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profitability is squeezed by reduced prices in the face of downwardly inflexible
costs’(ibid.:23-4). Regulation theory is not particularly against a theory of secular
stagnation within capitalism or the ‘malign invisible hand’, though it is against
theories of single-handed systematic crisis mechanisms. Brenner’s study of ‘self-
generating series of steps resulting from individual(and collective) profit maximizing
which leads not towards adjustment, but rather away from it’(ibid.) indeed narrows
capitalism’s systematic contradictions to the single-handed mechanism of ‘over-
capacity and over-production’ with ‘sunk costs’. For Fine et al.(1999:49) and many
others, Brenner’s theory is complicit of further ‘lost analytical time’ in crisis theory
largely in these terms. On the other hand, regulation theorists resort to an analysis of
rate of profit not because such an analysis would ‘bring out the downward movement
of profitability or its stagnation at an inadequate level which, in itself, would be an
element of crisis(and which may be the case in certain situations)’, but more because
of the fact that ‘taking the formation of the rate of profit as a guiding element,
bringing out the tendencies and countertendencies intervening on this level, and thus
identifying certain essential factors in the crisis’ is not in the least secondary to
regulationist research on ‘growing disequilibrium between the forms of regulation and
the state of structures at a given point’; even though the profit rate ‘cannot sum up by
itself all the disequilibria competing to set off a major crisis’(Mazier et al. 1999).
‘‘But no post-Fordism has emerged!’... and the theory is therefore false’ –there is
perhaps an element of rage in Boyer’s words(2002:2). Nonetheless ‘a fully functional
régulation mode, guiding a stable accumulation regime, may remain beyond the
horizon’ as of yet, still ‘the cumulative changes brought about in a disequilibrated and
unstable context assume ever more importance in the interpretation of capitalist
systems’(Grahl and Teague 2000:167) especially, as in Boyer’s quondam aside, ‘when
crises endure’(1990). Even though, ‘the interest of régulation theory is precisely its
ability to determine many different accumulation regimes and potential modes of
development in response to political conflicts and compromises’(Boyer 2002:3),
regulationists are scarcely at one in their analysis of ongoing ‘cumulative changes’.
That said, Parisian theorists no longer study the elements of the next model of growth
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