Regulation School

A school of economic thought whch looks at diferent regimes of regulation in order to explain the evolution of capitalism as well as differences between countries. The interpretation of 'Cognitive Capitalism' draws on the finds of the Regulation School, while also critiquing and adapting it.

Evaluation

1 Bob Jessop:

"Bob Jessop in his introductory speech first explained the emergence of the Parisian regulation approach. He pointed out that those most strongly associated with RT, Michel Aglietta, Alain Lipietz and Rober Boyer, had not been trained as political scientists or economists at university level but came from polytechnicals and had worked in various institutions subordinate to the "Commissariat Général au Plan". They were technocrats fascinated by and busy with the production of diagrams, slow charts, timelines and data series.

Jessop highlighted one of the central achievements of the regulation approach, the identification of structural forms. RT was developed as a critique of neo-classical macroeconomics which understood the equilibrium between production and consumption as an automatic outcome of market forces. RT posed that the reproduction of capitalism was 'improbable' in the first place and that a kind of stability was achieved only through the emergence of 'structural forms' during the era of Fordism. Structural forms were the result of antagonistic forms of class struggle, but once those forms had settled in they were capable of important functions of mediation such as the mediation between production outcomes and consumption norms. Jessop listed five structural forms: wage, enterprise, money, state and the international regime.

Then Jessop went on to explain where RT failed and succeeded. It failed in economics, insofar as it could not replace neo-classical economics as the dominant paradigm in France. Although regulation approach theorists gained some level of influence on French governments, this influence waned in the long term. One reason for this failure that Jessop cited was that neo-liberalism had some very robust defence mechanism and that with its appearant success on the world scale French institutes involved with economic analysis such as CEPREMAP received less and less funding. Today, Jessop reprorted from a recent visit to Paris, even the building is in a sorry state and the major funding does not come from the French state but from corporations interested in long term planning scenarios. Many economists with leftist leanings have turned their backs to RT and are now leaning towards institutional economics which has non-Marxist origins.

According to Bob Jessop, RT's success and failure in social theory is even more paradoxical. Generally it can be said that RT made a big impact on the social sciences. The periodisation and the usage of the terms Fordism and Postfordism is an achievement of RT. The wide-spread reception of RT in the social sciences however, was based on its hybridisation and remix with an eclectic range of other theories through which the specificity of the regulation approach was lost. Or, to put it in more populistic terms, as one friend recently said, in the lefty art-scene today you have to use the term Postfordism to look cool, otherwise you just haven't got it. That the hybridisation of theories results in the dilution of some of the key original concepts is a well known fact and usually regrettable. It is, however, not always clear, what gets lost and what gets won." (http://www.thenextlayer.org/node/1328)

2. Brian Holmes:

"For me the Regulation School has been inspiring, promising and disappointing. Inspiring because they bring Marx's hardcore concept of capitalism as a terminally crisis-prone mode of development into tension with an institutionalist analysis of the ways it is stablized for a time, before one of its contradictions becomes insurmountable and the institutional balance has to be reworked. Promising because their highly economistic analysis nonetheless held out the possibility of understanding how cultural forms and patterns of usage and consumption either supported or undermined a stabilized regime, or even contributed to a new one. Disappointing because they were never able to repeat their excellent analysis of the postwar assembly line mass production regime, nor did they ever fulfill the promise of integrating culture. So instead of a full-fledged analysis of present-day world society we were stuck with a vague concept of "post-Fordism." David Harvey nonetheless did draw one brilliant book out of Regulation School theory (The Condition of Postmodernity) which went a long way toward fulfilling the program by describing the dynamic tensions of financially driven neoliberalism on the cultural as well as governmental levels; and Jessop's work has been quite rigorous and usefully systematic too, so the balance sheet is not all that bad...

