[PEN-L:1709] Re: Aglietta

["Hugo Radice" <HKR@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks, Fikret, for your very informative posting and the refrences.

My scepticism about the Regulation School concerns mainly the
political economy towards which its Paris wing have tended.  I found
Aglietta's original work extremely valuable, especially as a
contribution to the 1970s effort to return labour to the centre of
Marxian discussion (cf Braverman at about the same time).  However,
the problems arise when we come to what 'regime of accumulation' and
what 'mode of regulation' is supposed to succeed the defunct Fordism,
and through what agencies the new regime/mode are being produced.
At this point, the RS get involved in a whole range of prognostic
debates, e.g. about lean production (I hope Maggie Coleman's posting
will lead to some debate on this, but I'll leave it for now!),
industrial districts, flexible specialisation, monetary regulation,
etc.

There are two main problems, I think, with these debates.  The first
is that some of these supposed new capitalist paradigms do not appear
to be well-founded empirically (I think this is true of flexible
specialisation and lean production, for example).  The second is that
most of the regime/mode prognostications assume that the arena in
which the new (often termed post-Fordist) socail forms are emerging
is a national one.  The common weakness here, I believe, is to assume
that 'politics' is basically national, because the state is national,
and therefore the social. political cultural and legal -