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Jessop’s uptake on the concept of régulation perhaps best expatiates on his analysis of
regulation theory as an integral economic heuristic. He argues that prevarications
litter the concept of régulation as (i)it first and at most touched upon a ‘site of a
problem’, and therefore has been more diacritical than substantial; (ii)‘whereas most
of the key Marxist concepts refer to the ‘naturally necessary’, enduring, invariant, and
universal moments and laws of motion of capitalism considered as a mode of
production, regulation refers to contingent, provisional, unstable, partial aspects
associated with the external articulation of these relations with other social relations to
produce more complex as well as more concrete concepts’; and (iii)there is not exactly
a well-rounded ‘object of regulation’(Jessop 1990b:177). Three other ‘aspects’ of
regulation theory, which Jessop considers under ‘regulationist challenges to critical
realism, touch upon (i)‘the constitutive incompleteness of the capital relation’; (ii)‘the
structural contradictions and strategic dilemmas’ intrinsic to the capital relation; and
(iii)‘conflicts over the regularisation and/or governance of these contradictions and
dilemmas’(:101). First, the tendencial aboutissement implicit in the self-valorisation
of capital even at the most abstract level of analysis of the value-form is infinitely
inconclusive, this is in fact a ‘naturally necessary’ fixture of capitalism. Secondly, the
basic contradiction between use-value and exchange-value in the commodity form
circumscribes all other ‘structural contradictions and strategic dilemmas’ intrinsic to
capital.
Structural contradictions are those circumstances ‘when the overall logic of an
institutional ensemble generates opposed developmental tendencies; when there is a
conflict or tension between the requirements of system reproduction and individual
action; and when a social relation is so constituted that it tends to produce socially
structured conflicts between inherently antagonistic interests’. On the other hand,
‘when agents face choices such that, within given parameters and horizons of action,
any action that they pursue(including inaction) will undermine some key condition(s)
of their existence and/or their capacities to realize a broader set of interests’, this
would be a strategic dilemma(Jessop 2002:277-8). Still the forms of these
contradictions and dilemmas are not invariable. Finally, as with contradictions and
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