I lived in France during the later years of the Regulation School, and of course our group, Multitudes, relied implicitly on their work (including the use of that vague and unfortunate concept of post-Fordism, alas). What you recount of the crisis in their approach seems quite accurate to me, particularly for the French core group. The problem is, first, they took the postwar boom as a kind of norm, and assumed that it would eventually be followed by a new kind of stabilized growth. Indeed, to some extent they even hypostatized this stability, leading to the "myth" of Fordism. Second, on the political level they thought they could help stabilize the New Economy within the national framework. In the late 90s Aglietta was advising Jospin to create employee participation in the New Economy by the financialization of part of their wages! (which already at the time I thought was insane). Unlike Bob Jessop and Ngai-Ling Sum, I don't think they ever really understood that the crisis of the 70s could only be resolved by bursting the national and even continental scales, in order to create a fully global economy. They did not understand that financialization was both the operator of this expansion (assembling the money capital for the industrial development of Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe) and at the same time, that financial payoffs or at least the promise of such payoffs were replacing wage-bargaining as the mode of regulation, but in a way that could never be stabilized in any egalitarian (let alone ecological) sense. So they persisted in seeing financialization as the sign of an unresolved crisis of Fordism. No doubt this is why they were unwilling to pay serious attention to the the technologies involved.

My view as you know is quite different. I think that we have a global regime of financialized accumulation, enabled by the key product of ICTs and expressed as fixed capital and new urbanization primarily in Asia. The mode of regulation, institutionalized by the American and British states in particular, has been none other than crisis itself: continual readjustment of financial accounts by repeated crises careening through the space of financialized globalization, extracting the savings and surplus labor of the peasant, working and middle classes in all the countries involved, continually creating fresh investment and takeover opportunities on the ruins of "creative destruction," and then finally coming home as a major, game-changing crisis centered in the Triad countries themselves (US, EU, Japan). Aglietta himself followed all this rather better in the course of the 00s - but by then he had ceased to be a regulationist and his work was more strictly economic.

Of course, the inability to describe the economic relations and governance mechanisms of financially driven globalization (or informationalism, or neoliberalism, or whatever you want to call it) makes it very difficult to talk about the present crisis and to recognize that it will be a painful and protracted affair. From the perspective that we are developing in the technopolitics project, the 2007-10 blowout marks the autumn phase of a Kondratiev plus the beginnings of a world-systemic hegemonic shift. Yet because neoliberalism is a full-fledged regime of accumulation with a mode of regulation that has served and enabled global economic development, it can't just disappear with the first significant crisis in the heartlands. Therefore we can expect more such crises to follow, over a ten or twenty-year phase of decline and hegemonic shift. The question is, how will the societies react to this long and trying decline, and what kinds of relations between domestic politics and foreign policies will emerge in the context of the hegemonic shift? In short: what forms of violence will emerge?

I totally agree that the 1929 analogy is not very helpful. The lesson of the past is that the future will be different! But I don't at all exclude a crisis of the liberal-democratic state. Such a crisis is already incipient with the post 9/11 security panic, and it could become even worse as ecological collapse gives rise to new and more desperate waves of immigration to the developed countries. One could easily imagine that innovations in the military-security realm would form the backbone of a new regime of accumulation in which the pattern of inclusion/exclusion would be greatly changed, away from the kind of inclusion and expanded rights and entitlements favored by a postwar-style intensive full-employment regime. Such a regime would rest on two pillars of growth: life-enhancing biotechnologies for the rich, and electronically equipped, network-enabled security guards at every border wall, institutional facility and gated community. For me, that is exactly what should be avoided. If there is any value in constructing a crystal ball (which of course we are trying to do!) it is to see that future and avoid it. It's essential to go "beyond" the radically inegalitarian conditions of neoliberalism, and that will entail not just a new wave of technological growth but above all new institutional arrangements and new global protocols. This is really a time to be visionary, in my view. Strictly analytic and visionary at the same time!" (http://www.thenextlayer.org/node/1328)

Full conference report on the legacy of the regulation school, at http://www.thenextlayer.org/node/1328

More Information

The Regulation School: some documentation

Some recent articles and essays from a newsletter associated with the Regulation school, will give you an idea of the high quality and level of interest of their production:

1. On the concept of ‘worldwide public goods’, at http://www.upmf grenoble.fr/irepd/regulation/Lettre_regulation/lettrepdf/LR48.pdf ;
2. the current phase of American hegemony is unsustainable, at http://www.upmf-grenoble.fr/irepd/regulation/Lettre_regulation/lettrepdf/LR46.pdf ;
3. on the need to reconsider our outdated notions of productivity, which have no bearing on the current situation, at http://www.upmf-grenoble.fr/irepd/regulation/Lettre_regulation/lettrepdf/LR43.pdf ;
4. an overview of intellectual property regimes and their evolution, at http://www.upmfgrenoble.fr/irepd/regulation/Lettre_regulation/index.html