Alain Lipietz

From Althusserianism to
"Regulation Theory"
The Althusserian Legacy Almost the entire generation of May 1968 in France came to Marxism

through the work of Louis Althusser and his school. And even today almost
everything fruitful that is written in France within a {greatly rarefied)
culturally Marxist atmosphere remains marked by this origin. To say this is
not to negate the importance of existential Marxism and the philosophy of
praxis (in particular the work of Henri Lefebvre), nor to ignore the negative
effects of the "structural Marxism" of Reading Capital (1965). It is simply to
Edited by state that the success of the articles in the collection For Marx (1965)
greatly helped to disengage French Marxism from the oversimplification,
E. ANN KAPLAN determinism and mechanism inherited from the Stalinist period. It is also to
and recognize that the viable and justified critiques of which "Althusserianism"
MICHAEL SPRINKER has been the object have allowed some currents to "interiorize what has
been transcended" (to appropriate a Hegelian term which doubtless would
have displeased the master!), and thus to escape the general crisis of the
human sciences and of structuralism during the 1970s. I am thinking in
particular of the sociology of Pierre Bourdeiu (1987), and, in relation to my
own profession {political economy), that which today is referred to as
"regulation theory."' We ourselves are "regulationists," in a way "rebel sons"
of Althusser.
From the very first, Althusser {for example in "Contradiction and
Overdetermination," 1962) taught us to conceive of history as a fabric of
contradictory relations, autonomous in relation to one another, although
overdetermining rather than "reflecting" one another. Neither politics nor
ideologies "reflect" economic forces, but ideological-politico-economic
"configurations" exist, either as stable configurations or configurations of
crisis. During the 1960s, French Marxism thus aligned .itself with all the
reductionism of the "kapital-logik" genre. We were even invited to discover
in every social formation a plurality of "modes of production" (relation-type
configurations) articulated one to another (Rey, 1969): in short,
configurations of configurations.
Since then, for example, domestic social relations (or patriarchy, or
"sexage") could be studied for themselves, without previous subordination to
"capitalism." France, as everywhere, was acquainted with the opposition
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100 THE ALTHUSSERIAN LEGACY
between "socialist feminists" and "radical feminists," but it was less virulent
there than elsewhere. Autonomy and reciprocal overdetermination of social
relations offered a theoretical substratum to think the autonomy and
convergence of social movements. That this opportunity was hardly taken
advantage of politically, I explain elsewhere (Lipietz, 1986a), but the
possibility of a convergence and its theoretical articulation exists
nevertheless.
Althusser and his school (in particular Balibar in his contribution to
Reading Capital, and Bettelheim, 1970) broke with a determinist vision of
historical evolution which conceived of the "productive forces" themselves
( traditional "locomotives" of history for Stalinist Marxism) as social
relations born in the organization of production. It was not from outside
that the local representatives of a larger current, which from Maoists to
radical Americans by way of the Italian "workerist" movement, proceeded in
the 1960s and '70s, to concentrate in its attacks on capitalism no longer on
the extraction of surplus-value alone, but on the dominant post-war
industrial paradigms, accepted for the most part by communist parties:
Taylorism and Fordism. This current was not only critically in sync with
the reality of the labor struggles of the period, but also broke above all with
the idea that "the development of capitalist productive forces prepared the
way for communism." Capitalism did not prepare the way for anything but
itself, and further over the course of time it had experienced and developed
contrasting "forces of production" (forms of the organization of labor).
At the political level, this double rupture with determinism was
developed principally by Poulantzas (1968) in his reading of Gramsci. For
the simple and permanent juxtaposition of "bourgeoisie/proletariat,"
Poulantzas substituted the stabilization and dilution of successive, and
always original, "hegemonic historical blocs," uniting the dominant and the
dominated in struggles over the limits and terms of social compromise, on
the basis of a perpetually new articulation of social relations.
These fecund basic notions unfortunately began to freeze in a kind of
formal scholasticism in which social relations were no longer understood as
contradictions or unstable tensions but as structures. This evolution
developed explicitly out of Reading Capital. Althusserianism went on from
there to reject the contradictory character of social relations themselves,
and with it the autonomy of the individuals and groups contained in these
relations and their capacity to be constituted as social subjects capable of
transforming structures. This was a return to a pre-Marxist materialism,
forgetting the Theses on Feuerbach, forgetting that there is a "consciousness"
and thus a potential generator of transformation in the most routine
practices, and cut off a fortiori from the transforming practice of the masses.
This ossification contributed to the crisis of structural Marxism and all
FROM ALTHUSSERIANISM TO 'REGULATION THEORY' 101
French Marxism (although, it is true, in a different political conjuncture) in
the middle of the 1970s.
It is precisely in a return to the contradictory character of social relations,
which inhibits their reproduction, and in taking into consideration the
conscious element, the active role of "representation" in reproducing itself,
that the approaches based on "regulation" found their origin. Naturally the
opening of the Great Crisis of capitalism in the 1970s obliged us at any rate
to keep our distance from any approach that placed quasi-exclusive
emphasis on reproduction.
It is good, at the distance of a quarter of a century, to measure our
continuities and discontinuities. In the first part of this article, I will present
a synthesis which I believe is able to honestly qualify the meaning of
"classical Althusserianism" in the 1960s, and what comprised its evolution
and its divergences. By "classical Althusserianism," I refer to the texts For
Marx, the contributions to Reading Capital (particularly those of Etienne
Balibar) and those of Nicos Poulantzas (1968). The post-1968 evolutions of
these authors belong to another history, while the texts of this "corpus" were
the point of departure for the majority of those who continued in, amended
or broke with "classical Althusserianism."
In the second section, I will expand the critique of the insufficiencies and
dilemmas to which classical Althusserianism contributed.2
In the third section, I will briefly show how "regulation theory" currently
. seeks to overcome these obstacles. It goes without saying that, here as
elsewhere, I speak only for myself: numerous "regulationist" practitioners
have long eschewed referring to Marxism at all, and would not accept the
connection claimed here. However, I do not intend to totally chart their
intellectual itinerary, or that of those who are "agnostics" today.
I. Theses of Classical Althusserianism
In this first section, we will seek to present under the heading of "theses"
("didactic and dogmatic," as the Master liked to say) the ideas of the body of
works cited above which had such a great intellectual resonance for a
generation of social science researchers. We will see that from the
beginning (that is, between For Marx and Reading Capital), some slippages
operate whose ravaging effects would only be felt later. We will only sketch
out the critique, pointing out in passing what the "regulationists" maintain.
But we must liegin by placing the emergence of classical Althusserianism
itself into perspective.
1) Althusserianism in its Time
The first part of the 1960s marked, in France, the "resurgence" of
Marxism, the re-emergence of the "frozen" theoretical Marxism of the
102 THE ALTHUSSERIAN LEGACY
Stalinist era. Of course, some isolated thinkers, marginal militants, had
never ceased to oppose the reigning dogmas, but often without taking into
account the problematic which precisely defined these theses as "dogma."
As for antidogmatic reactions, for example those of the journal Arguments
and Henri Lefebvre, they slipped rapidly into eclecticism, either directly or
through their readers. Finally, the fraction of the existentialist "fellow
traveler" current of the French Communist Party brought into French
philosophy a wave of interest in "the anthropology of praxis" but virtually
without touching the "theory of history" that they then qualified as Marxist:
in a way, they juxtaposed "the supplement of the soul." In any case these
"contestations" left the intellectual field intact, since they barely affected
the principal "potential users" of Marxism: the political parties which
claimed it for themselves (and it was not the French Communist Party
alone), and academic research.
It was completely different for the true theoretical "reformation" ( in
Calvin's sense) inaugurated by Louis Althusser's articles in For Marx, which
would place at the front of the intellectual scene a pleiad of scholars and
philosophers. Such bastions as the Ecole Normale Superieure and the Ecole
Pratique des Haut.es Etudes propagated a wave of strictly academic, or
politically more useful, research: what we call here the "Althusserian
school."
This school arises from a very particular political and epistemological
conjuncture, evoked in the preface of For Marx.
a) Politics first. The renaissance of Marxist thought was provoked by the
collapse of "frozen" Marxism: Althusser attributed the awakening to Stalin's
death and the 20th Congress. He evokes the theory of "two sciences"
(bourgeois science/proletarian science) advanced by the communist leaders
"to defend against bourgeois attacks on Marxism at that time dangerously at
risk in Lyssenko's biology." The Althusserian rupture with Stalinist
dogmatism thus goes on to take the form of a restitution of the autonomous
rights of "theory" in relation to political "necessities." This choice led to a
series of consequences which today appear contradictory but whose logic was
clear at the time. Tactically, this signifies the exclusion of the other "escape
hatch" that Stalinism then advanced: the "Italian," "Togliatist" route, to
which Garaudy can be linked. Philosophically, it is the obsessive refusal of
"historicism" and the "problem of the subject." Scientifically, it is the
completely natural union with the second component of the conjuncture at
which the Althusserian school began: the structuralist vogue.
b) In effect, the Althusserian school was resolutely inscribed in a purely
scientific movement which corresponds to the emergence in the French
FROM ALTHUSSERIANISM TO 'REGULATION THEORY' 103
university of a "new scientific continent," still contaminated by ideology:
the social sciences. The dominant ideology for the most serious researchers
was structuralism. The Althusserian school inscribed itself completely in
the course of the discovery of this continent, marking when necessary its
distances from a certain structuralism, but claiming no partisan specificity:
there was only one science, and may the best-equipped win. Significant in
this respect are the total absence of a "class break" within French
epistemology (Bachelard, Canguilhem, Koyre, etc.) and the fundamental
weakness of the break with structuralism. A proudly asserted refusal in the
first case (autonomy of theoretical practice), and a tactical choice in the
second case (one sole enemy: historicism).
2) The Dialectical Materialism of the Althusserian School
What then is the "Philosophy," Dialectical Materialism (DM), latent in
the practice of the "historical theoretician" of Historical Materialism
(HM) ?3 It includes two groups of theses: methodological and ontological.
a) The Process of the Production of Knowledges
The methodological theses are posed in opposition to empiricism, and
define the process of knowledge. We can summarize them thus:
Thesis 0: The real exists independently of the knowledge we have of it, and
is not engendered by human thought nor by the development of an
"absolute idea." This is the fundamental thesis of all materialism.
Thesis I: The progress of knowledge is a process of production like any
other, which sets into motion the activity of a theoretician (who carries out
a theoretical practice), who applies means of production to objects of labor
to furnish a product. The whole of this process unfolds entirely within the
realm of thought. Objects of labor ("Generalities I") are previously
produced notions or concepts, the means of labor ("Generalities II") is the
already-existing conceptual body, the product ("Generalities III") a new
concept. In particular, the operation which consists of passing from
"ideological" knowledge (recognition-misrecognition) to the scientific
knowledge of a domain, an operation which marks the "birth" of a science,
is called "epistemological break." In the course of its accumulation,
knowledge is elevated from the abstract to the concrete, that is, from more
general concepts to more fertile determinations, thus reproducing in the
form of "concrete thought" the complexity of concrete reality.4
Thesis 2: This process is the method for appropriating the realm of thought;
it is different from the method belonging to art or pratcial activity. There is
ths not a "problem of knowledge" (the guarantees of the adequacy of the
104 THE ALTHUSSERIAN LEGACY
idea of the real), but a place for mechanistic theory by which theoretical
practice is articulated to other practices in the appropriation of the real.
The result is that the primacy of practice does not signify the subordination
of theory to other instances of human activity, since the "criterion of
practice" is internal to the very moment of theory.5
b) A Complex Overdeterminated Whole
Thus we arrive at the ontological theses which are also gnoseological
theses, since there is all the same a relation between the structure of the real
and the knowledge we have of it. Arriving at the object itself (here: the
history of human social formations), we must be aware of "Marx's immense
theoretical revolution": the setting in motion of"structural causality" (LLC,
II, p. 56). It is precisely there that Althusser himself brings us the most
