Revisiting the regulation approach: Critical reflections on the contradictions,dilemmas,fixes and crisis dynamics of growth regimes

Introduction

The basic features of the capitalist mode of production (CMP) and its nature as a distinctive ensemble of objects of régulation/governance are such that neither capital as a whole nor the capital-labour relation on which its contradictory and conflictual dynamic depends can be reproduced purely through market relations (Box 1). What most distinguishes capitalism from other forms of producing wealth is its treatment of labour-power as if it were a commodity. In short, the appropriation of surplus labour takes the form of exchange. This turns the labour market and labour process into sites of class struggle between capital and workers. This economic class struggle is overdetermined, of course, by juridico-political and ideological structures and struggles, the complexity of class relations in actually existing social formations, and the intersection of class with other social categories. Class struggle and competition are significant sources of capitalism’s open-ended dynamic, and underpin the differential accumulation that reflects the ability of some capitals to grow through market and non-market means faster than others (or at least to suffer less in cyclical downturns and/or in periods of crisis). While the generalisation of the commodity form to labour-power is peculiar to capitalism, there are three other key categories of fictitious commodity: land (or nature); money; and knowledge, with corresponding forms of revenue (rent, interest, royalties) (on degrees and forms of commodification, see Jessop 2007). The relative weight of these fictitious commodities is one way (among others) to distinguish different stages of capitalism, different regimes of accumulation, and different modes of competition within the overall framework of the world market, which is the ultimate horizon of differential accumulation. Thus one might compare rentier extractive economies, regimes based mainly on absolute surplus-value, finance-led economies, and knowledge-based economies.

Renewing the Parisian regulation approach

I now draw on these arguments to reinvigorate the early Parisian work that explored how the inherent contradictions of the capital relation were regulated through specific structural forms and institutionalised compromises in different stages of capitalism. Early studies decomposed the capital relation into a series of structural forms, each of which has its own characteristic contradictions and dilemmas, requiring specific forms of regulation. These are conventionally described as the wage relation (individual and social wage, wage form, lifestyle); the enterprise form and competition (internal organisation, source of profits, forms of competition, ties among enterprises and/or banks); money and credit (form and emission, banking and credit systems, allocation of capital to production, national currencies and world monies, and monetary regimes); the state (institutionalised compromise between capital and labour, forms of state intervention); and international regimes (trade, investment, monetary, and political arrangements that link national economies, nation states, and world system). The choice of these forms probably reflects the institutional configuration of Atlantic Fordism in a specific world-historical context rather than a generic set of forms applicable to all accumulation regimes (Röttger 2003). This is why it is better to premise comparative analysis on the inherent contradictions of the capital relation rather than take for granted the features of a particular growth regime. This makes it easier to distinguish the specific institutional configurations corresponding to other growth regimes, especially where they involve strong elements of political capitalism (Weber 2009).

Petit has argued that one structural form will predominate in each period or accumulation regime and shape its institutional dynamics (1999). Translating this proposal into the terminology suggested above, we could say that the dominant structural form is the one linked to the principal contradiction in a given period or regime. I propose that one way to distinguish modes of growth is in terms of how they handle contradictions and dilemmas in terms of the four above-mentioned methods. Thus one can study their principal contradictions and their primary and secondary aspects when they are en régulation, how this configuration displaces and/or defers for a while the inherent contradictions of the capital relation and, indeed, contributes to the typical crisis-tendencies of a given mode of growth, and how the primary and secondary aspects of contradictions and the overall hierarchy of contradictions change when a mode of growth is in crisis. A useful insight here is Boyer’s distinction between stable and transitional periods. In periods en régulation, the dominant institutional form is the one that constrains the covariation of other institutional forms and thereby secures their complementarity or coherence. For Fordism, he claims, this was the wage-labour nexus. In transition periods, however, the dominant structural form is the one that imposes its logic on the others – without this ensuring coherence among all five institutional forms, at least in the short-term (2000: 291). He suggests that, ‘in the 1990s, finance appeared to govern the dynamics of other institutional forms’ (Boyer, 2002b: 320) and, indeed, that a deregulated, internationalised and hyper-innovative financial system had destabilising effects on other structural forms (Boyer 2002b, 2004, 2012).

