Date: 	Thu, 2 Oct 1997 12:23:16 -0800
From: bhandari-AT-yuma.Princeton.EDU (Rakesh Bhandari)
Subject: Re: M-TH: Regulationist readings regularized


I have been reading with interest Bill's post on the regulation school. Not
having read this material for a few years now, I can only express now a
simple uneasiness--that the regulationists, like the Keynesians before
them, remain wedded to the idea of a closed economy whose authorities have
potentially complete control over its economic destiny. That is, as
Keynesian measures may now only encourage capital flight or the stimulation
of demand for foreign products, aren't these schools simply attempting to
reform the project of national steering of the economy?

And to the extent that production and consumption have been globalized,
aren't we being distracted from the reality of an increasingly integrated
world capitalist economy, the growth of which determines in the last
instance the accumulation possibilities of any of its single national or
firm-level parts.

Moreover, aren't these schools simply ignoring the problems of unequal
exchange (in its many forms all of which are continuously accentuated by
devaluations) and repatriated profits--that is, mechanisms by which certain
capitals attempt to pass of the problems of declining profitability at the
level of the system as a whole to weaker parts of it (see Carchedi,
Frontiers of Political Economy).

So, Bill, an invitation to talk about the relationship between capitalism
as a whole and national regulation or social structures. That is, I am not
asking about the possibilites of regulation or new social structures in
South Africa or China but more generally about the dialectic between
(national) part and (global) whole.

Rakesh







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