original and useful but also the least infallible and most unsable ideas, the
most"degradable" in the course of development of the Althusserian school.
Here it follows the most controversial path (for other Marxists) yet the most
fertile (for everyone). Let us again try to state the theses.
Thesis 3: The real is presented as a structural whole, not as an "even"
combination of homogenous elements. Everything is first of all a structure
of structures, a system of relations more than a collection of elements. The
"elements" are themselves defined only by their place in the structure. For
example, the capitalist and the proletarian, more generally defined as "men,"
are defined only as places in the capitalist relations of production.6
Thesis 4: These structures articulate relationships which are presented as
"contradictions" between two aspects, of which one "dominates" the other,
the sense of the term "domination" being specified in each case. For
example, the infrastructure of the CMP (Capitalist Mode of Production)
combines two relations of domination, proprietorship and possession.
It seems that, in classical Althusserianism, "structures" and
"contradictions" are equivalent, and the categories and theses valid for one
are so for the other as well. Here the great slippage becomes a decoy: PM
speaks of "contradictions" and "overdetermination," LL of "relations" and
"structural causality."
Thesis 5: Everything is always already given to us as complex (that is,
constituted of multiple independent contradictions). It is concrete in this
sense. The real does not develop out of an original "simple unity": on the
contrary, a simple category can appear at the heart of the most complex
given structures.
This thesis marks the radical rupture with the "vulgar reversal of the
FROM ALTHUSSERIANISM TO 'REGULATION THEORY' 105
Hegelian dialectic," that of the vulgar Marxism of the Stalinist period,
according to which the economic infrastructure would be reflected as far as
the intellectual sphere, opposing "expressive totality" at every tum: two
solitary terms to a single contradiction. Bourgeois science and proletarian
science ... The following theses specify the structure of this "already given
complex whole" and the modality of its unity.
Thesis 6: In everything a dominant structure exists such that this
domination is the unity of the whole ("the complex whole possesses the
unity of an articulated structure in dominance" [PM, p. 208]). This
domination consists in that, to repeat the words of Marx in the Introduction
to the Critique of Political Economy, "it is a light in which all colors are bathed
and which modifies their particular tonalities, a particular ether which
determines the specific weight of all forms of existence which resort to it."
The effects of this domination do not intervene "from the outside" of the
dominant structure but as a specification of the structure itself.
Thesis 7: Reciprocally, "the secondary contradictions" are essential to the
very existence of the principal contradiction, in reality they constitute its
"condition of existence." For example, "the relations of production are not
the pure phenomena of the forces of production: they are also their
condition of existence" (PM, p. 211).
Thesis 8: Within the structure in dominance the dominated structures and
conditions have their own efficacy and autonomy which are each time
precised by the dominant structure, which for that reason is said to be
"determinant in the last instance."
The four preceding theses permit a definition of the category of
"overdetermination," which designates within the contradiction (or
structure), whether it is principal or subordinated, the following essential
quality: "the reflection, in the contradiction itself, of its conditions of
existence, that is, of the situation within the structure in dominance of the
complex whole" (LL, p. 215). For example, the principal contradiction
(bourgeoisie/proletariat) can be overdetermined in "blockage" or
"explosion" by the multiple secondary contradictions which dominate it but
which are not its simple development (men/women, citizens/immigrants,
etc.). It is important as well to grasp the reality, the efficacy of this
overdetermination, unthinkable in the framework of a dialectic of Hegelian
form, where, lacking the autonomy of the "already given," in the absence of
a dislocation, irreducible to the principal, the secondary contradictions are
m:ade only of an interiorization of the one and only contradiction,
106 THE AL THUSSERIAN LEGACY
indefinitely connected, hence indefinitely "frozen." With this we have
introduced two theses on the dynamic of reality (the possibility of change).
Thesis 9: The principal contradiction, as the principal aspect of every
contradiction (said another way: the dominant element of each relation)
can be displaced, because "nothing ever develops in an absolutely even
fashion" (according to the terms of Heraclitus and Mao Tse-tung).
Thesis 10: The overturning of the structure is made possible when the
displacement of the contradictions brings dominance into a "strategic place"
where a "condensation" of a contradiction operates. "Comprised in this
way, the contradiction is the engine of all developments. The displacement
and condensation, founded in its overdetermination, account for the phases
which constitute the existence of complex processes, that is, of the
becoming of things" (PM p. 223).
When the Althusserian school has finished emptying the contradiction,
it will become incapable of thinking the possibility of change, but will
remain perfectly capable of describing it. It will extract the tools of that
description particularly from Balibar and Poulantzas. These we will discuss
in the following paragraphs. But we must first proclaim our debt to the
Althusserian school's first blow to "frozen" Marxism: the end of the myth of
the single contradiction, of the messianic anticipation of a revolution from
the implacable virtue of the contradiction between the productive forces
and the relations of production, "interiorized" in the proletariat/bourgeoisie
contradiction.
All this, set apart from the degradation of the contradiction in structure,
would then be very positive if it were not necessary to note in the course of
these pages an eleventh thesis, not necessarily a consequence of, yet strongly
indicated by the preceding:
Thesis 11: The support-agents of active structures conform to the
requirements of the latter, such that they appear in a representation which
the theoretical gives them, that can be vastly different from them
conceptually, but which induces them nevertheless, conforming to their
"place," to reproduce the structures which define them.
History thus appears as "a theater whose spectators can, on occasion, be
spectators only because they are first of all forced to be its actors, caught in
the constraints of a script and parts whose authors they cannot be since it is
in essence an authorl.ess theater'' (LLC, II, p. 71 ). This radical negation of the
subject in the name of structuralism knows its most refined form in the
analysis of "forms of representation"7 given by Ranciere, which concludes:
FROM ALTHUSSERIANISM TO 'REGULATION THEORY' 107
"the essential continuum of the function of the subject will be constituted in
mystified being" (LLC, III, p. 77).
3) The Concept of the Capitalist Mode of Production
The philosophical rupture registered with the "Hegelian" conception of
the whole (a single contradiction which exteriorizes and interiorizes the
economic ad infinitum) opens in effect the breach of a series of scientific
ruptures which shake the representation of historical materialism to its very
foundations. What is taken again into consideration is the most classic
concept of Marx: that of "modes of production." The famous "Preface of
1859" presented a simple schema ("matrix"):
-At the base, productive forces that "evolve." This is the "engine."
-Above, the "relations of production" adequate to the degree of develop-
ment of the productive forces.
-On top, a political armature and an ideological justification for it all.
The first two levels form the economic "infrastructure," where all is
defined; the other levels (political and ideological) only "reflect." This is
why, in scholarly terms, a "mode of production" is defined as these two first
levels, distinguishing therein two degrees: the first, fundamental
(man/nature relations: the productive forces), and the already derived
second, the relations of production (relations between men in nature).
The Althusserian school breaks with this simple schema, a Hegelian
"matrix" simply turned upside-down, and conducts its attack on two fronts.
First Front: the mode of production is the concept (entirely within thought)
of the articulation of three ever-present instances (and always already given
together): economic, political, ideological. This "complex whole in
dominance" is dominated in the last instance by the economy, in the sense
that the economic structure determines the "matrix" of the mode
(indications of the dominance and autonomy of various instances until their
excision). For example, the economy can determine the dominance of
politics and religion in the feudal mode of production.
Second Front: it is necessary to consider the very structure of the
infrastructure, with its canonical distinction between productive forces
(defined "technologically") and relation of production (defined "socially").
In so doing, the "development of productive forces" is itself defined as a
social relation.'8
Although the consequences of these two affirmations in the destruction
of technologico-economic determinism are considerable, certain questions
mt1st remain. Let us stop at one of them, beginning with the "determining
instance."
108 THE ALTHUSSERIAN LEGACY
a) The Economic
All material production (whatever its mode) is necessarily social and
brings into play the following elements: workers, means of production
(objects of labor and means of labor) and non-workers. The "relations of
production" are the combination of these elements. For example, in the
CMP, the "worker" is separate from the means of production which is the
property of non-workers. This is well known. Still, it is necessary to specify
what it means. From the economic point of view, property signifies the
capacity of the dominant element to "affect the unity of production onto
which it brings to a particular production and to dispose of the product"
(Bettelheim, 1970). But one such capacity supposes as a condition on the
political and juridical level, the existence of the right and property and
contracts which "permit" the worker to sell his labor power, and the
proprietor of the means of production to keep the product. The juridical
right of property is logically independent of economic property (and it is
made separate from it in numerous situations comprised within capitalism).
We have thus already distinguished two relations: property/juridical
property, borne by the same supports (men and things) , but in places
inscribed in two different and relatively autonomous instances. These two
relations define (economically and juridically) the conditions of pl.a.cing value
on capital (the process of "valorization"). Froin this point it is possible to
develop theories of exchange value and surplus value. But nothing has been
said of the process of labor itself, or the production of use values that the
"frozen" reading of Marx leaves in the indifferent quantitative flow of
"productive forces": the accumulation of men, machines, invention, know
how ...
It is there that the Althusserian school's reading of Capital delivers a
second relation which intervenes in the structure of economics: the relation
of real appropriation (from Balibar) or possession (from Bettelheim). It
determines, for the labor process itself, the combination of the same
elements of economic structure. It substitutes, for the element "possessor,"
"the capacity to set in motion the productive forces in the process of labor"
(Bettelheim, 1 970). This implies a particular determination of the
combination of the activity of the worker, the means of labor and the object
of labor. It is this combination (this relation) which qualifies the famous
"development of productive forces."
In the case of the feudal or the artisanal mode of production, the worker
himself sets the productive forces into motion. The means of labor is only a
tool which extends his arm, and the process of labor, to his "work." There is
a unity, in terms of the object, of the activity and the means of labor. In
developed forms of capitalist production, there is on the contrary unity of
the means and the object of labor (the press and the steel plate), a unity that
FROM ALTHUSSERIANISM TO 'REGULATION THEORY' 109
is opposed to the indifferent worker who is only the servant of the
machinery.
We thus establish in the CMP a homology between each of the two
economic relations (proprietorship and possession, not counting their
correspondence witht the juridical relation), characterized by the separation
of the worker and the means of production and by the domination of the
non-worker. The profit the theoreticians of "Fordism" draw from these
reflections is well-known (in particular Coriat, 1978). At this point, two
errors of vulgar Marxism, juridicism and quantitativism, are clearly
denounced.
The first consists of identifying capitalist relations of production at the
level of the juridical property relation. We are thus led not to recognize in
such an economic form the capitalist relations of production, thinking that
they are not yet there (the putting-out system), or thay they are no longer
there (state capitalism in Eastern nations).
In addition, Balibar's demonstration that the "level of productive forces"
is also a "relation of production" shatters the glass of the "neutrality of
productive forces": they have a class character. The politics of
"quantitative" developments of capitalist-type productive forces, from which
Stalin expected the production of "material bases of communism" have
{literally) bound labor. This error (essentially identical to technological
determinism) has existed since the beginning of the Russian Revolution;
since then "the workers' opposition" has been opposed on this point to
Lenin, who mechanically imported Taylorism and the individual direction
of f actories. In this instance, "frozen" Marxism confused the two
constitutive relations of the economic instance.
The "two" constitutive relations ... according to Reading Capital. Because
the least vulgar economist cannot suppress his astonishment: evidently, one