Drawing on these arguments, I further suggest that, whereas the economic dynamic of periods of stability rests on complementary institutional hierarchies and institutionalised compromise, periods of instability involve disruptive institutional hierarchies and struggles to roll back past compromises and establish new ones. In both cases, thanks to the presence of multiple contradictions and dilemmas, agents are forced, nolens volens, to prioritise some over others. This is not a neutral technical matter but is essentially political and typically contested. This is especially evident in periods of economic crisis, which provoke restructuring through the normal working of market forces as well as through more deliberate, typically contested attempts to restore the conditions for differential accumulation, often through institutional innovation and efforts to modify the balance of forces. This may include changes in the priority of opposing aspects of a contradiction as the previously secondary aspect becomes more urgent and/or in the sites and scales on which contradictions are handled and dilemmas are juggled. These issues become even clearer when there is a crisis of crisis-management, i.e. when conventional ways of dealing with crisis no longer work well, if at all. And this holds particularly when it is the dominant contradiction that generates the most severe challenges and destabilising, disorienting effects. This will vary with the accumulation regime and its mode of regulation and the shifting conjunctures of a variegated world market.

Althusser claims, rather dramatically, that contradictions have three forms of existence: ‘non-antagonism’, ‘antagonism’, and ‘explosion’ (Althusser 1965). Utilising the strategic-relational approach (see Jessop, 2007), we can reinterpret this claim as follows. Non-antagonism exists when there is a relatively stable institutional and spatio-temporal fix associated with a hegemonic economic imaginary and institutionalised compromise within a given time–space envelope. Antagonism occurs when contradictions and crisis tendencies can no longer be managed, displaced or deferred, with the result that growth cannot be renewed within the usual parameters, producing a crisis of crisis-management that provokes struggles over how best to reconfigure the contradictions and dilemmas and secure a new unstable equilibrium of compromise. This is especially likely where one of the structural forms operates to destabilise the inherited growth regime. An explosion is an overdetermined ruptural moment that opens the possibilities of radical restructuring on a qualitatively new basis. Whether or not the search for solutions to economic crisis restores the prevailing accumulation regime and its mode of regulation does not depend solely on the objective features of the crisis and the feasibility of resolving it within this framework. It also depends on the institutional, organisational and learning capacities of the social forces seeking to resolve the crisis and on the outcome of the contest to define the nature of the crisis, to explain its various objective causes, to attribute blame for its development, and to identify the most appropriate solutions.

Atlantic Fordism

I now illustrate these arguments from Atlantic Fordism. The fix associated with Atlantic Fordism can be analysed in terms of the hierarchisation, prioritisation, spatialisation, and temporalisation of its basic contradictions, thereby securing the conditions for its dominance in Fordist social formations and giving the appearance that contradictions had been harmonised, social conflict moderated, and the conditions for permanent prosperity established. Crucial here was a spatio-territorial matrix based on the socially constructed congruence between national economy, national state, national citizenship embracing social as well as civic and political rights, and national society; and the consolidation of institutions relatively well adapted to the twin challenges of securing full employment and economic growth and managing national electoral cycles. The dominant (or principal) structural forms (with their associated contradictions and dilemmas) around which this specific resolution was organised in and through the KWNS were the wage and money forms. Whereas Petit (1999) and Boyer (2000) focused on the wage-nexus, Aglietta also regarded the money constraint as important (see Aglietta 1979, 1986).

In my account, whether Fordism was en régulation or in crisis, the wage-nexus and money form were joint sites of dominant contradictions. On this assumption, Table 1 presents an ideal-typical configuration of this growth regime en régulation and also provides a reference point for studying its crisis-tendencies. This and later tables focus on four structural forms and deal with international regimes in terms of the spatio-temporal aspects of the embedding of each form. This reflects my view that international regimes are closely tied to the other four forms and should be studied in these terms rather than presented as a separate structural form.

