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production’(ibid.:160). This would then circumscribe the commodification of such
elements of consumption as housing and commute(i.e. their mass production), the
socialisation of finance or the socialisation of those working class consumption
expenditures in excess of household income through credit, and above all a ‘functional
aesthetic’ that would not be antithetical to the strict format of engineering.
2.1 Regulation Theory, Crisis and Marxism
Structural crises are back, and theories of regulation were conceived to
account for them([Boyer 1986:8], Dunford 1990:298)
Alan Noel has one of the earliest pieces on regulation theory for the English-readers.
‘Although not yet a unified approach’, regulation theory, for him, is about the analysis
of capitalist change as social change(1987:303). Through brief apercus on Mazier et
al.’s Quand les crises durent(1984), Aglietta and Brender’s Les métamorphoses de la
société salariale: La France en projet(1984), and Lipietz’s L’audace ou l’enlisement:
Sur les politiques économiques de la gauche(1984), he considers all regulationist
research as a ‘theoretically informed understanding of time-changing empirical
patterns’(ibid.:327).
Mazier et al.’s study affords a further cargo of statistical and econometic methods for
research on economic change in general and foundations of economic crisis in
particular, so that ‘description of capitalism for the two major periods covered’ would
be more precise. These methods are ‘productivity equations’ a la Kaldor and
Verdoorn that ‘relate the annual rates of productivity growth to the annual rates of
growth in capital intensity and to an indicator for the business cycle’. Regression
analysis then circumscribes the parameters for these ‘productivity equations’. With
that, Mazier, Basle and Vidal could announce that the productivity growth between
1886 and 1913 had been slow(in France), and it after 1949 was much quicker than the
patterns from 1896 to 1929 would have caballed. In these terms, they then argue that
post-war ‘capital intensification’ had a decidedly productivity-increasing effect, hence
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