is lacking. That to which Marx dedicated the first section of Capital, and
notably the first chapter: market relations. We will not enter into the
symptomatic analysis of this oversight here, but the fact remains that
classical Althusserianism's criticism, from Althusser and B alibar to
Poulantzas by way of Macherey, purely and simply makes out that the
unification of the means of production and workers, under juridical and
economic proprietorship and possessed by capital, operates within separate,
non-coordinated economic unities, independent of one another, which must
first of all find suppliers and afterward a "client" for their production.
The oversight of this first relation, its reduction to an ideological and
juridical illusion, without doubt corresponds first to a simple reaction:
Stalinist Marxism has for too long limited its critique of capitalism to the
"anarchy of the market-place." By placing the accent on the extortion of
surplus-value and the dispossession of the direct producer from the control
110 THE ALTHUSSERIAN LEGACY
of his labor, classical Althusserianism pursues legitimate political goals. But
this does not excuse (autonomy of theory! ) such a failure to take into
account.
As we see it, however, the criticism is deeper than that. With the
autonomy of economic units, the autonomy of the individual appears ( its
"liberty") and the contradiction between individual subjects and social
reproduction. "Subject," "contradiction": two words which will become
taboo; "Hegelians," "humanists." This is why Althusser, in his Preface to
the Garnier-Flammarion edition of Capital, strongly advises the reader to
"skip" the first chapters. This is why Macherey (LLC, IV) persists in
forgetting, over the course of dozens of pages, that the process of capitalist
production is administered by different capitals. This is why Balibar (LLC)
persists in demonstrating that this variety is only illusory and introduces no
"original" contradiction in the reproduction of capitalism as a whole.
b) The Articulation of Political and Ideological Conditions
Evidently, it is no longer a question of building upon this infrastructure a
political and ideological superstructure, "like preliminary essences entering
into a series of external relations. The articulation proper to all research on
a Mode of Production requires the constitution [of these] regional instances"
(Poulantzas, 1968 Part I, p. II). However, these instances have in principle a
general definition of their autonomy, specified in each mode, according to
modalities to be determined "in the la.st instance" by the economic.
The political level for Poulantzas (p. 36) is that of decoding, maintaining
or transforming the unity of a social formation. The political structures of a
mode "consist of the institutionalized power of the State." Political practice
is that which produces transformations within the unity of the mode and the
social formation. Politics is thus the crucial instance when all the
contradictions of a function are reflected and condensed, that which can
imply the existence of political structures (and practices) corresponding to
economic and ideological functions of politics properly stated.
The "ideological" level is the site where the agents of a formation, bearers
of its structures, live their conditions of existence, the "lived" relations of
agents to these conditions (II, p. 27). In modes and social formations, its
function is "to occult real contradictions, to reconstitute in an imaginary
plan a relatively coherent discourse" (II, p. 28). More than the conceptual
system, it recovers a group of practices and structures which constitute the
"culture" of a society (such as religion) . It thus reflects the unity of the
formation, and constitutes its cement (using Gramsci's word), but only at the
level of the imaginary (which does not impede its real efficacy on the other
levels of the structure).
The real autonomization of the political level is a characteristic aspect of
the capitalist mode of production: to speak truly, there is no "Politics and
FROM ALTHUSSERIANISM TO 'REGULATION THEORY' 111
"State" other than the bourgeois. This autonomous place for political
structure within the CMP is precisely the effect of determination in the last
instance of economic structure. In this mode of production, in effect, the
double separation of the producer from his means of production assures the
unity of the process of valorization under the ownership of capital, and
hence the appropriation of surplus-value, in the (apparent) absence of all
external "violence" except the "despotism of the enterprise."
Let us go further. The capitalist relations of production which govern
the production of j uridically private labor, executed on one another
independently within separate economic unities which integrate workers
themselves separate from their means of production-have, in the
consequent practice and social relations of the agents, an "isolating effect"
(concurrence between capitalists and workers, etc.) which refers to the
juridical-political superstructure, "autonomous" in relation to the economy,
the group of functions of the "unity" of the structume (I, p. 133-37). It is
the State which integrates, organizes and represents a people-nation of
citizens, juridical personalities. In particular, we have already observed that
the relation of "economic ownership" has as a condition of existence (was
overdetermined by) the relation of juridical ownership.
In this way the two specific traits of politics in the CMP are isolated:
autonomy (by its relation to economics) and the function of unity. They
differentiate it from the detailed and indissolubly economic structure of
feudal power. These two traits are intimately linked, when one imagines the
characterization of the bourgois class that we attribute to Marx, a class
"which, at each moment, sacrifices its own general class interest, its political
interest, to its most limited particular and private interests" ( The 18th
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte).
This conception is thus opposed to the fixed conception of the State that
could be drawn from Lenin's polemical definition in State and Revolutian: a
tool of the dominant classes to "subdue" the oppressed classes. It emphasizes
(l) that "the bourgeoisie" exists only as "a class for itself," it needs the
existence of political structures to be recognized as a class; (2) that the
relative autonomy of politics permits the State to assure the reproduction of
the capitalist mode of production even if the bourgeoisie is incapable of
insuring its historical responsibility; and (3) that, in particular, it is relieved
of complex tasks other than that of subduing the dominated classes by
means of "special detachments of armed men."
The "autonomy" of politics thus acquires a strong meaning: structural and
institutional autonomy, not identified with optimal political economy (from
an economistic point of view) and optimal general politics (from the point of
view of maintaining the social formation), not identified with the dominant
class (economically), the "reigning" class or "tenants of poverty," etc.
112 THE ALTHUSSERIAN LEGACY
It is easy to guess the profit which the "regulationists" will later draw from
the work of Poulantzas: if politics (and ideology) are "always already" given
and economically overdetermined, the State is no longer a "support for
capital." Law and Representation intervene in the formation of economic
relations themselves: market, wage-earners (Lipietz, 1985b). And insofar as
the State (as an institution) "intervenes," it does so as an archetype of the
regulated forms of the social formation (Delorme, Andre, 1983; Lipietz, 1986).
However, the already-sketched critiques do nothing but aggravate the
difficulties. First of all, in the absence of "subjects" really opposed in
contradictory structures, it is no longer possible to see very well what there is
to unify. What are these if not structures combatting one another? This is a
useful point of view, but insufficient, and we will see the efforts of
Poulantzas to address this difficulty. In addition, the "isolating" effect
(between capitalists, between wage-workers) is reported by Poulantzas (who
follows classical Althusserianism in ignoring the contradictions of market
relations) as the j uridical instance: "economic units" are autonomous
because they are juridically private, the ideological effect of which is the
m isunderstanding (meconnaissance) of their unity at the heart of
reproduction. Bettelheim ( 1970) will rectify this fundamental error by
showing that the separation of market units is a real separation at the core of
the process of social production, indicating a real contradiction in economic
reproduction, which is only formally recovered by the planning within
nations having public ownership of the means of production. .
4) Social Formations
Pure modes of production do not exist. All that exist, in reality, are
particular combinations, specific intersections of modes. It is thus necessary
to have recourse to concrete objects of thought, social formations, complex
wholes dominated in general by a mode of production which imprints its
matrix upon them. "In general," because there exist precisely social
formations in transition between the dominance of two modes.
To render more concrete in thought the concept of the mode compared to
that of formation, two directions can be taken: the external articulation of
the dominant mode with other modes, or the international periodization of
the mode.
External articulation with other modes evidently does not consist of a
simple juxtaposition: the dominant mode overdetermines the others and
gives them a specific "degenerated" form (ground-rent, the "slave plan
tations" of the American South). It is even possible to locate modes of
production which cannot exist as dominant but which can appear in the
transitions or under the domination of another, such as the mode of "small
independent producers."
FROM ALTHUSSERIANISM TO 'REGULATION THEORY' 1 13
This concerns the dominant mode itself. It delimits first in the history of
the social formation two phases: that of its "beginnings" ( transition in the
strict sense); and the phase of reproduction enlarged in the structure. But
the unequal development between the branches imposes case by case a
realization of this distinction after the establishment of the dominance of
the mode. Next, the displacement of the contradictions of the mode to the
interior of its invariant structure founds a "periodization" of this mode which
is imposed (with dislodgings) on the formation.
The periodization by the CMP by Marxists presents numerous gaps: the
contrary would be surprising, the "dislodgement" between the structures
contradictions permitting choice. Marx privileges the periodization by the
relation of .possession: manufacture/large-scale industry/automation.
Ultimately the Marxists have privileged a periodization in stages relative to
the functioning of the unifying structure of the CMP which the
Althusserians ignore: the market. We arrive at the division "competitive
stage/monopoly stage."
The coexistence in a single social formation of different modes of
production, stages, etc. subdivides the dominant and dominated classes into
strata or fractions. What is then the uniry of a social formation? Structural
unity is inscribed in it, we have already said, at the political level. The
question is naturally that of the unity founded by a "domination." This
"unity under domination" introduces the concept of hegemony, particularly
as developed by Poulantzas following Gramsci, and means two things.
-It indicates the constitution of the political interests of the dominant
classes, in their relation to the Capitalist State, as representative of the
general interest of the "people-nation." Gramsci points out (in his Modern
Prince) : "This means that the dominant group is concretely coordinated
with the general interests of the subordinated groups and that the life of the
State is ... like a continual passage of unstable equilibria ... , equilibria to
which the interests of dominant groups bring it, but only up to a certain
point, that is, not up to the paltry interests of corporative economy."
-In the block of dominant classes in power, one of the classes (or a fraction)
holds a hegemony over others.
We can see that the analysis in terms of "social formation" rectifies the
"economic" conception of "frozen" Marxism:
-Because it takes into account a plurality of contradictions overdetermined
between them, and no longer leaves two homogeneous camps face to face,
defined by their antagonistic place in the relations of production. There are
certainly at every moment two camps on e ither side of a principal
contradiction, but it must be determined at all moments because it is
displaced and not necessarily identifiable at the economic level.
1 14 THE ALTHUSSERIAN LEGACY
-Because, even at the economic level, it can explain the obstacle or the
lessening of the tendentially explosive contradictions of capitalism (against
the "catastrophism" of Rosa Luxemburg).
-Because at the political and ideological level, it permits a "distancing"
between the immediate and catastrophic interests of the bourgeoisie and the
strategy of their class. This distance provokes a fracturing within the
dominant classes, and shows that the fraction which is hegemonic is not
indifferent to the dominated classes, neither from the point of view of their
short-term material interests, nor from the point of view of the struggle for
social transformation.
Poulantzas certainly had in mind the choice between fascism and social
democracy, which the KPD did not know how to make under the Weimar
Republic. But the regulationists reintroduced a much more general idea:
capitalism does not always function in the same way; there are several
solutions, several possible forms of reorganization at the time of its great
crises, and the choice very much depends on the forms of institutionalized
compromise which the dominating classes are capable of proposing or
imposing.
5 ) The Theory of Passage
What is most striking about the preceding explications is the strange
appearance of "historical materialism." The Althusserian school has
brought a quantity of concepts depicting a static reality up to date, but it
seems that this could be to the detriment of what has passed as the very
originality of Marxism: a theory of variables, even a tentative "absolute
historicization" of whatever seems eternal in the dominant ideology.
Balibar and Althusser do not conceal it: their reading of Capital is first a
condemnation of "evolutionism." "Marx told us that all modes of