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Table 1.

Atlantic Fordism en régulation

Basic form	Primary aspect	Secondary aspect	Institutional fixes	Spatio-temporal fixes
(Social) wage (1)	Source of domestic demand (2)	Cost of production (3)	Keynesian welfare + rising productivity	Creation of national economies
Money (1)	National money (2)	International currencey (3)	Keynesianism + capital controls + Bretton Woods & role of USD	Managing uneven development and international relations
State (2)	Social cohesion in national societies (3)	Economic Intervention (4)	Welfare state + spatial planning	National state and local relays
Capital (2)	Stock of assets that must be used profitably in given timeplace (3)	Mobile money capital in search of most profitable investment sites (4)	Reinvested Fordist profits + financing of consumption	Atlantic Fordist circuits in embedded liberalism
KEY	(1)	Principal (or dominant) structural form	(2)	Secondary structural form
	(2)	Primary aspect of principal form	(3)	Secondary aspect of principal form
	(3)	Principal aspect of secondary form	(4)	Secondary aspect of secondary form

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Table 2.

Atlantic Fordist crisis

Basic form	Primary aspect	Secondary aspect	Institutional fixes	Spatio-temporal fixes
(Social) wage (1)	Cost of international production (2)	Source of domestic demand (3)	Internationalisation inverts role of (social) wage	Crisis of national crisis management
Money (1)	International currency (2)	National money (3)	Breakdown of Bretton Woods, change in USD	Crisis in international regimes
State (2)	Social exclusion, rise of new social movements (3)	Rise in economic intervention to manage crises (4)	Fiscal rationality, legitimacy, and hegemonic crises	Declining power of national states
Capital (2)	Mobile money capital in search of most profitable site of investment (3)	Productive capital integrated into changing global division of labour (4)	Disruption of Fordist circuits due to neoliberal globalisation	Crisis of Atlantic Fordism, rise of East Asia, then of ‘BRIC’ powers

The primary aspect of the wage form was its role as a source of domestic demand rather than as a cost of international production. This reflected a context where full employment levels of demand served the interests of industrial capital as well as the Fordist labour force (especially semi-skilled male wage-earners). Although Keynesian fine-turning contributed at best modestly – and often counter-productively – to achieving this goal, the principal foundation was the virtuous circle of mass production and mass consumption reinforced by the Keynesian welfare national state. Wages as a cost of international production were secondary because of the relative closure of national economies and the capacity to live economically and politically with modest inflation, and to resort to modest devaluations to protect full employment levels of demand. The state was permissive towards wage costs as long as they rose in line with productivity and prices. This was relatively easy to achieve in the 1950s and early 1960s, as Fordist firms and branches expanded thanks to their economies of scale and collective bargaining operated within the Fordist class compromise. Labour market pressures were also alleviated in this period by processes such as the transfer of workers from low productivity agriculture, the mobilisation of women into the labour force and, later, state support for responsible trade unionism, collective bargaining, industrial modernisation, the consolidation of big business, and forms of corporatism.

The primary aspect of the money form in most Fordist regimes was its character as national credit money. The development of adequate national, macroeconomic statistics and the steady expansion of the peacetime state budget gave the KWNS considerable leverage in fiscal and monetary terms to steer the economy. Private debt also played a major role in the post-war boom by financing fixed investment and working capital as well as by funding the growth of mass consumption. In turn, lubricated by public and private credit, growth helped to legitimate Keynesian welfare policies, and to generate the tax revenues for collective consumption, welfare rights and social redistribution, as well as for infrastructure provision. It also helped to consolidate a social basis for the Fordist accumulation regime based on a class compromise between industrial capital and organised labour.

