RE: [OPE] Are Regulation Theorists Marxists?

> sorry for delaying to answer but I was on vacations and Attica is in fire.
 
Hi Stavros:
 
I'm on 'vacation' as well (on the boat) so I perfectly understand. I've
been listening on the radio (no TV on board and only occasional access to the Net
when I'm ashore) to reports about the fires. Hopefully, they have now been
put out. (I've also been thinking lately about what could have been a potential
disaster: Hurricane Bill. The storm, quite literally, has passed, though.)

> In my opinion, and this I suggested in my papers, is that its demise was caused
> for a series of reasons.
> The main is the explanatory deficiencies of 'middle range- theory, its
> confinement to mainly descriptive explanations and its inability to provide
> general analysis. Broadly speaking, 'middle range' theory poses as self-evident
> certain empirical believes (stylised facts) without properly investigating them
> (e.g. mass consumption etc.) and then creates a theory and concepts that
> vindicates these empirical believes. This is a circular reasoning.

Well, have any former regulationists identified this as a reason? Have any
young scholars who were at one time attracted to regulationism identified
this as the reason for their disenchantment?
 
I think that any theory which is disconnected to a mass movement and workers'
struggles will eventually lose appeal and become isolated. It's not an
accident, for instance, that autonomist theory has been popular in recent years:
whatever else one can say about these perspectives, they have been connected
to living, actual struggles and this gives them a certain amount of vitality,
imo. Stepping back a step, I think it's the case that radical theory tends
to spread largely as a consequence of a period of radicalization: thus, most
of the radical theorists of today were 'products' of the radicalization of the 60's
and early 70's. An interesting question becomes: when a radicalization ends
what allows one perspective to continue to be popular while others fade away?
 
In solidarity, Jerry_______________________________________________
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Received on Mon Aug 24 11:04:21 2009