production are historical moments; he did not tell us that these moments
engendered one another ... here the identity of chronology and of an
internal law of the development of forms is found broken" (LLC, II, p. ll2) .
And Balibar recognized that "historical materialism, reduced to the single
concept of modes of production conceived as combinations, should be found
in the impossibility of thinking at the same theoretical level the passage of
one combination to another" (LLC, II, p. 157). Hence the necessity of a
second concept: that of "passage," analysis of the transition between two
modes, thus of the formation and dissolution of modes. Balibar (in LLC)
provides the principal contribution on this point.
The mode of production is in effect first a reproduction of the places of
the various elements of the structure: "production of objects and individuals
for social relations, a production in which individuals are determined to
FROM ALTHUSSERIANISM TO 'REGULATION THEORY' 115
produce and objects to be produced in a specific form for social relations"
(LLC, II, p. 175). This is why the theory of reproduction is conceptualized
not in time but "in a plan" which translates the "eternalization" of the mode
and of its "places." Production is a "process without a subject," or perhaps
(but this means nothing), the subject is the relations of production that "set
into motion" the workers who are already defined as proletarian before being
sold to a particular functionary of capital.
To conceive of the structure as reproduction, and reproduction ( of social
relations) as the condition of production (of objects), is not only to make
the mode of production the very con!,'.'.ept of historical continuity, but also to
prevent thinking the passage between two modes as an "irrational gap," in
which one stops and sees what one will do next (since to live it is certainly
necessary to produce, hence to reproduce the conditions of production), and
inversely to prevent thinking the passage to another structure by the same
functioning of the previous structure ( which would only be known as a
reproduction of itself: we know of the Althusserians' affection for Spinoza) .
The result: each passage is a "revolution," and one does not slip insensibly
from one mode to another; each beginning is a "discovery." The new mode
needs to "find" elements in the dissolution of the one preceding; each
transition is a "quasi-mode of production," with its specific structure and
reproduction.
a) A Theory of Origins
To formulate a theory of the origins of a mode is to take a retrospective.
We know the structural elements of this mode: thus, we know the theoretical
presuppositions of the appearance of this mode. If they are reunited, the
mode can begin its greater reproduction. But whence comes the reunion?
Cetainly not from the mode itself, but as a product of the social formation
under the domination of the preceding mode, which constitutes the historical
conditions of the appearance of the mode, and of the realization of its
theoretical presuppositions. These elements are defined in the new world
but born separately in the ancient one and are thus susceptible to a genealogy
which is indifferent to its means of arrival: it will "forget" its origin, and
from there several series of "historical conditions" can satisfy the same
"presuppositions" (LLC, II, p. l84ff).
This is far from evolutionism. Capitalism, contrary to what Stalinist
Marxism thought, does not descend from feudalism as man descended from
the ape in vulgar Darwinism. These presuppositions can be satisfied as well
by the dissolution of the Asiatic mode of production as by the unleashing of
a "dictatorship of the proletariat."
1 16 THE ALTHUSSERIAN LEGACY
b) The Theory of Tendencies
Let us imagine the problem in the other sense (the end of a mode). The
question is very different: it ignores some elements it acts to create (they are
defined only by the structure of the following mode). We can at the most
see what elements of the present mode tend to become.
Now these are defined in the "space-plan" of the reproduction of their
structure, the synchrony which the concept constitutes of their relations.
The "funcitoning" of that structure is the "dynamic" of the structure, "that
is, its existence in time" (LLC, II, p. 194). Is this dynamic simultaneously
the "history" of the structure, the engine of its obsolescence? No. The
"contradiction" announced by Marx in the CMP between the socialization
of productive forces and the private character of the relations of production
is only, for Balibar, that the structure itself developed in time; in fact it is
manifested only as a contradiction by the dissociation in thought of the
"contradictory effects" of the structure. The representation of laws of the
dynamic as "tendencies" is coupled with "counter-tendencies": in fact, the
tendency (of the decline of the rate of profit, for example) is the same law
inherent to the structure, coupled with the internal determination of the
rhythm of the appearance of its effects (pp. 198-99), that is, of the definition
of "its" temporality.
Thus, "the contradiction is only between effects, but it is not original, the
cause is not divided in itself, it cannot be analyzed in antagonistic terms" (p.
201). Notably, the two relations of the economic base (relations of property
and possession) are in relations of "reciprocal limitation," they co-determine
the submission of labor to capital: "we thus rediscover here, not the
contradiction, but the complexity of the mode of production, [its] double
articulation" (p. 204).
Let us specify at once that, for us, Balibar marks here the "point of
inversion'' of classical Althusserianism, and the substitution of "structure"
for "contradiction" as a fundamental category will not be long in making its
effects felt: the return to non-dialectical materialism, with characteristically
the change "by the external causes" which will appear in the next
paragraph.
But before "surpassing" Balibar, we will subscribe to the conclusion of his
theory of tendencies: the "contradiction" between the effects of the
immanent laws of economic structure cannot, of itself, elicit the mode of its
own nature; being the very function of structure, it can only arrive at an
equilibrium, even in the form of prolonged or cyclical crises. But the effects
of economics can be "the material base" of other results, such as the
constitution of reformative or revolutionary social forces, in other instances
endowed with their temporality. To understand that these temporalities can
be born in the unity of a conjuncture is another problem, exterior and
FROM ALTHUSSERIANISM TO 'REGULATION THEORY' 117
economic. I t must be supposed that in addition one rethinks relations in
terms of contradictions, but the analysis of Balibar is perfectly pertinent to
the critique of the economic determinism of "frozen" Marxism, as it is to the
catastrophism of Rosa Luxemburg.
The "regulationists" remain faithful on this point to the Althusserian
contribution. In fact, their objects will not be "modes of production," but
the modes of particular forms of capitalism, the "models of development,"
analyzed as combinations of a technological paradigm, a regime of
accumulation, a mode of regulation. They will maintain the distinction
between the analysis of "theoretical presuppositions" of a model, the
"discovery" of its historical conditions, the "tendencies" conducive to its
crisis; but they will refuse, against for example the theory of "long cycles," to
think that models of development are linked to one another according to
some transhistorical (technological?) determinism. In marking a more and
more pronounced skepticism towards the idea of the emergence of a new
mode of production at the horizon of their own time, they will insist on the
profusion of ruptures ( great crises, institutionalized compromises) separating
the consecutive models of development.9 In return, all their effort against
the Althusserian heritage will consist of showing that the contradictions of a
model of development are original, inscribed in its structure, and that it is a
veritable miracle (a "find") that a mode of regulation should have been able
to be established as a resolution, over a long period, of these contradictions.
Before evoking their solutions, it is necessary to pass to a more symptomatic
critique of classical Althusserianism. But first let us show what is
bequeathed, to the economists of Marxist inspiration who have had to
confront the crisis of the 1970s, by the Althusserian school, in matters of
predictive methodology.
6) Prediction
With the two fundamental concepts which resume the Althusserian
conception of time, that of the dynamic as the existence of a structure in
time and that of overdetermination, we have two tools at our disposal ( to
combine) for thinking evolution and mutation.
a) The Tendential Analysis
The first type of result is produced by a theoretical reflection on an
abstract structure (the CMP, or the economy in the CMP). It expresses the
development of the structure in a temporality which is proper to it. That is
to say that such a "state" of the structure can be found as much in the future
as in the past or even never to be attained! Everything depends on the
concrete diachrony in which this dynamic is articulated. The process that
consists of developing the internal dynamic in thought up to its ultimate
1 18 THE ALTHUSSERIAN LEGACY
form then takes on the allure of a scientifically estblished prophecy, a
prophecy that may or may not be realized but which in all rigor is perhaps
written as much in the past as in the future. This type of prophecy, frequent
in the texts of Marx, founded on a very profound comprehension of the
essence of the mode of production, Lipietz and Rouilleault ( 1972 ) call
"prophetic analysis" or "tendenciality."
The most celebrated prophetic analysis is the Communist Manifesto (first
chapter) of Marx and Engels, written in 1848. It described in a stupefying
fashion the great traits of the contemporary world. It is written entirely in the
past tense. "By exploiting the global market, the bourgeoisie gives a
cosmopolitan character to production and consumption .. . It has removed
industry from its national base. The old industries have been destroyed and
replaced by new ones which do not use indigenous materials, but materials
which come from the most distant regions, and whose products are
consumed in all parts of the globe ... In place of ancient isolation a
universal interdependence between nations is developed ... In a word the
bourgeoisie fashions a world in its own image . . . The development of
machinery and the division of labor, removes from the worker all the
autonomous characters of his work, all its attraction. The producer becomes
a mere accessory to the machine," etc.
At the limit we can say that the verification or non-verification of these
prophecies has no importance, any more than the law of gravity is disproven
by the flight of objects "heavier than air." The non-verification of a
prophetic analysis invites us "simply" to search for, in the complex whole in
dominance, the causes which have fettered the articulated dynamic in a
concrete dichotomy, causes that prediction seeks in the analysis of a
conjuncuture in order to support its prognostics with a scientifically
produced diagnostic.
"Simply": that is already a great deal. The great error of the majority of
Marxists is to take tendential analyses literally. They have good reason at
certain moments. But not always. Next to the genial prophecies such as we
have cited, Marx is responsible for celebrated errors (social bipolarization,
the development of India, etc. ) . More characteristic still is the
"catastrophism" of Rosa Luxemburg. It is precisely with the proof of
"deviation" between the tendential scenario and reality (for example the
emergence of the New Industrial Nations , the absence of a crisis of
overproduction in 1945 and 1979) that the work of the regulationist begins.
To understand how an explosive tendency has been inhibited is the first
step in understanding crisis.
b) The Diagnostic of Conjuncture
To understand the reality of past diachronies ( that is, of concrete
histories) or to "evaluate" the possibility of future diachronies, suppose,
FROM ALTHUSSERIANISM TO 'REGULATION THEORY' 1 19
Althusser tells us (LLC), that we must rid of our minds the "linear time in
which events unfold ." I t is first of all necessary to construct the
temporalities of each structure or contradiction as a whole, but above all to
examine carefully how each structure is conditioned, overdetermined by
others, specified in the whole which is always already given us, and that in a
very precise conjuncture: that which Lenin calls the "present moment."
From this moment, it is possible to see how each dynamic is articulated with
the dynamic of other contradictions, and to construct concrete historical
time.
If a "general synchrony" existed, that is, if all past and future structures
were articulated "as in a plan," it would then be theoretically possible to
leave the actual moment, to deduce the following moments and begin again.
This is not possible for several reasons. Practical reasons first: analysis can
be "infinintely concrete" only by being put into the form of the "general
equat ion" wh ich would require " Balibar's demon" to foresee the
transformation of societies just as "Laplace's demon" foresaw the evolution
of mechanical systems. Reasons of principle also: contradictions do not
"displace themselves"; they can, as Althusser would say, "fuse" into
explosive conjunctures on the other side of which the complex whole is
restructured in another "illumination," in a radically different structure
which redefines all contradictions. The next Revolution or "great crisis" of
a model of development would appear as the closure of the field which the
Althusserian school opened in the exploration of the future.
Consequently, the prediciton must limit its ambitions (but this is already
an enormous task) to the analysis of the conjuncture, from the point of view of
the reciprocal conditioning of the dynamics of diverse contradictions which
present themselves. This operation is what Lenin calls "the living soul of
Marxism: the concrete analysis of the concrete situation," and what we
simply call diagnostic.
The first step of the diagnotic is to grasp the principal contradiction in a
conj uncture. The second is to determine the state of the principal
contradiction, that is, the modality of its overdetermination by the
"conditions" ( the other contradictions ) : by "displacement" ( non