Thus, in the expansion phase of Atlantic Fordism, the role of money as an international currency was secondary. This aspect was managed through the embedding of Atlantic Fordism in the Bretton Woods monetary and GATT trade regimes. Most national economies were more closed on their capital than trade accounts, with national states enjoying effective capital controls, fixed but adjustable exchange rates, and significant and legitimate trade controls in place or to hand. Thus economic policy adjustment and intervention were more oriented to economic growth and full employment than to defence of a fixed exchange rate. This was gradually undermined, however, as increasing flows of stateless money and near-money instruments induced national governments, reluctantly or willingly, to abandon capital controls and adopt a floating exchange-rate system. The USA was a partial exception because its national money was the hegemonic international currency. Initially beneficial during its expansion phase, this later became another source of instability and crisis for Atlantic Fordism.

Finally, we should note that some costs of the Fordist compromise and the KWNS were borne inside Fordist societies by the relative decline of agriculture, the traditional petite bourgeoisie and small and medium firms; by the decline of cities, regions and sectors that could find no competitive role in the Fordist circuits; by workers in the disadvantaged parts of segmented labour markets; and, especially in liberal welfare regimes, by women subject to the dual burden of paid and domestic labour. One of the mechanisms for deferring the contradictions of Atlantic Fordism and the KWNS and redistributing their costs was inflation. Based on the capacity of banks and the state to expand credit, inflation served to (pseudo-)validate otherwise unprofitable production and to maintain high levels of capacity utilisation and employment (Lipietz 1985). Provided that all the relevant economies had similar mild rates of inflation or that higher inflation economies could engage in occasional modest devaluations, this did not hinder integration of the Atlantic Fordist circuits (Aglietta 1982). It did produce problems later in the form of stagflation and, throughout this period, it had significant redistributive effects in class, sectoral, and regional terms, favouring big capital in particular (Galbraith 1967). Other costs were borne by economic and political spaces tied to international regimes (such as those for cheap oil or migrant labour) necessary to Atlantic Fordism’s continued growth but not included in the Fordist compromise. This regime gained from a Janus-faced temporal fix. For while it depended on accelerated (and unsustainable) exploitation of nature (especially raw materials and non-renewable resources laid down over millennia, such as fossil fuels), it also produced environmental pollution and social problems that remained largely unaddressed. Increasing difficulties in maintaining this institutional and spatio-temporal fix prompted attempts to challenge the institutionalised compromises on which it rested.

The crisis of the Atlantic Fordist growth regime emerged when internationalisation and other spatio-temporal changes inverted the primary and secondary aspects of the dominant contradictions, undermining the corresponding institutional and spatio-temporal fixes. This disorganised the typical configuration of Atlantic Fordism and triggered struggles to introduce a new growth regime (or regimes). The table for Atlantic Fordism in crisis uses the same grid as that for this regime when it is en régulation; but the content of every cell has been changed to reflect the inversion of the primary and secondary aspects of the dominant contradictions, the factors that contributed to the crisis, and the repercussions of the growing unsustainability of the institutional and spatio-temporal fixes that supported Atlantic Fordism in its heyday. Considerations of space prevent a full discussion of all these features, but they are taken up in the ensuing discussion of two major alternatives proposed as successor regimes to the Fordist growth regime. (For more detail on the crisis itself and initial responses thereto, see de Vroey 1983; Jessop 2002.)

Two post-Fordist growth regimes

While the economic crises affecting Atlantic Fordist economies had many similarities, they were not identical and were also resolved in different ways. Sometimes they were managed largely as crises in Atlantic Fordism, sometimes as crises of Atlantic Fordism (Jessop 2002). Many alternative growth scenarios were proposed during the crisis in/of Atlantic Fordism (for a partial survey, see Boyer 2002a), many of which were short-lived. As Petit (1999) notes, post-Fordist regimes are linked to the dominance of other structural forms from those found in Fordism. It is highly improbable that a regime in crisis can be re-stabilised simply by refocusing régulation-cum-governance from one pole of the dominant contradiction(s) to the other because, as I noted above, all the basic contradictions are interdependent. It follows that new configurations with different institutional and spatio-temporal fixes are required if capital accumulation is to be renewed. One alternative, which appeared to become the hegemonic economic imaginary for the after-Fordist epoch, was the (globalising) knowledge-based economy (KBE). This was strongly promoted by the OECD and productive capital (Jessop 2002). Another alternative was finance-led (or, better, finance-dominated) accumulation, reflecting the interests of money capital. This prevailed in the leading liberal market economies and, through its promotion under the Washington Consensus and its destabilising effects elsewhere, shaped differential accumulation on a world scale. Even in crisis, thanks to the continued dominance of the transnational power bloc that supports it, this finance-dominated model continues to destabilise growth regimes in many regions.

