The Parisian Regulation Approach, Crises of Capitalism, and a Critique

This work consists of two parts. The first part focuses on some of the early texts of the PRA to understand the approach’s analysis of capitalism and its crises. This is done through the analysis of the main concepts developed by the contributors to the approach. Regime of accumulation, mode of regulation, and mode of development are three important interrelated concepts that occupy a central place in the conceptual apparatus of the approach. One of the defining properties of the approach is its formulation of accumulation crisis. Particularly, the crisis is not a recurrent manifestation of the same underlying problem in the economy. It is, instead, the overdetermined result of the contained contradictions of the configuration of the social relations in and the processes of the capitalist economy. The second part of the work focuses on a notion of a particular tendency (overaccumulation of capital) utilized by Michel Aglietta and modified/formulated later on by Simon Clarke and David Harvey. This part traces the path of the notion among the works of these scholars and compares them. A critique of later formulations is offered from a perspective that we acquired from the PRA.