Escola francesa da regulação, escola da estrutura social de acumulação e as etapas do capitalismo

Abstract

This work aims to understand the origins and transformations of the French regulation school and the social structure of accumulation school, focusing mainly on the changes of the main concepts of the approaches mode of regulation, accumulation regime and social structure of accumulation and the use of these concepts to understand the stages of capitalism. Before these schools, theorists of imperialism and monopoly capitalism elaborated periodizations of capitalism, which would be criticized due to the deterministic and ahistorical character of such theories, which emphasized the changing from competitive to monopoly capitalism, which would be replaced by socialism. The central concepts of the social structure of accumulation school and the regulation approach were developed from mid-1970, to create an intermediate level of analysis between an abstract and general theory of capitalism and the historical and factual realm. Throughout the historical evolution of these approaches, both moved away from theoretical considerations about the fundamental characteristics of the capitalist mode of production and, eventually, adopted pre-theoretical conceptions about these features. That is the reason why the regulation approach and the social structures of accumulation school had problems to understand contemporary capitalism.