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labour. ‘This is why the wage relation is both a relation of exchange and a relation of
production’(Aglietta 1979:46).
For Aglietta, in economic theory, ‘the task of abstraction is possible because a process
of homogenization exists in the reality to be studied, making the objects under
investigation commensurable elements in a space to which a measure can be applied’;
in fact, ‘the process of homogenization of economic objects is a social relation’.
Neoclassical theory, on the other hand, stoops to General Equilibrium ‘since for it
prices are homogeneous variables for all economic subjects only on condition of a
general equilibrium’; neoclassical economics would not, on the basis of its blunt
empiricist method, consider those ‘conditions that require the measurable space to be
constructed before it is possible to measure’(1979:38-9). In other words, value
concept is paramount to economic science because ‘its commensurability role is
independent of whether or not an economic equilibrium prevails’(Driver 1981:150).
General Equilibrium models, on the other hand, study over-time accumulation in
terms of ‘an easy, automatic transition between two well defined equilibria’(Boyer
2002:322), since changes in the terms of productivity are infinitely reversible in those
models. ‘But fixed capital investment cannot be “reversed”, only devalorised’(Driver
1981:150).
In A Theory of Capitalist Regulation, departments of production category is integral to
the regulationist analysis of accumulation. For Marx, the two departments of
production(wage commodities/non-wage commodities or department II/department I)
affords an analysis of accumulation over time in terms of reproduction schemas. In
Marxist political economy, these schemas has stirred up many controversies
foremostly because devalorisation is not part of this heuristic model. Aglietta
nevertheless analyses the effect of the unequal growth of non-wage commodity
production vis-a-vis wage commodity production and the transformations in the terms
of productivity on the surplus value production(i.e. accumulation) with exactly these
controversial department of production categories. To that effect, transformations in
the standard of production within Department I lowers the value of labour power once
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