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accumulation’(1991:45-6). Thus the ‘original intention’ had been towards a long-
wave theory of capital accumulation that studies the changes in the network of social
forms as opposed to some unchanging structure of capitalist economies so that
transformations of the structural invariant are not inexplicably tendencial or
ephemeral; the very ‘mode of cohesion’ of the said forms which never stems from
some exogenous variable nor is spontaneous, but in fact is very ‘short-lived’; and
finally, the very ‘capacity for evolution’ or the Sraum for régulation between the
system and its contradictions even in the very midst of a structural crisis. As such
theorists of capitalist régulation must ‘explain how stable capitalist accumulation is
possible over long periods, how and why these long periods end in major economic
crises, and how new stable patterns can emerge’(Noel 1987:305). This tripartite
research has been quite invidious; after all regulation theory has been more
analytically staunch than other ‘theory informed understanding[s] of time-changing
empirical patterns’. Then there is the timing of the regulationist research on Fordism;
Aglietta and CEPREMAP had not considered the circumstances of this unarguably
post-war phenomenon before the 1970s or before its crisis(Lipietz 1987).
As to crisis, the regulationist shibboleth is ‘every society has the economic context
and crisis corresponding to its structure’ which it borrows from the Annales School,
that is, crisis is always the crisis of a certain model of growth, so that ‘it is important
to analyse how the different stages of industrial capitalism affect economic cycles and
major crises’(Boyer 2002:17). For Brenner and Glick, regulationists however have
not even been ‘at one’ as to the exact contradictions of Fordism(1991:96). At one
time, Aglietta argued that both the crisis of the interwar economy and that of Fordism
had its basis in the uneven accumulation in Department I and the stagnant wage
income segment of the overall effective social demand; the nuance however is that the
latter crisis was more about the contradictions of intensive accumulation itself than
certain competitive mechanisms and the terms of working-class consumption that had
been antithetical to an all-out intensive accumulation in the 1920s. Another argument
touched upon the contradictions of productivity growth under Fordism. Productivity
stagnated as Taylorist methods of work and mechanisation were no longer productive;
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