The Parisian Regulation Approach: capitalism as a panoply of crisis tendencies

Abstract

In this study, I analyze the Parisian Regulation Approach (PRA) developed as an intellectual response to the structural crisis of capitalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In theoretical and relational axes, I examine its ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions and its relationship to other regulation approaches to grasp the conception of regulation in the PRA. Regime of accumulation, mode of regulation and mode of development are the major concepts produced by the PRA to study the capitalist mode of production and its crises. I analyze them and expose the crisis explanation of the approach. I specifically emphasize the understanding of the PRA of capitalism as a malleable mode of production under the combined effect of the development of forces of production and class struggles with major implications for the formation of its crises. Overaccumulation of capital as a tendency underlay to some degree the crisis formation in the PRA, and David Harvey and Simon Clarke who engaged in the PRA at some point in their intellectual journey formulated it as a general crisis theory. I analyze these later formulations of overaccumulation of capital and develop a critique of these primarily focusing on Harvey from the perspective I distilled from the PRA. It is in this sense that the present study contributes to the critical literature on the crisis theory.