In the chapters on the “ideal” industrial cycle, I assumed that there is one capitalist economic cycle, what Marx called the industrial cycle. Furthermore, I assumed that all the contradictions of capitalist production accumulated during this cycle of about ten years are then discharged in a single crisis at the end of the cycle. If actual industrial cycles corresponded to the “ideal cycle” I described, each cycle would have a crisis, a depression, a phase of average prosperity, and a boom of more or less equal length.
Even if there were a tendency for the length of the various stages to change over time, this would be a secular process, not a cyclical one. Concrete industrial cycles differ from each other. These differences are not a matter of theory but a matter of empirical fact. Are the sometimes drastic differences observed among individual concrete cycles due to accidental forces, secular forces, or cyclical tendencies at work?
In addition to the possible existence of a long cycle, many economists have claimed that a short cycle of about 40 to 48 months exists. A complete theory of crises and capitalist economic cycles also has to account for the existence of this cycle.
To my knowledge, at least five different economic cycles within the capitalist economy have been proposed at one time or another. Perhaps readers have heard of even more.
A Critique of Crisis Theory 