In contrast to Atlantic Fordism, the two principal (or dominant) structural forms in the KBE are capital and competition. The primary aspect of capital is the valorisation of the general intellect in the form of knowledge- and design-intensive commodities (real or fictitious). It involves the production, management, distribution and use of knowledge as a key driver of economic growth, wealth generation, and job creation across the private, public, and ‘third’ sectors. In a true KBE, it is suggested, knowledge is applied reflexively to the production of knowledge and most sectors tend to become more knowledge-intensive. As such, it could potentially help to reduce socially necessary labour time, socially necessary turnover time, and, through bio-technology, naturally necessary reproduction times. KBE discourse can be translated into many visions and strategies (e.g. smart machines, expert systems, knowledge transfer, creative industries, intellectual property rights, lifelong learning, e-government, smart weapons, the information society, and cybercommunity). It can also be pursued at many scales (firms, organisations, cities, regions, nations, supra-national regions, transnational institutions, etc.). While it tends to favour productive over money capital, it has sometimes been inflected in a neoliberal manner that highlights the role of market forces as the driving force behind innovation.

Table 3 depicts the institutional-spatio-temporal fix of an ideal-typical KBE mode of growth with its principal structural forms and complementary forms, if it is be en régulation. Moreover, because knowledge is a fictitious commodity that depends for its valorisation on a broad range of extra-economic supports, there are limits to its commodification, and this indicates that an effective fix depends on embedding the KBE in a multi-scalar knowledge society (Jessop 2007a; cf. Polanyi 1957, on market economy and market society). A suitable state form for this accumulation regime is the Schumpeterian workfare post-national regime in so far as this fits an innovation-led, flexicurity oriented, multi-scalar and governance-based mode of growth (for details, see Jessop 2002). Note that this table rests on a thought experiment, because most examples of the KBE are local, regional, or based on specific global networks rather than being truly national, supranational, or global.

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Table 3.

Knowledge-based economy

Basic form	Primary aspect	Secondary aspect	Institutional fixes	Spatio-temporal fixes
Capital (1)	Valorise design- and knowledge intensive capital (2)	Capital as intellectual property (3)	Competition state plus moderate IPR regimes	Knowledge-intensive clusters, cities, regions
Form of Competition (1)	Innovation-led, Schumpeterian competition (2)	‘Race to bottom’ + effects of creative destruction (3)	Wider and deeper global investment, trade, IPR regimes	Complex + multi-spatial with local and regional forms
(Social) wage Relation (2)	Production cost (for mental as well as manual labour) (3)	Source of local or regional demand (hence flexible) (4)	Flexicurity aids demand and global competitiveness	Controlled labour mobility, globalised division of labour
State (2)	Competition state for innovation-led growth (3)	‘Third Way’ policies to cope with new social exclusion(s) (4)	Schumpeterian workfare post-national regime	Multi-scalar meta-governance (e.g. EU type ‘OMC’)

Another post-Fordist growth regime is finance-dominated accumulation (see Table 4). This is not a simple inversion of Fordism because it involves different principal contradictions as well as different institutional and spatio-temporal fixes. The principal (or dominant) structural forms of finance-dominated accumulation are money and the (social) wage relation; the others are subordinated to these in potentially destabilising ways – as the genesis and repercussions of the North Atlantic financial crisis have amply demonstrated. This regime gained increasing influence in the variegated world market through the disembedding of financial capital and the importance of neoliberalism as the driving force in world market integration (Jessop 2009). The continuing efforts to revive this model tell us something about the limits of the regulation approach in so far as it ignores the broader dynamics of class domination, the ability of those with power not to have to learn from their mistakes, and the growing turn to authoritarian statism and, indeed, repressive measures to maintain class power (on this see, for example, Duménil and Lévy 2004, 2011; Harvey 2005; Lapavitsas 2011).