antagonistic contradiction, quantitative variations ) , or by "fusion"
(antagonistic contradictions can be resolved only by a qualitative change) .
Such, a t least, i s the methodology which is i mpl icitly used b y the
regulationists in: the analysis of the present crisis. 10
The problem of Althusserianism is that the ossification of the category of
contradiction within the category of structure no longer allows thinking
"fusion," explosion, the qualitative good, except by inserting every structure
into a generalized structure comprising the succession of structures as a
variation. Balibar (LLC) slips toward one such solution: the transition from
120 THE ALTHUSSERIAN LEGACY
one structure to another is there conceived as an effect of the mode to come
(e.g. capitalism) on the anterior mode (e.g. feudalism). This is the
theoretical myth of "generalized synchrony."
Poulantzas introduces an audacious solution. In the social whole, an
instance (the political) is the strategic site where the principal contradiction
will be condensed when it is antagonistic. But the "structure of politics" has
for him reached such a point of ossification that it is confused with
institutions. How, as the political structure becomes "principal," can it
reverse the social whole? He is obliged to reintroduce the notion of the
"practice" of agent-bearers constituted in "classes," classes defined by the
effect, on the practice of agent-bearers, of the whole of the structure. From
this is drawn a "field of practice," projected shadow of the field of structures
(with all possible displacements: it is not a Hegelian expressivity). This field
is that of cl.ass struggle because all classes are there defined in relations of
opposition (here at least contradiction reigns). It is determined by the field
of structures (classes are not subjects, even so!), in the form of limits to the
variations of class struggle, bit it has its own effectivity on the field of
structures at the level of the poUtical instance. "The effectivity of structure on
the field of practice is thus itself limited by the intervention, in the structure,
of political practice" (1968, I, p. 97).
What a strange construction! It is in this way that the "shadows"
projected on Plato's Cave by the Heaven of Structures had the capacity to be
autonomized in order to change the constellation of structures! It is certainly
somewhat in this manner that the regulationists conceive putting in place
new models of development. But from the beginning, they have admitted
that social groups, however constituted by and in ancient relations, can be
subjects of contradictory ambitions, and thus capable of conflicts and
compromise.
c) Can We Make a "Prediction in the Future Anterior"?
Scoffing at Hegelian dialectic, where what is obsolete is also saved, and
where the past thus finds its key to the evening of "absolute knowledge,"
Althusser refuses "history in the past anterior," where each era ''had already
prepared and announced" the future period. Nevertheless, we know how to
make a geneology of the elements of a mode. But it is necessary not to forget
that the theory of origins is a "prehistory," a "retrospective." This means that
we know the structural elements of a mode and we will search for them in the
products of the dissolution of the previous mode. But for any structure, the
new mode is not produced by the anterior mode: its constitution is a
"discovery," and, from the phase of reproduciton, it radically "forgets" the
occasional origins of its elements. The "retrospective" (genealogy element by
element) thus has nothing to do with a "tendential prediction applied in the
past."
FROM ALTHUSSERIANISM TO 'REGULATION THEORY' 121
Will it not be possible then to "apply the methods of retrospection to the
future"? That is: knowing the theoretical presuppositions of the future
mode, to search for the historical conditions in the present? A reading of
the present to illuminate the future? A prediction of the future anterior
("the present will have prepared the future")? This would be a powerful
guide in the analysis of the conjuncture. Such an element obeys less and
less the dynamic of the structure from which it issues; it begins to follow
another dynamic, that of a structure which will remain dominant tomorrow.
This is what Lenin meant when, in response to the "Friends of the People"
on the development of capitalism in Russia, he referred to rural artisan
production as that which "still" produced under command and which
"already" produced for the market. But he had the conceptual knowledge of
what had to develop: capitalism. This is where the problem lies.
After they had made a precise enough "conceptual" idea of the dominant
capitalist mode of development after the Second World War, a model called
"Fordism" in homage to Gramsci, the regulationists undertook the genealogy
of its different elements: Taylorism, collective conventions, welfare state,
money credit, etc. Robert Boyer' 1 in particular will show at what point the
origin of these elements was heterogeneous, hazardous, and not in the least
having in mind the instigation of "Fordism." But as a result, numerous
social forces gained an idea of the contradictions which the crisis of 1930
revealed, and advanced propositions of which some had a nearly Fordist
allure (as much for fascists as for social democrats and communists). The
projects they advanced often indicated a rupture with the representations
which were formed in the preceding period (Lipietz, 1985).
Since the regulations tried to perform again the same operation on the
contemporary crisis, they had to combine two steps anew:
-An "Althusserian" analysis of the present moment, but taking seriously
into consideration the contradictory character of the real, and the different
possible solutions for stabilizing it;
-A location of the social forces capable of bringing a specific solution to
the located contradictions.
Examples of the above can be found in Leborgne and Lipietz (1987),
Mahon (1987), Noel (1988). Still, it is necessary to take seriously the
notions of "contradiction" and "subject." And then to go beyond the limits
of Althusserianism.
II. The Trouble With Althusserianism
Rejection of Contradiction and the Subject: these two censures seem to
be the ransom in classical Althusserianisrn for the emergence of the concept
of Reproduction. This connection is particularly clear in the contribution
1 22 THE ALTHUSSERIAN LEGACY
of Balibar to Reading Capital . His analysis of capitalist economic
reproduction furnishes a "prototype" which involves a whole vision of
history and humans.
1. Fecundity and FaiUngs of the Category of Reproduction
In reading into capitalist production the reproduction of social relations,
Balibar brings to light a very fertile idea in Marx. In the capitalist process of
the production of things, seen from the point of view of the whole, from the
point of view of results, what fundamentally occurs is the reproduction of
places in the synchronic structure of the mode, a place from which the
structure determines the functions in the reproduction of the mode. For
example, at the end of the cycle, Sector I has reproduced all the constant
capital and Sector II all the variable capital, but above all the capitalist class
is reproduced with the ownership of the means of production, and the
proletariat is reproduced always also dispossessed. The reproduction of
people and things thus determines them to produce and to be products.
Where we cannot agree is where reproduction becomes the foundation of
production (determines men to produce), when the production of things
becomes "appearance" and reproduction "reality," "the effectivity" (II, pp.
174-5). We disagree that Marx institutes a rupture between "production as
an act, objectification of a subject," and the "concept of a production
without a subject, which determines as a result certain classes as their own
functions" (p. 171).
In a celebrated text (On Contradictin, 1937), which served as a point of
departure for For Marx, Mao Tse-tung opposes "the two fundamental
concepts of development." The first sees the causes of development of
things "from the outside, in the action of exterior forces." The second
thinks that "the development of objects is sustained by their internal
contradictions." Does this exclude the external causes? "Not at all. The
external causes constitute the conditions of change, the internal causes are
its base, and the external causes operate by the intermediary of the internal
causes." What is this for Balibar, who sees in the "matrix of the CMP" (the
homology of the relations of ownership and possession) a non-contradictory
structure ? He is obliged to think change by the effectivity of a relation
(ownership) over another (possession), of an instance (political) over
another (economic), of a new mode (the CMP) over the ancient (the feudal
mode of production) ... and of structures over their supports.
What Balibar does not see is that the base of the effectivity of the
external cause is internal to each structure under consideration. He
specifically forgets three things:
-First, that the relation of "possession" is contradictory. It would be more
FROM ALTHUSSERIANISM TO 'REGULATION THEORY' 123
correct to speak of the "implication/control contradiciton." In depriving the
direct producer of intellectual mastery of the operations (for example in
Taylorism), the capitalist sacrifices the efficiency of which the producer who
is "implicated" in his work is capable (which Swedish and Japanese
employers know very wel l ) , but inversely the producer "implicated"
increases his capacity to control (which Taylor understood too well). The
"dispossession" of the direct producer thus is not the univocal dynamic of
the capitalist organization of labor; Taylorism is not the unsurpassable
horizon of professional relations (Leborgne, Lipietz, 1987).
-Next, Balibar forgets the existence of market relations. The capitalist
producer is also a vendor who must find clients, for example with the wage
workers.
-It follows that thus overdetermined, the relation of exploitation is highly
unstable: too much surplus-value is extorted, and there are no longer enough
clients.
One more word: each of the elementary structures of capitalism is itself a
contradiction. And at bottom, it is this way because contradiction unites
and opposes human bearers of projects which are only compatible within
narrow limits. The contradiction is "original" (not only in its effects)
because at the origin a social structure does not unite places but opposes
"objective subjects," beings as capable of routine activity as of deviance.
2. The Problematic of the "Objective Subject"
Another reading of Capital is in effect possible. "Our point of departure,"
said Marx, "is labor in a form belonging exclusively to man .... What first
distinguishes the worst architect from the most expert bee is that he has
constructed the chamber in his head before building it in the hive. The
result toward which the worker moves ideally pre-exists in the imagination
of the worker.... He realizes there his own goal of which he is conscious,
which determines his mode of action as law, and to which he must
subordinate his will. And this subordination is not momentary .... It is even
more exacting as the work is less attractive" (Book I, Chapter VII, P 1).
I t is this thesis of Marx, a thesis of philosophical anthropology,
unchanged from the manuscripts of 1844 to the Critique of the Gotha
Program, that replaces the other theses which found the category of man as
"objective subject" and as social being, historical and "predictive," which
Labriola (1899) and Kosik (1968) develop, for example. 12
In this problematic, man ( philosophically) appears with a double aspect:
-Subjective being: he introduces a "mediation" between his needs and
their satisfaction, he forges for himself an "artificial milieu," and to produce
objects he is produced and reproduced himself as a social being. "His"
124 THE ALTHUSSERIAN LEGACY
nature is thus the product of "his" activity, the "objective world of men and
their products"- an originally contradictory world.
-Objective being: he obeys the laws of nature such as they are (including
"his" nature); he evolves in this objective and contradictory world which
determines the mode of satisfaction of his needs.
From the second aspect it is possible to produce the "social sciences," and
this is why economics takes the dominant role in them. From the first
aspect man could be known as a historical being, liable to a past, a future, a
project, a prediction.
The problematic of the objective subject, according to which, as Labriola
(p. 237) said, "man is developed or produces himself, not as an entity,
generically provided with certain attributes, who repeats himself or develops
himself according to a rational rhythm, but is produced and developed at
once as cause and effect, as author and consequence of determined
conditions," thus opens onto two dialectically connected points of view:
-That of the "objectifying practice": the movement by which humans are
produced and engendered their future routines.
-That of the "objectified practice," the state of social man produced in this
way, of his material production as well as his routine practices in social
relations, which are now presented as "conditions."
Kosik compares this doubling to Spinoza's categories of "natura naturans"
and "natura naturata." And rightly so: the question is neither of two
different moments (humans will sometimes be followers of routine, and
sometimes innovators), nor of a division of humanity into two groups
("leaders" and sheep), but into two aspects, always coexisting in variable
proportions, in all human practice. Such is the opposition currently used
(from Poulantzas to Giddens) between structure and practice. Because in
the same way that practice is determined by conditions, the "trajectories" of
these practices are mechanically obtained by a "duality" apart from the
knowledge of structures, and reciprocally social structures are only the
pattern for these objectified practices (Lipietz, 19886).
Knowledge of social reality as "conditions" is thus a moment (but only a
moment) of the knowledge of the "social being" of man. Again it is
necessary, as Kosikreminds us, not to forget that "conditions are not being"
and that these conditions are "products": "social being is not contained, but
simply fixed, in economic categories and their articulation. For the analysis
to grasp social being in the system of economic categories, it must dissolve
its fixity and conceive of it as the expression of the objective activity of
men" (1968, p. 135).
