ABSTRACT
The Regulation school, which originated in France in the 1970s, has analyzed the post1973 world depression and the resultant capitalist restructuring as a product of the breakdown of the postwar “Fordist” regime of capital accumulation.1 According to this school, the long postwar boom in the advanced capitalist countries was generally realized through a Fordist regime of accumulation. In 1920s Henry Ford organized his car factory with a belt conveyer system to increase productivity, paying wages substantially above the social average so as to enable his workers to purchase their products and also to maintain the necessary number of workers for heavy monotonous work. Similarly but in a social scale, the postwar Fordist regime of accumulation realized both increases in labor productivity and roughly proportional increases in real wages. These lay behind the continuously expanding effective demand for consumer durables and other products. Such a regime of accumulation was formed and maintained by a set of institutions and a social consensus concerning the social positions of workers and trade unions as well as the role of the state for Keynesianism and social welfare policies. The social mode of organic regulation including such institutions worked smoothly to foster the Fordist regime of accumulation in the long postwar boom period.