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Table 4.

Finance-dominated accumulation en régulation?

Basic form	Primary aspect	Secondary aspect	Institutional fixes	Spatio-temporal fixes
Capital (1)	Fast, hypermobile money as general form (+ derivatives) (2)	Valorisation of capital as fixed asset in global division of labour (3)	De-regulation of financial markets, state targets price stability, not jobs	No national or regional state controls; grab future values
(Social) wage (1)	Private wage plus credit as demand source (privatised Keynesianism) (2)	Reduce residual social wage as global production cost (3)	Numerical + time flexibility; new forms of credit for households	War for talents + race to bottom for most workers and ‘squeezed middle’
State (2)	Neoliberal policies with ordo-liberal constitution (3)	Flanking plus disciplinary measures (4)	Free market plus authoritarian ‘strong state’	Intensifies uneven development at many sites + scales
Global regime (2)	Create open space of flows for all forms of capital (3)	Moderate uneven growth, adapt to rising economies (4)	Washington Consensus regimes	Core-periphery tied to US power, its allies and relays

The primary aspect of money (as capital) in the finance-dominated regime is (world) money as the most abstract expression of capital and its disembedding in a space of flows (in contrast to the more territorial logic of Atlantic Fordism or a productivist KBE). The primary aspect of the (social) wage is its privatisation or recommodification, including private consumer credit. The secondary aspect of money (real assets) was secured through the neoliberal policy boost to post-tax profits – that was not always reflected, however, in productive in productive investment in financialised neoliberal regimes. Indeed, the neoliberal bias towards de-regulation also creates the basis for an institutional fix that relies on ‘unusual deals with political authority’, predatory capitalism, and reckless speculation – all of which has helped to fuel the global financial crisis. An ordo-liberal framework would have provided a more appropriate institutional and spatio-temporal fix, including the embedding of neoliberalism internationally in a new, disciplinary constitutionalism and new ethicalism (Gill 1995; Sum 2010). The secondary aspect of the wage form involves cutbacks in the residual social wage, resulting in a lean welfare state.

Separately and together, neoliberal measures (such as liberalisation, de-regulation, privatisation, the use of market proxies in the residual state sector, internationalisation and the lowering of direct taxes) privilege value in motion, the treatment of workers as disposable and substitutable factors of production, the wage as a cost of (international) production, money as international currency (especially due to the increased importance of derivatives), nature as a commodity, and knowledge as intellectual property. World market integration enhances capital’s capacity to defer and/or displace its internal contradictions by increasing the global scope of its operations, by reinforcing its capacities to disembed certain of its operations from local material, social, and spatio-temporal constraints, by enabling it to deepen the spatial and scalar divisions of labour, by creating more opportunities for moving up, down, and across scales, by commodifying and securitising the future, and re-articulating time horizons. This helps to free monetary accumulation from extra-economic and spatio-temporal constraints, increases the emphasis on speed, acceleration, and turnover time, and enhances capital’s capacity to escape the control of other systems in so far as these are still territorially differentiated and fragmented. This disembedding from the frictions of national power containers intensifies the influence of the logic of capital on a global scale, as the global operation of the law of value commensurates local conditions at the same time as it promotes the treadmill search for superprofits. Supported by a stress on shareholder value, this particularly benefits hypermobile financial capital, which controls the most liquid, abstract, and generalised resource and has become the most integrated fraction of capital, and enhances its abilities to displace and defer problems onto other economic actors and interests, other systems, and the natural environment.