It is thus necessary not to confuse the methodology of the analysis of the
conditions of objectified practice with the metaphysical ontology that
FROM ALTHUSSERIANISM TO 'REGULATION THEORY' 125
confuses the existence of man with conditions. In my sense, the
Althusserian school is par excellence the school of the methodology of
conditions; in this regard, a renaissance of historical materislism can be
legitimately atttributed to it. Unfortunately, it slipped from methodology to
ontology. It has thus remained capable of analyzing past conditions (the
retrospective branch of being) but finds itself powerless to apprehend the
new, humanity in the process of making the world. Having dissolved the
vulgar "pseudo-concrete," it fetishizes, in an academic mode, the
"conditions" that it has analyzed so well, by denying that the "conditions"
should themselves be the product of subjects. It has taken "conditions" for
"being."
We saw, however, that Poulantzas reintroduced, in the shadow of the
field of structures, a "field of practice" determined by the effect of the field of
structures on the "agent-bearers." Let us note first of all the advantages of
this conceptualization. It excludes the empiricism which would read off
from the relations of production the existence of a "class in itself" (the
proletariat), which would become (the concept was developing in the real
and was self-conscious) a "class for itself' susceptible to political autonomy.
It instituted a field of analysis where contradiction reigned. It reintroduced,
in making the class the effect of the totality of instances, an entity which,
without being a "pars totalis" of the "expressive totality," at least has the
characteristic of being "present" (that is to say, contemporaneous) in all
instances (economic, ideological, political).
These advantages, we have said, are met with a singular oddity. What
are these structures? What do they structure? Are they empty forms, a
"container" which informs the contents? And practice? Is it not structured?
If the structures are not those of the practice-and Poulantzas takes great
care to affirm the relative autonomy of the two fields, the first only imposes
"limits" on the other-then must structures be represented as a "too-large
garment" in which practice "swims"?
Effectively, it seems that the "stake" should be the effect sought by
Poulantzas in the distinction of fields. It is a question of being given with
the practices that which is forbidden to lone structures: to think their
overturning. The "practices" appear as an "escape hatch" for structuralism.
But Poulantzas takes great care to restrain them: they are determined
(limited) by the field of structures, and can only have "effectivity" on the
field of structures at the level of the political instance. Poulantzas timidly
reconnects with the Third Thesis on Feuerbach: "the materialist doctrine
which would have man be the product of circumstance and education ...
forgets that it is precisely the men who transform circumstance and that the
educator himself needs to be educated....The coexistence of the change in
circumstances and human activity or self-change, can only be considered
126 THE ALTHUSSERIAN LEGACY
and comprehended to the same degree as is revolutionary practice." In an
ossified form, he thus retrieves the two fiundamental ideas of the
problematic of the objective subject: it is a human practice that makes
history, but not all practices are transforming.
But it is still necessary to think practice authentically, as Kosik reminds
us: "Even a totality thought as articulation of contradictions remains
abstract, if one does not show that man, as a real subject of history, created
the base and superstructure, and in the process of production and
reproduction, elaborates social reality as a totality of social relations,
institutions and ideas, and, in this fashioning of social objective reality, was
himself created at the same time as a historical and social being ...." Lacking
which, he pursues, "One falls into the snare of fetishism, of which the fruit is
the false totality. Social reality then is conceived as the sum of autonomous
structures which influence one another. The subject has disappeared, or
better, the actual subject is replaced by a mythical subject, reified and
fetishized, of knowledge: by the autonomous movement of the structure" (p.
42). One thus finds oneself facing the following dilemma: "At one of the
poles relations (conditions) are petrified, and at the other, the spirit, the
psyche. Either the conditions are passive, such that the spirit, the psyche,
sets them in motion and gives them a meaning; or else the conditions are
active and themselves become subjects, whereas the psychic element or the
consciousness has as a function only to know in an exact, or mystified,
manner their natural or scientific laws" (p. 92). This takes yet another form:
"The alternative, either mechanical causality, where one factor is cause and
the other effect, or pluralist interaction, simple reciprocal connection
excluding all actual causality ... ; this alternative is already the consequence
of a determined vision of reality which, apart from social realities, has
elaborated isolated abstractions of which it makes ontological essences
(factors) .... Metaphysics bases all its premises on this problematic" (p. 79).
Here we are precisely at the heart of the contradiction between Balibar
and Poulantzas, on the common terrain inaugurated by Althusser. Balibar
chose the complete autonomy of the movement of the "structure of
structures," of generalized synchrony, with its consequence, rallying around
mechanical causality ("one structure over the other"). Poulantzas, who
cannot resort to this, introduces political struggle as the "motor of history,"
political struggle determined by the totality of the structure, thus by a
plurality of relatively autonomous instances. But are these instances so
different from the "factors" against which Labriola and Kosik polemicize?
In fact, this dilemma ("symptomatic form of ideological questions," said
Althusser) already finds its source in the famous critique of the "simple
reversal of the Hegelian dialectic." In positing reality as a network of
"decentered circles," of autonomous contradictions, For Marx shattered
FROM ALTHUSSERIANISM TO 'REGULATION THEORY' 127
Hegelian and Stalinist mythology, but, failing to put in place an "organizing
subject," Althusser rejoined the worldview of the 18th century: the
kaleidescope of Diderot. For if the circles are decentered, for the
contradictions to condense, it is necessary either for them to be set into
place by pure chance and to be content with a mere "history of
combinations," or to imagine a structure of all structures similar to the
dream of "the single equation" of modem physics, or to reintroduce structure
by means of a subject endowed with the contemporaneity of all instances.
At the heart of classical Althusserianism, the first solution seems to be that
of Althusser, the second the temptation of Balibar, the third describes well
enough the attempt of Poulantzas, with his class-effects of the ensemble of
structures, and their practices which are condensed in the single political
instance.
III. The Regulationist "Surpassing"
When in the first half of the 1970s economists of Marxist inspiration had
to think the crisis, there remained af first, for many of them, to "surpass" the
Althusserian heritage. Approaches in terms of "regulation" have
corresponded, for many among us, to this need. The results have since
mostly been published, and it is not a question of explicating them here. I
nevertheless wish to try to "realign" a bit better these results with their
heritage. To do this, I will resituate the emergence of the regulationist
approaches in the intellectual context of the l970s, and then I will respond
to the notion of "reproduction" as I have extracted it from Balibar, precisely
from economic production.
l. Confronting the Heritage
From the preceding long critical analysis, we can summarize what helped
us and what hindered us in four "main theses."
a) Social reality is a fabric, an articulation of relatively autonomous and
specific relations, overdetermining one another (even if some are more
fundamental than others): an "always already given, overdetermined whole,
in dominance."
b) Each of these social relations is reproduced as a result of the action of its
"bearers" ("structure exists as a result"), in placing the bearers into the
contradictions of reproducing it, independent of their subjectivity.
To these fundamental methodological theses, the school of Althusser
associates, in a more or less contingent or haphazard way, two important
theses for economists:
c) Productive forces themselves are the materialization of social relations of
production (a theme developed by Balibar and Bettelheim).
128 THE ALTHUSSERIAN LEGACY FROM ALTHUSSERIANISM TO 'REGULATION THEORY' 129
d) The contradictory character of the relations of exchange is superficial and The seminal thesis of Michel Aglietta (1974) sacrificed at this altar: it
secondary (a theme affirmed forcefully by Althusser and developed by was necessary to work through hundreds of pages dedicated to the analysis of
Balibar, but rejected by Bettelheim). the labor/capital relations, but fortunately diffracted in a relation of labor
We will not discuss any further the fertility of Thesis (a). Neither will we organization and a relation of distribution of the value added (possession
discuss further the fecundity of Thesis (c), which is subjacent to all our work and proprietorship) before the existence of autonomous capitals would
on Taylorist organization of labor, its crisis and its overcoming. appear. But this "diffraction" sufficed to bring about the contradiction in the
Thesis (b), on the other hand, and Thesis (d), which is basically its reproduction of this complex relation, hence the possibility of crisis, and
corollary and its illustration, constitute the "bad side" of Althusserianism, by hence the problem of regulation. It was time: the crisis of Fordism was about
which it participates in the structuralist hegemony of its epoch which, from to erupt.
Levi-Strauss to Lacan, everywhere pummels the "subject." Individualism, Let us admit: the introduction of the term "regulation" does not at all
the subjectivism of the "captain of industry," for example, finds its first suffice to dissipate the functionalist ambiguities connoted by the term
illustration (and perhaps its economic determinant) in the existence of "reproduction." In some of our formulations, "regulation" is designated
market relations, and in the autonomy of "private labors executed simply "what is needed for reproduction to work however." Evidently, to
independently of one another" and which search after the fact for their explain the crisis we sought to explain what, first of all, was not in crisis,
social validation in Chapter One of Capital. Throwing onto this first Fordism. The "mode of regulation" was hence freed for public diffusion in
chapter the mantle of Noah, Althusser erased in a single stroke the subject, the form of its result, rather than starting with a discussion previous to the
contradiction, and market relations. Developing this idea, Balibar came to "however," to the contradiction and the tendency to crisis (which it has to
deny the existence of structural contradiction at the origin of crises: a inhibit as an unstable result): one can rigorously speak of "functionalism
structure has as its mission to persevere in its being. after the fact."
From here to think that "all is done for this," it was only a short step to
functionalism. This is what Terray (1977) explained quite well: "we have 2. From Reproduction to Regulation
frequently seen the reintroduction, in favor of considerations on We insist on this point: it is apropos of problems of capitalist
reproduction, of the whole out-of-date arsenal of functionalist accumulation that the passage of the notion of reproduction makes way for
interpretations: reproduction is conceived as a final cause from which the that of regulation. Let us return in effect for an instant to the emblematic
ensemble of structures and analyzed institutions proceeds.... To avoid this example of the reproduction of places (capitalist/proletarian) in Balibar's
error, it is necessary to recall first of all that reproduction can only be a goal: reading of Capital. He has clearly underscrored the fact that the circulation
only a subject can propose a goal. Society is not a subject. It is necessary to of merchandise between capitalists and proletarians would result in a
recall above all that what is reproduced is precisely and before everything reproduction of the structure of the wage relation. The conditions of the
else a contradiction .... Consequently, to be placed at the point of view of relation ( and of the circulation it induces) appear in effect identical in
reproduction is definitively to understand how the same cycle of production result:
and distribution constantly replaces in presence the two terms of the
A P ( .. . . M --+ A' . . . . A
contradiction which is the fundamental relation of production: dominant { pl
and dominated, exploiter and exploited; how the first attempts to embellish
the crises to which this contradiction leads so that it could be surmounted or Capitalist Money- Conditions Products Money Money-
resolved, how the second is attached to the contrary, more or less concisely, capital of capital
to abolish or invade it. Reproduction in its totality is at once the stake of production
their confrontation and its result." Proletarian Labour- Money Subsistence Labour-
Retrospectively, we consider the long period of Fordist expansion with - power V goods power
out a crisis "in circulation" to be the most significant part of the function
alist illusion. "Circulationism" was thus one insult in the debates between F V M......F
Marxists (in particular in the critique of Rosa Luxemburg, but also in the
analysis of "center-periphery" relations). It began to be applied to produc Figure 1: Reproduction of the Wage Relation
tion, to labor-capital relations.
130 THE ALTHUSSERIAN LEGACY FROM ALTHUSSERIANISM TO 'REGULATION THEORY' 131
This chart may be read in two ways. Should one be interested in the From these figures, the Althusserians have essentially retained the
reproduction of positions (vertical, synchronic, paradigmatic, harmonic "vertical" dimension (the system of places). It is in' effect sufficient to
readings): consider the first chart "head on" (that is, with time moving towards us) and
not longitudinally (with time from left to right) to obtain the famous "figure
eight" of reproduction:

