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contradiction(or more pedantically of an invisible hand). Capitalism, for Aglietta and
Brender, is a ‘complex network of social relations’ whose degree of likeness to market
ethos is scant to none(ibid.:320). Thereby, ‘the complex mechanism described as a
regime of accumulation associated with a form of regulation can endure over a
reasonably long period because it fixes itself into routines and institutions’ though
never mechanically and always pre tempore. For regulationists, class analysis is
paramount to a theory of such institutional and structural change and long term
coherence of the capitalist mode of production; however, at least Aglietta and
Brender’s study of wage society is evasive as to the terms in which class would no
longer be ‘an endogenous element brought in to close the explanation’. The most that
analysis can stir theoretically is that the extant structures ‘reflect and institutionalize,
in forms that make capitalism workable, past conflicts between collective actors,
between the classes as they are organized’. But once these forms stagnate into a
frenzy of organic contradictions, foregoing class organisations, as part of the now
stagnant structures, would unlikely be part of the exit from crisis(i.e. future coherent
structures)(ibid.:322-3).
Within the glass menagerie of studies of history of thought, Noel’s short piece is
paradigmatic of the tentativeness of most such analyses of a certain procedure of
thought. One could even argue that not only this tentativeness itself in Noel but the
modality of it as well is very paradigmatic especially because the subtext of his paper
is very much the subtext of the mainstream pedantic understanding of regulation
theory. In that, the latter is about the longue durée of capitalism, the endogenous
structural long-term changes in it or the structural causality in and through régulation
and the crises of capitalism, though all this ‘theoretically informed understanding of
time-changing empirical patterns’ is yet short of a conclusive social theory that would
expatiate on the nexus between the esoteric mechanisms of capitalism and concrete
phenomena mostly because ‘class struggle remains an ad hoc element in an
incomplete theory’ of capitalist régulation(ibidem:323).
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