View Original - Middle East Technical University

accumulation as well. Implicitly, such a concept of crisis and/or capital accumulation
analyses the social as an a priori closed system. Thus, changes in the capitalist
system are often a threshold for broader social changes.
Though regulationists have berated this understanding of capitalist economy in terms
of some formalistic model of supposedly immutable contradictions within the capital
circuit, and the teleology of socialisation of production(in short this threshold of social
change qua capitalist crisis), the expansionary imperative of capital accumulation –or
‘the ideal of competitiveness’- has still a substantial foothold in their theoretical
analysis. That is to say, ‘regulationists have dispensed with the inevitability of
capitalist breakdown, [but] they have not dispensed with the inevitability of
growth’(ibid.:158). This is particularly stark in theories of post-Fordism –‘post-
Fordism becomes a ‘fact’, given prior to social action, to which we have to
adjust’(Gough 1992:32). However, regulation theory is not a theory of post-Fordism
or even Fordism; Gibson-Graham first equivocate the ‘theoretical result’(Boyer 2002)
with the theory itself. Secondly, they extenuate the fact that ‘most of the present uses
of the notion of a post-Fordist regime of accumulation vulgarise [Aglietta’s]
conception by abstracting from the moment of value’, and without such a value
analysis of capitalist contradictions these are often complicit of technological
determinism(Gough 1992:32). Besides, as with regulation theory, not all Marxist
theory is complicit of the analysis of capitalism as a priori closed system, and this
must be explicit in their theory of crisis. In Aglietta’s words, capitalism ‘does not
contain a self-limiting mechanism of its own, nor is it guided in a direction that would
enable it to fulfil the capitalists’ dream of perpetual accumulation’(1998:49); still ‘in a
system whose internal relationships are in course of transformation, not everything
does continue to exist’(1979:12). This ‘course of transformation’ of system’s internal
relations is integral to regulationist analysis of capitalist crisis in and through
régulation, and at so many levels it is to Marxist theories of crisis as well. In fact,
crises in general, for Marxists, are ‘variations in the intensity of time’; they are
‘turning points’(Holloway 1992:146). So far as ‘the study of the regulation of the
capitalist mode of production seeks to uncover the determinant relations that are
22