CAPITALISTS

(
A A'

j}, efilu>tion

F M
Labour market ......._.,_PRODUCTION<Goods market

)
V V

/}, EmE:n;

M
time

Figure 2: The Structure in Time PROLETARIANS

Should one be interested in the trajectory of agents (horizontal, Figure 4: The "Figure Eight"
diachronic, syntagmatic, counterpointed readings):
Seen from this angle, reproduction appears in effect "non-contradictory."
All the work of "regulationists" can thus be understood as a triple effort:
-to show that capitalist reproduction "doesn't run by itself'';
-to show why, for vast periods of time, it is pursued "however";
-to show why, at the end of a certain time, a great crisis erupts.
,,- .... ,, ,-, ,, -,,
These things are known today. First, the simple reality of the market
relation, the uncertainty of the capitalist producer concerning the social

,' -
\;-----,/'\ '/(1 \,--;...
validity of the merchandise offered, introduces a radical dissymmetry
I: -+t-1-
\ -----,L...f-A+--l:-
..,...\ I [/ .\ I between merchandise and money: money is a general "unconditional"
I ,, I I ,' 1 I , equivalent of merchandise; the realization of merchandise in money is on
I ,, I ,, I I , ,- ' l

\,l-?
'-!'/,:-'----L--1:-\-\,+
1
1,-' ' I I ,' I the contrary a "perilous leap, " indicated in Figure 4 by the sign Z,