In the short-term, financial accumulation depends on pseudo-validation of highly leveraged debt, but finance capital (let alone capital in general) cannot escape its long-term material dependence on the need for surplus-value to be produced before it can be realised and distributed. Nor can it escape its material dependence in this regard on the existence and performance of other institutional orders (e.g. protection of property rights and contracts, basic education, effective legislation, scientific discoveries). And, of course, it always remains a prisoner of its own crisis tendencies.

The overaccumulation of financial capital enabled by its dissociation from, and indifference to, other moments of the capital relation was a crucial factor contributing to the eventual bursting of financial bubbles around the world. But the crisis has a specific form due to the hyper-financialisation of advanced neoliberal economies and, in particular and most immediately, practices of de-regulated, opaque, and sometimes fraudulent financial institutions that still benefit from a corrupt relation with political authority. These features reflect the hybrid nature of finance-dominated accumulation through its articulation with a predatory and parasitic political capitalism. Overall, the hierarchy of structural forms in this regime is generating an epic recession, and perhaps eventually, another great depression, which is based on the vicious interaction between debt, default, and deflation (Rasmus 2010).

Although I have presented the KBE and finance-dominated accumulation as if they were simple alternatives, they actually co-existed as competing accumulation strategies in the same economic spaces and/or in closely connected economic spaces within a variegated world market. This could itself have caused additional problems because it made it less likely that either growth regime would be stable compared to the golden years of Atlantic Fordism, since their co-existence made it correspondingly harder to secure their respective forms of embedding.

Beyond finance-dominated accumulation?

The global financial crisis removed the issues associated with the ‘triple crisis’ – the environmental, food and fuel crises – from the mainstream policy agenda. While the immediate response was the rescue of ‘too big to fail’ and ‘too interconnected to fail’ financial institutions, one medium-term response has been to re-emphasise the need for renewed growth. The contradictions involved in fiscal consolidation are producing a double dip recession for workers (the ‘middle class’ as well as manual workers) because of its one-sided emphasis on the social wage as a cost of production and on public debt as a deduction from profits. Nonetheless, the global environmental crisis has risen up the policy agenda at the margins in the guise of promoting a ‘Green New Deal’ (GND) or, more radically, a ‘no-growth’ or ‘de-growth’ regime as a longer-term strategy aimed at resolving the triple crisis. (For further discussion, see Jessop 2012.)

The GND can be seen in part as an extension of the 1980s-1990s KBE paradigm – one that was sidelined but not negated by the rise of finance-dominated accumulation. The very fuzziness of the slogan has helped to build alliances and compromises around what is allegedly capital’s best hope to create jobs, restore growth and save the earth. To date, the GND has been translated into many different visions and strategies and can be inflected in neoliberal, neo-corporatist, neo-statist and neo-communitarian ways by prioritising, respectively, market incentives, social partnership, societal steering and solidarity. This provides one basis for recuperating and normalising the GND and, indeed, re-contextualising and re-appropriating it on neoliberal lines (e.g. cap and trade) so that it no longer challenges the economic logic that created the triple crisis. This is seen in proposals to commodify nature’s labour power, e.g. its role in carbon sequestration, maintaining biodiversity, and limiting the effects of ‘natural’ (but often in part anthropogenic) disasters. If this route is taken, the incompressible contradictions of capital accumulation will be generalised even further.

Finally (for the moment), the GND risks becoming part of a new imperial strategy whereby the ‘North’ maintains the living standards essential for its class compromises by paying for slower growth in the ‘dependent south’, with disastrous repercussions on food and fuel costs and an increased likelihood of riots and revolutionary movements. To escape this development requires a critique of political ecology to match Marx’s critique of political economy and to match the dimensions of the crisis and, although authors such as Altvater (1993), Burkett (1999, 2006) and Foster (2000) have shown that this is feasible, the task is truly urgent. In general, in contrast to solutions that promote renewed growth in some form as the exit strategy from the current financial and sovereign debt crises (and their debt-deflation-default deleveraging dynamics), a deep green new deal implies quantitative restraints on growth; a transformation in the quality of growth; and geographic, social, and intergenerational redistribution of growth. This also implies the rebalancing of growth across the global North versus global South divide.

