Competing Marxist Theories on the Temporal Aspects of Strike Waves: Silver’s Product Cycle Theory and Mandel’s Long Wave Theory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite the profound changes in capitalist development since the industrial revolution, strike waves and mass strikes are still a feature of the twenty-first century. This article examines two Marxist theories that seek to explain the temporal aspects of strike waves. In the main, I argue that Silver’s product cycle theory, suffers from an over-determinism, and that turning point strike waves are not mainly determined by lead industries. Mandel’s long wave theory argues that technological innovations tend to cluster and thus workers in different industries feature prominently in strike waves. By re-examining and comparing two competing Marxist theories on the temporality of strike waves and turning points, I will attempt to highlight the similarities but also place emphasis on where the theories differ. I examine the applicability of the theories to the South African case, and reference recent world events in order to ascertain the explanatory power of the competing theories. In the main I argue that Silver’s product cycle lead theory does not fit the South African experience. KEYWORDS turning point strike waves; product cycle; long waves; capitalism
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".