Re: [PEN-L:1709] Re: Aglietta

["Anthony D'Costa" <dcosta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hugo Radice is on the mark in critiquing the RS.  In extending this
critique, I want to point out where the RS starts messing up things is on
"post-Fordist" regimes.  This is where the lean production stuff comes
in.  I read a translation of Boyer.  He had this nice little chart, where
countries were classified on the basis of regimes and modes.  All major
capitalist countries plus India and a few other large LDCs were
presented.  Conspicuously Japan was missing.  This is where the problem
with RS begins.  RS advocates post-Fordist institutions (whatever they
are) but do not really get into the entire apparatus underlying Japanese
institutions.  Japan and Italy are considered to be two different sources
of post-Fordist industrial practices.

I think it is reasonable to consider politics to be national, even with
globalization.  Politics like culture is generally local.  Both RS
and many variants of marxism do not account for the cultural bases of social
institutions and economic forces and hence do not comprehend well the
"alternative" regimes of accumulation as found in illiberal, non-western
societies.  RS is very much in the liberal tradition (social democrats if you
will) hence they also suffer from the problem of failing to recognize
different capitalisms.

Anthony D'Costa

PS: For a solid critique of RS based on empirical (mis)evidence of the
US, see Brenner and Glick in NLR.

On Tue, 5 Dec 1995, Hugo Radice wrote:

> 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 -
>