Table 5 presents the matrix for this sort of ‘no-growth’ strategy based on institutional and spatio-temporal fixes that support a solidarity economy. But the form and content of this matrix clearly push at the limits of the proposed analytical approach because it stretches the meaning of the economic categories (structural forms) studied in regulationist analyses of the capital relation. Indeed, it is the deeply rooted nature of these categories that make it so hard, theoretically and practically, to think outside the capitalist ‘box’. This in turn makes it relatively easy for the logic of capital to reassert itself, especially when so many vested interests are committed to this happening.

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Table 5.

The no-growth economy

Basic form	Primary aspect	Secondary aspect	Institutional fixes	Spatio-temporal fixes
‘Capital’ (1)	Low carbon economy (2)	Capital possessed by coops (3)	Solar solidarity economy, oriented to allocative and distributive justice	Local and slow + appropriate glocal redistribution
Enterprise form (1)	Not for profit, innovation-led, Schumpeterian (2)	Solidarity to limit ‘race to bottom’ and its fallout (3)	Embedded cooperation (cf. Mondragon)	No growth or slow growth
(Social) wage (2)	Source of demand (green recovery) (3)	Reduction of material (esp. carbon) costs (4)	Flexicurity with new work–life balance	Controlled forms of labour mobility tied to global justice
State (2)	Back innovation-led sustainable degrowth (3)	Promotes social economy and fair competition (4)	Communitarian Schumpeterian post-national regime	Multi-scalar metagovernance oriented to glocal justice

Conclusions

My contribution to this special issue of Capital & Class has argued for a return to the insights of some early Parisian regulationist work on the unstable relationship between the basic contradictions of the capital relation and the institutional forms through which they are contingently resolved, always provisionally and partially, for a significant period of time. It has extended this pioneering analysis by identifying some additional contradictions inherent in the capital relation, linking them to corresponding dilemmas, and indicating how accumulation regimes and their modes of growth can be studied in terms of the institutional and spatio-temporal fixes that contribute to their régulation-cum-governance. In particular, four interrelated strategies for handling contradictions were discussed, and I indicated how specific configurations of these strategies can be used to characterise different modes of growth. On this basis, the article sketched four modes of growth, relying in part on a tabular form of summarising the institutional and spatio-temporal fixes associated with each of these regimes. The results presented here are provisional because they derive from work in progress that is part of a bigger project on a cultural political economy of continuing crises of crisis-management in the North Atlantic financial crisis and the difficulties that capital confronts in re-regulating finance-dominated accumulation.

Two (among many possible) issues are worth noting here as a poor substitute for a more extended set of conclusions in what has already been a too brief and dense analysis. First, a systematic concern with multiple, overdetermined contradictions need not lead to structuralist analyses that marginalise social agency: for contradictions entail dilemmas that open space, practically as well as theoretically, for agents, their strategic choices, and the changing balance of forces to make a difference to the course of accumulation. This invites a far more detailed analysis of economic (and ecological) imaginaries, accumulation strategies, state projects and hegemonic visions and their role in the régulation-cum-governance of the contradictions, dilemmas, and antagonisms of the capital relation. Second, assuming that the world market is both the presupposition and the posit (result) of capital accumulation, and that the integration of the world market generalises and intensifies its contradictions (Jessop 2010, 2011), it is especially important to look beyond national-territorial boundaries in examining the institutional and spatio-temporal fixes that contribute to the provisional, partial, and temporary stabilisation of the capital relation. If the world market is the ultimate horizon of capital accumulation and of capitalist strategies, then our analyses must take account of this too without falling back on some abstract, trans-historical logic of a capitalist world system. The approach suggested here is a modest contribution to this far broader project.