Michel Aglietta

Michel aglietta figured for over half a century as one of the most radically original thinkers within French political economy. His groundbreaking analysis of the crisis of America’s Fordist regime in the 1970s provided the founding concepts for the rich body of work that would become known as the Regulation School.footnote¹ Without ever abandoning this starting point, he went on to make a series of wide-ranging contributions on the theory of money, the role of finance, the vicissitudes of the European Monetary Union, the singularity of China’s role within contemporary world capitalism and the fate of human societies in the age of the Capitalocene. His intelligence and savoir faire allowed him to navigate between very different circles—economic theorists, French policymakers, financiers and asset managers, radical intellectuals—deploying sophisticated social theory, technical modelling and precisely informed conjunctural analysis. At the same time, he was running his late father’s construction company in the ancient Alpine city of Chambéry, in southeastern France.

Author of some twenty books, many of them co-written with younger colleagues, Aglietta was always eager to present his ideas and, despite a distinctly solitary streak, genuinely curious about other scholars’ research. As well as leading many of the path-breaking seminars that were at the heart of the Regulation School’s approach, he occupied numerous high-level advisory positions at the intersection of policy and research. As a student trained in political economy by regulationist scholars at the ehess in Paris in the late 1990s, I had the good fortune to interact with him on multiple occasions over the years. A very accessible person and generously supportive of his young colleagues, he was laser-focused in debates and categorical in his conclusions. His death on 24 April 2025 deprives the European intellectual world of a tireless thinker, committed to the proposition that we should aim to comprehend our changing historical times in their totality, which meant grasping the inter-relationships of their many moving parts.

From plan to system

Aglietta was born in Chambéry in 1938, the only child of a family of Italian descent, his father a bricklayer who went on to found his own firm.footnote² The son’s trajectory exemplified the republican meritocracy of the post-war era. In 1959, after preparatory classes at the Lycée du Parc in Lyon, he entered the École Polytechnique, pinnacle of the French education system, which trained a technical elite to serve at the highest levels of the public administration through a thorough immersion in the humanities and sciences, as well as military affairs. In 1961–62, Aglietta’s student life in the Latin Quarter was interrupted by a year’s military service in Algeria, where as an officer cadet he was traumatized to witness the French atrocities in Kabylia. The war had a radicalizing effect, reinforced on his return to Paris by hearing Sartre lecture on intellectuals’ responsibility to oppose it.footnote³ For a while he drew close to fellow thinkers in the French Communist Party, where a friend from the École Polytechnique, Philippe Herzog, led the debates on economics. Though he gained a thorough education in Marx, Aglietta was never a party militant per se. But he remained a committed intellectual in the Sartrean sense all his life.

It was in this spirit that he began, in 1964, a rigorous training in the Programme Division of insee, the national statistical institute, as part of the team responsible for producing five-year forecasts for the French planning commission. The Plan, as Aglietta liked to note, originated with the National Council of the Resistance; its first Commissioner was Jean Monnet himself, followed by Pierre Massé, one of Aglietta’s teachers at the École Polytechnique, who saw the work of planning as embodying ‘both a method of economic regulation and a humanist viewpoint’—‘a philosophy of political action.’footnote⁴ The Programme Division developed a computerized model, fifi, to integrate physical flows, using data on wages and production, and financial ones—‘an interface between the national statistics, private-sector accounting, economic theory and political strategy’, as insee director Claude Gusson would put it. Aglietta later recalled the debates at the Commission du Plan with nostalgia, as an era when ‘the high servants of the state were competent, had integrity, and were not itching to work in the private sector’, and ‘it was possible to have a rational discussion about the distribution of income and how to regulate it’—‘we had the impression that we knew who and what we were working for.’footnote⁵