e-t-,f-----\.....41
..;/ ...
. 1 --; "dangerous turn." The flow of merchandise going out at the northeast end
I \ I of the schema must be correctly proportioned (in volume and value) to the
,
.... _,,
I \
,_.,/ , I
,_ ,,./ demand which is expressed in the southeast loop, but also in the non
-----+----------1-------------.. time represented loops, in particular the "accumulation-investment" loop
(purchase of productive goods by capitalists). The uncertainty in this
subject constitutes the "formal possibility" of crises. Its necessity is
Figure 3: Trajectories introduced by accumulation itself, which tends to inflate the flow coming
132 THE ALTHUSSERIAN LEGACY
out of the northeast, all in containing the growth of the southeast loop.
This contradiction is at the heart of the wage relation. It can be summarized
in one phrase: either the price of exploitation is too high and the crisis of
overproduction threatens, or else it is too low and the crisis of
underinvestment threatens. This price is itself a function on one hand of
the relations of distribution (norms of consumption), and on the other hand
of the transformations in production (norms of production), and in
particular of gains in productivity and changes in the organic composition of
capitals.
A mode of transformation conjoined to and compatible with norms of
production and consumption is called a regime of accumulation. This regime
can be described as the given repetition of the production of sections or
productive branches and of the corresponding demand: what is called
schema of reproduction or macroeconomic structure. We have shown that
the "Fordist" regime could be described as a parallelism of the increase of
productivity, the norm of consumption of wage-workers, and of the
composition of capital. Said another way, it follows a schema of intensive
reproduction with increase of wage-worker consumption such that a parallel
increase occurs in the volume of the net product of Sections I and II, related
_ _
in number to productive wage-workers. This regime of accumulation thus is
_
T _
a kind of "chain"ll of possible capitalist reproduction:
-
[J --_
:
Value added in Sector I
-- --- --
-- -
Value added in Sector II
..........
---
I _ ____ _I ______ -I ---
- -- Purchasing power of salaries
---.....
---t-----4-------+-----+I time
Figure 5: Regime of Accumulation as a Chain
But let us return to Figure L The question is whether to take sriously the
longitudinal dimension of this chart. The agents (capitalists and
proletarians) can be considered the proprietors of "value in process," that is,
of the "flow" of values of respective generic forms:
FROM AL THUSSERIANISM TO 'REGULATION THEORY' 133
...->A->P...M->A'->P...
and ...->F->S->M...F->S...
This concept of "values in process" metamorphosing from form to form is
introduced in the third chapter of Capital and gradually developed through
out Book II. These millions of individual "flows" constitute the thread of
economic reality. In "everyday life" (Alltagsleben) they are even the only
positive reality. At the heart of this tide, the values in process change their
forms, as is seen developing in time in Figure 4, the "figure eight." In reality,
the two spirals of this figure are composed of myriads of individual spirals:
the tide. "Ex post," when the regime of accumulation is stabilized, this tide,
in its structure, must fit exactly the proportions repetitively described by the
schema of reproduction.
But "ex ante," the tide is guided by millions of individuals, each respon
sible for "his" value in process, and most particularly the well-named
"captains of industry." To guide themselves, they make use of "maps,"
Representations (DarsteUungen) of their insertion in the tide, and their errors
are sanctioned by slumps or unemployment. Can we then compare
individuals to automatons receiving informational "input" of which the
"output" is behavior conforming to reproduction? By no means.
The possibility of a satisfactory reproduction is only designated by Marx
in the celebrated "schemas of reproduction" and in his reflection on the
"price of production" (Lipietz, 1983). But this possibility does not imply any
guarantee of a happy ending. It suffices that the assumed laws of formation
of wages and nominal profit are not be adapted to the evolution of norms of
production, for imbalances appear. The tide of values in process thus seems
to "overflow" the increase in value of the schema of reproduction, or on the
contrary to prove inferior to the potential increase. In the economic fabric,
wrinkles or holes appear: inflation or overproduction. This then poses the
problem of the adaptation of the tide to the regime, or, to keep the
Smithian metaphor of weaving, the woof to the warp. This adaptation is
the effect of regulation in action, which plays, in the metaphor of weaving,
the role of warps, or the "invisible hand" of Adam Smith.
The whole effort of economic works in terms of regulation, and in
particular of the CEPREMAP report (1977) and its derivatives, has consisted
of showing that this "invisible hand" was not the transhistorical mechanism
of concurrence pure and simple. The mode of regulation includes, among
others, direct and indirect forms of determination of wages, of inter
enterprise concurrence and of increase and self-guidance of values in
process. As the regime of accumulation is itself transformed, great crises can
arise from the inadequacy of the mode of regulation. These great crises (like
the current crisis, or that of the 1930s) are to be distinguished from cyclical
"small crises," _which are the same form of the action of regulation in the
134 THE ALTHUSSERIAN LEGACY
modes called "competitive." As for the "intentionality" of putting in place
an adapted mode of regulation, as in the "monopolist regulation" for the
Fordist regime, we have been able to show that historically the question has
most often been one of "discoveries," which in the thread of time have been
able to be consciously consolidated, by Keynesian theoreticians of Fordist
regulation, by reformist unions, and by governments seeking to preserve
social consensus.
Inversely, to understand how the great crisis of Fordism (for example)
appears, how the "fabric" is torn, implies a double labor. On one hand, at a
profound level, the progressive deformation of the macro-economic structure:
decline of gains in productivity, sluggishness of the organic composition,
increased internationalization. On the other hand, at an "esoteric" level, we
seek to show how socioeconomic actions, in their struggles to "modify the
given," at the very interior of the logic of the model of development, but also
in their efforts to transform it in the name of a "nature" incompatible with
this model, have "accumulated divergences." The unions have sought to
render wage increases more and more automatic, to consolidate the assets of
the welfare state: offensives internal to the model. But workers have resisted
more and more alienating forms of Fordist organization of work. To oppose
these tendencies, entrepeneurs have sought to enlarge the scale of
production, to accelerate automation (a strategy internal to Fordist logic);
but also to transfer production to countries with modes of regulation more
favorable to profit, to distort social legislation by the "dualization" of the
labor market: a form of avoiding by flight the institutionalized Fordist
compromises. "Regulation" has given way to crisis.
The result of these divergent strategies is known. The essential thing is
to understand that it is not a question of a regrettable weakening of
consensus that a b i t of good will would be able to smooth out.
Contradiction is internal to the regime itself.
Conclusion
In France today, Althusser is, as Hegel once was, treated like a "dead
dog." He and his school bear certain responsibilities, deriving from the
structuralist deformation imposed on the reading of Marx. Forgetting the
subject, forgetting contradiction, hypostasis of reproduction: all this
prevents thinking the crisis, thinking the positive value of individualism.
Althusserianism was thus condemned by the 1970s. Unfortunately, those
who today "forget" Althusser in fact "forget" Marx, the existence of
structures of exploitation, the weight of social relations.
I have attempted to show that in "classical Althusserianism" there was
much to save: the irreducible multiplicity of the relations which weave
social reality, overdetermination of these relations, and, for the little which
FROM ALTHUSSERIANISM TO 'REGULATION THEORY' 135
can be taken into consideration about their contradictory character, the
multiplicity of possible conjunctures.
I have recalled that the regulationists began in the school of Althus
serianism in the comprehension of notions such as productive forces, social
formations, state/economic relations.
I undertook to show that the notion of "regulation" literally constituted a
"surpassing" (Aufhebung) of "reproduction": the unity of opposition and
identity at the heart of a contradictory structure, the moment dialectically
opposed to that of "the crisis of the structure." I did it, like Balibar, through
the example of economic reproduction of capitalism. I was equally able to
evoke the regulationist surpassing of the reflections of Poulantzas, which is
beginning today (Jenson, 1988; Lipietz, 1988b).
But I wish to conclude by recalling what remains for me the fundamental
lesson of Althusser: simply the methodological theses 0, 1 and 2. The real
exists independently of our thoughts. The concepts through which we
pretend to know it exist only in our minds. Their adequation to other
practices at the heart of the real is only a matter of pertinence. Or again, as
Umberto Eco, author of The Absent Structure, made the hero of The Name of
the Rose say: "The concepts which we fabricate are only ladders, threads by
which to grasp something. After which, they can be thrown into the fire."
Shall we one day throw into the fire Mode of Production, Reproduction,
Fordism, and Peripheral Fordism? Certainly. But they can be useful in the
meantime.
Translated by Erika Thomas
Notes
1. The works of reference of this "school" are: Aglietta ( 1976), Boyer (1987), Boyer and
Mistral (1978), C.E.P.R.E.M.A.P. (1977), Coriat (1979), Lipietz (1979, 1983, 1985a), which all
make critical reference, implicitly or explicitly (mine in particular) to Althusserian
contributions. An International Congress on Regulation Theory, uniting economists,
geographers and social and political scientists of all continents, was held in June 1988 in
Barcelona. In my contribution ( 1988a) I remarked that Anglo-Saxon geographers making
reference to the "theory of structuration" of Antony Giddens (1984) themselves also practiced a
form of critical Althusserianism.
2. For this I based myself on works (Lipietz and Rouilleault, 1972; Lipietz 1973) representing
my own "rupture with the Father."
3. According to the Althusserian distinction, dialectical materialism is the spontaneous
philosophy of scientists, practitioners of the science of history, i.e., Historical Materialism.
4. Pour Marx (Althusser, 1965), pp. 187 ff. For the remainder of this article the book will
be designated PM.
5. Lire le Capital (Althusser et al., 1965), tome I, pp. 67 ff. For the remainder of this article
the book will be designated LLC.
136 THE ALTHUSSERIAN LEGACY FROM ALTHUSSERIANISM TO 'REGULATION THEORY' 137
6. Innumerable references in PM and LLC: this is the "theoretical anti-humanism" C.E.P.R.E.M.A.P. (1977)
common to all structuralism. Approches de !'inflation: l'example francais, report to CORDES by J.P. Benassy, R. Boyer,
7. Ranciere translates with this single term "Darstellung" and "Vorstellung" in Marx, without R.M. Gelip, A. Lipietz, J. Mistral, J. Munoz, C. Ominami. Paris, mimeo.
inquiring whether they mean exactly the same thing.
8. See especially Balibar (LLC, pp. 214 ff.) and Bettelheim ( 1 970). Coriat, B. (1979)
9. See, for example, Boyer (1986), Lipietz ( 1985b). L'atelier et le chronometre, Bourgeois, Paris.
10. Thus, Glyn et al. ( 1 986) and Lipietz ( 1985a) have analyzed the current crisis as a "crisis
of the Fordist model" (notably in the "relation of possession"), overdetermined by the Delorme, R.; Andre, C. (1983)
contradiction between the more and more internationalized character of production and the L'tat et l'economie, Seuil, Paris.
national character of the mode of regulation. Giddens, A. (1983)
1 1 . See his numerous historical articles, in particular his contribution to the CEPREMAP The Constitution ofSociety, Polity Press.
(1977) report.
12. The concept of the "objective subject" is developed by Kosik (1968). There is a long Glyn, A., et al. ( 1 987)
Marxist tradition that derives ( via Gramsci and Labriola) from the Marx of the 18th Brumaire The Rise and Fall of the Golden Age, WIDER/Oxford University Press.
("Men make history, but on the basis of given conditions") and above all the Third Thesis on
Feuerbach. These two theses of Marx are the point of departure reclaimed by the "theory of Jenson, J. (1988)
structuration" of Giddens (1984) and of the "genetic structure" of Bourdieu (1987) as well as my "'Different' but not 'Exceptional': Canada's Permeable Fordism," Canadian Review of
own theory of regulation (1988). Sociology and Anthropology , Special Issue on "Comparative Macrosociology."
Let us remark, for the benefit of Anglo-Saxon feminists, that the generic term "homme" (of
masculine gender) has been monopolized by males in France (the Latin root "vir" existing only Kosik, K. (1968)
in the adjective "virile"), while in English "men" have inversely imposed the genericness of La dialectique du concret, Maspero, Paris.
their name to the entirety of "human beings." It is not as easy to disrort social relations of
gender in the French language as it is in English. As all efforts being made here are bound to Labriola ( 1899)
fail, I keep the masculine to refer to the philosophical concept of "man" (and the feminine for Essais sur la conception materialiste de l' histoire, ed. Gordon & Breach, London-Paris, 1980.
that of"nature": all is evidently not neutral).
13. On the "warp/woof duality," see Lipietz (1983, 19866). Leborgne, D., Lipietz, A. ( 1 973)
"L'apres-fordisme et son espace," Les Temps Modemes, April.English translation: Society and
Space, vol. 6, 1988.
Works Cited
Lipietz, A. ( 1973)
Aglietta, M. (1974) "D'Althusser a Mao?," Les Temps Modemes, November.
Accumulation et Regulation du capitalisme en longue periode. Example des Etats-Unis (1870-
1970) , These Paris I, mimeo. Lipietz, A. (1979)
Crise et inflation: pourquoi? F. Maspero, Paris.
Aglietta, M. (1976)
Regulation and Crises ofCapitalism, Calmann-Levy, Paris. English translation: Verso. Lipietz, A. (1983)
Le Monde enchant: de la valeur a l'envol inflationniste. F. Maspero-La Decouverte, Paris.
Althusser, L. (1965) English translation: Verso, London ( 1985).
Pour Marx, F. Maspero, Paris.
Lipietz, A. (1985a)
Miracles et mirages: problemes de l'industralisation dans le Tiers-Monde. La Decouverte, Paris.
Althusser, L. (1970) Enlgish translation: Verso, London ( 1 987).
Lire le Capital, F. Maspero, Paris. Cited according to La Petite Collection Maspero, 4
Volumes. Lipietz, A. (1985b)
"Reflexion autour d'une fable. Pour un statut marxiste des concepts de regulation et
Bettelheim, C. (1970) d'accumulation," Couverture Orange, CEPREMAP no. 8530. English translation: Studies in
Calctd economique et formes de propriete, Seuil-Maspero, Paris. Political Economy, no. 26, 1988.
Bourdieu, P. (1987) Lipietz, A. (1985c)
Choses dites, Minuit, Paris. "Trois crises," contribution to the colloquium The Current Crisis in Relation to Previous
Crises, Binghamton (USA), November, Couverture Orange, CEPREMAP no. 8528.
Boyer, R.; Mistral, J. (1987)
Accumulation, inflation, crises, P.U.F., Paris.
138 THE ALTHUSSERIAN LEGACY
Lipietz, A. (1986a)
"Les conditions de la creation d'un mouvement altematif en France," contribution to the
Colloquium of the Association of Institutional and Political Studies and Research, Les
enjeux institutionnels et politiques de Mars !986, January. English translation: revised version
in Rethinking Marxism.

Lipietz, A. (1986b)
"Aspects seculaires et conjoncturels de !'intervention economique de l'etat," contribution
to the colloquium Estado y Economia, Medellin (Colombia), September, Couverture Orange,
no. 8621 .

Lipietz, A . (1988a)
"La trame, la chaine et la regulatin: un outil pour !es sciences sociales," Congres
intemationale de la Theorie de la Regulation, December, Couverture Orange, CEPREMAP
no. 8816.

Lipietz, A. (1988b)
"Gouvemer l'economie, face aux defis intemationaux: du developpementisme nationaliste a
la crise nationale," contribution to the colloquium In Search of the New France, Brandeis
University (USA), Couverture Orange, CEPREMAP no. 8815.

Lipietz, A. and Rouilleault (1972)

Sur les pratiques et les concepts prospectifs du materialisme historique, D.E. S. Paris I, mimeo.

Mahon, R. (1987)
"From Fordism to New Technologies, Labor Markets and Unions," Economic and Industrial
Democracy, vol. 8, pp. 5-60: Sage, Beverly Hills, CA.

Noel, A. (1988)
"Action collective, partis politiques et relations industrielles: une logique pour l'approche
de la regulation," International Congress on Regulation Theory, Barcelona, June.

Poulantzas, N. (1968)
Pouvoir politique et classes sociales, F. Maspero, Paris (cited according to La Petite Maspero, 2
volumes).

Rey, P. P. (1969)
"Sur !'articulation des modes de production," published in Les alliances de classes , F.
Maspero, Paris.

Terray, E. (1977)
"De !'exploitation. Elements d'un bilan critique," Dialectiques, no. 21.