View Original - Middle East Technical University

mechanisms no longer had a foothold in prices; and, institutions salvaged a modicum
of coherence between average growth of wages and industrial productivity. On top of
that, working-class consumption as well was an element in this revved-up
productivity; standardised mechanisation(i.e. mass production) afforded standardised
commodities which wage-earners then purchased(i.e. mass consumption); ‘Fordism
precisely marked the entry of goods produced with significant productivity gains into
wage-earners’ consumption’.
Furthermore, regulationists have been the indignant votaries of empirical analysis and
‘marvelled at this... with the ardour of neophytes: ‘this return to empirical assessment,
even when difficult and invariably unsatisfying given the precise origin of statistics
used, introduces the possibility of refuting the initial theoretical framework, however
satisfying it might be from a strictly logical standpoint[(Bertrand et al., 1980)]’(ibid.).
Alas, in that and on many other quodlibets, regulation theory was not even nominally
au fait with any ‘living Marxism’.
2.2 Political Economy of Crisis
Not all economic theories are fond of crisis as explanandum. In fact, neoclassical
economics considers crises unco in terms of the spontaneous bliss of market
economies. Markets supposedly are mechanisms that are utterly recalcitrant to any
felo-de-se. For that mainstream, crises are thereby sabotages to the price system from
the outside. Such an understanding often scandalised Marx for whom the cyclical
crises of the capitalist mode of production were absolute intimations of its inner
contradictions in that sudden devalorisation of capital values stemmed from capital
valorisation itself. So there is first this fact that capitalist crises as crises of capitalist
accumulation have never stagnated into an inaudible aside in much of Marx’s analysis
and Marxist political economy. Needless to say, crisis as explanandum are totemic to
any theory of social/historical change. Yet crisis has even a fiercer bite on a theory
such as Marxism which profusely anticipates the self-extinction of capitalism as a
mode of production(i.e. its radical transformation). Therefore almost all Marxists are
20