Jacques Bidet a Stathis Kouvelakis

262 • Thomas Coutrot
or underestimate the formidable strength of this SSA’, even if the latter was
‘fraught with contradictions’. 11
More recently, the radicals have acknowledged the assertion of a new social
structure of accumulation, but without really producing a detailed analysis
of it. 12 It is striking that no article published in the Review of Radical Political
Economics offers an analysis of the emergence of institutional investors
(pension funds and mutual insurance funds), or of their role in what we now
call in France the � nancial or neoliberal régime of accumulation. Reich certainly
cites the works of Ghilarducci, Hawley and Williams, or of Lazonick
and O’Sullivan on the impact of ‘corporate governance’ on wage-earners, but
without dwelling on it. The main works of the radical economists seem in
fact to have shifted both the axis of their alternative proposals and the way
in which they argue for them. The works of the 1980s denounced Reaganism
for its brutality and injustice and called for the formulation of radical
social-democratic policies, advocating not only neo-Keynesian public regulation,
but above all a revival of accumulation based on an increase in wages,
productivity, and union power. In the 1990s, registering the retreat of egalitarian
and democratic ideals, as well as the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Bowles,
Gintis and Weisskopf recast their line of argument. Thus, Weisskopf rallied
to the theses of the supporters of ‘market socialism’, rather than the ‘socialdemocratic
approach’, to achieve socialist objectives. 13 More astonishing still
is the evolution of Bowles and Gintis. 14
Economic democracy: self-management socialism or productivist
egalitarianism?
The radical economists, in general supporters of a democratic, self-managerial
socialism, were nevertheless barely active in the theoretical debates on
the ‘pro-market’ reforms that have followed one another in Eastern Europe
since the 1960s. With collapse of the Wall, a crop of articles appeared in the
Review of Radical Political Economics (as in other Anglo-American Marxist jour-
11 Houston 1992, p. 67.
12 See Reich 1997 and Lippit 1997.
13 See Weisskopf 1992.
14 See Bowles and Gintis 1998.