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Regulation School
Fordism,
post-Fordism, regime of accumulation, Althusserian
structuralism (Lipietz says they are the ‘rebel sons’ of Althusser) No
specific common political stance, but generally are a left- leaning response
to neo-liberalism, neo-classicism – yet in a constitutional/reformist form. Michel
Aglietta, Coriat, Alain Lipietz, Boyer, Bertrand, Billaudot Mario
Tronti, Toni
Negri, Andre Gorz?, Bob Jessop, Hirsch, Roth, David Harvey? |
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In his 20 theses on Marx, Antonio Negri mentions
the formula workers struggle/ capitalist development and his adherence to
this formulation by Tronti and the regulation school. He then goes on to
comment that the regulation school became an academic discipline with less
relevance for the politics of subversion. Boyer’s introduction to the school
notes three main origins: the work of Destanne de Bernis and the Research
Group on the regulation of the Capitalist economy based in Grenoble,
Aligetta’s study of regulation in the US experience and Bertrand and
Billaudot’s and Lipietz’s extension of Algietta’s research. In reading
Aglietta’s major 1974 work, its academic character is pretty plain to see.
Arguably there is much useful within this work, but overall it comes across
as an attempt to make the Marxian schema relevant to the preoccupations of
academic pursuits. “A theory of capitalist regulation” aims at
criticising the one-sided handling of economic realities by neo-classical
economics which are described as theories of general equilibrium. These
economics are one-sided in that they are incapable of accounting for the
lived experience of time of work and the social relations that inform them.
Neo-classicism in economics assumes the existence of individuals at the level
of its explanation and economic relations are understood only through these
market- based approaches. For Aglietta, real crises and diequilibria cast
doubt over theories of general equilibrium, and he argues that the approach
of the regulation school is to look for the source of ruptures with the old
in the process of accumulation. Even Keynes
who looked to the history of capitalism confined his theory to the short
term. The regulation school by contrast looks at the long-run developments of
capitalism, and in this particular work which is based upon the experience of
the USA, looks to the market adjustments, depressions, deflations and crises
in contradistinction to the ideological idea that they conform to a
harmonious form of development. What this entails is a study of the
reproduction of capitalism as a system, and the cognition (following Marx’s
refusal to attribute a fixed essence to capital’s forms (pp 15)) that changes
within the production and reproduction of capital are qualitative changes
within the functioning of the system. The regulation school sets out to
explain this through the analysis of the social existence of the producing
class. “the study of capitalist
regulation therefore, cannot be the investigation of abstract economic laws.
It is the study of the transformation of social relations as it creates new
forms that are both economic and non-economic, that are organised in
structures and themselves reproduce a determinant structure, the mode of
production”(pp 16). Although it is not their specific object of study, the
regulation school understands that shifts in these social relations as a
whole takes place with a changing structure of the state, thus is similar in
concerns with Marxism in general and the theoretical insights of Antonio
Negri in particular. Written in 1974 Aglietta’s book already suggests some
paradoxical elements. It is perceived as relatively fundamental that the “the
cohesion of social relatio0ns under the rule of the wage relation necessarily
involves the framework of the nation” (pp 22) Here the organisation of the
capitalist class through the nation state is treated as a basic and
fundamental relationship. Secondly, as the development of capitalism is seen
to “encompass the totality of social relations (pp 24) the wage relation, its
imposition and generalisation is given special importance. Aglietta thus
considers as absolutely important the two forms of the production of surplus
value – absolute and relative – extensive and intensive, which coexist as
form of labour-capital relation. So far he has not suggested how this
relation might change, and subvert the basic categories of analysis, when the
totalisation of the outside – of non-capitalist substance – is complete.
Indeed Aglietta recognises that the state forms part of the very existence of
the wage relation, its generalisation equals worldwide emergence of nation
states*. However, the basic concerns are very much in line with the tradition
of thinking about the symbiosis of economic and political levels we have been
accustomed to in the Italian workerist tradition. “Rejecting the idea of a superstructure that acts
from the outside on a similarly autonomous infrastructure, I shall seek to
show rather that the institutionalisation of social relations under the
effect of class struggles is the central process of their production.” (pp 29) *Aligetta argues that the wage
relation forms a cornerstone of capitalist economies meaning that ‘the
classical fiction of labour-power as a commodity’ pursued by Marx is opposite
to his own view of the wage relation as an unequal exchange (hence not commodity
relation). In Aglietta’s schema, the wage relation directly gives rise to the
abstract space of value. (see: pp 32) Boyer, in his critical
introduction to regulation school comments that though Aglietta’s concerns
lay in the investigation of the U.S experience and the ambitious attempt to
define the processes that lead social relations to form a mode of production,
his originality lay in the study of collective bargaining and consumption
norms. Crises are understood as divergences from norms of consumption and
production, a process that takes the form of inflation |
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