fifi’s five-year forecasts were completed in 1968. But for Aglietta, they were already rendered obsolete by the students’ and workers’ uprising that May. The Plan had not reckoned with their discontent, which had notable economic consequences. It was therefore necessary to introduce a social dimension to economic modelling. The following year, Pompidou appointed Giscard d’Estaing as Finance Minister and the work of the Commission was essentially dismantled. Giscard ‘did away with the essence of French planning as an institutionalized space for debate,’ as Aglietta put it.footnote⁶ Rather than resign himself to the coming privatizations, he took up an insee grant to study at Harvard Business School in 1970–72. This was a major epistemological shift which proved enormously fruitful. Aglietta undertook intensive research into the social relations structuring the American economy, studying alongside Kenneth Arrow, Wassily Leontief, Simon Kuznets, James Galbraith, Alfred Chandler and Paul Sweezy.

Back in Paris, Aglietta enrolled in a PhD programme at the Sorbonne to write up his research, under the supervision of his former École Polytechnique teacher, Raymond Barre, who was himself just back from a stint in Brussels heading the economy and finance division of the European Commission. But Aglietta’s real interlocutors were the group of young intellectuals, friends and fellow thinkers spanning insee, the Ministry of Finance, the planning commission and the Sorbonne, who joined a monthly seminar to discuss, chapter by chapter, his thesis on the changing capitalist mode of production in the us. Robert Boyer, junior to Aglietta at the École Polytechnique, had just joined cepremap, the mathematical planning department of the Ministry of Finance, having constructed an econometric model of the French economy incorporating a Marxist concept of accumulation and a Kaleckian investment equation. Alain Lipietz, a younger polytechnicien, was also at cepremap. Philippe Herzog was teaching at Nanterre. The discussions around Aglietta’s research were quite an event for Parisian Marxists; the monetary theorist Suzanne de Brunhoff attended his thesis defence. It was this network that formed the basis for the Regulation School, and Aglietta’s thesis, revised and published in 1976 as Régulation et crises du capitalisme, would become its founding text.footnote⁷

America’s capitalist crises

As Mike Davis pointed out, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation, to use the English title, was a difficult book but an important one.footnote⁸ Aglietta set out to provide a rigorous analysis of American capital’s laws of motion, using a theoretical terminology derived from Marx but which he made his own—regimes of accumulation, modes of regulation, structural forms, ‘extensive’ and ‘intensive’ processes of surplus extraction. Regulation theory is sometimes misconstrued in the Anglosphere as a recipe for technocratic manipulation; nothing could be further from the mark. For Aglietta, the ‘mode of regulation’ referred to the overall articulation of institutionalized social relations, or ‘structural forms’, which allowed a new regime of capitalist accumulation to stabilize and continue for a period, until its sharpening contradictions threw it once more into crisis. Regimes of accumulation, meanwhile, involved modes of surplus-value extraction through the labour process, under constant pressure from inter-capitalist competition to increase. Here again, Aglietta followed Marx in distinguishing between an ‘absolute’ and a ‘relative’ increase in surplus extraction: the increase is ‘absolute’ when it involves a simple extension of surplus-labour time, through a longer working day or through speed-up; if productivity is rising through an intensification of the labour process, however, less labour will be needed to produce the same surplus, so any increase can be relative. And for Aglietta, as for Marx, the regime of accumulation involved not only the labour process but, equally important, the forms taken by the social reproduction of labour power outside the workplace—the modes of working-class consumption.

A Theory of Capitalist Regulation distinguished five different periods in the history of American industrial capitalism. First was ‘frontier capitalism’, hegemonic from the ante-bellum period though to the crisis of 1873, under which the structural preconditions for industrialization beyond the textile sector were set in place. This was an ‘extensive’ regime of accumulation, based on the continent’s huge reserves of free land; its ‘structural forms’ included the annexations of the 1846 Mexican War, the discovery of gold, mass British and German immigration and the opening of prairie agriculture to meet industrializing Europe’s demand for grain. The next period, 1873–1919, saw a mixed regime: on the one hand, waves of ‘intensive’ industrial accumulation through the expansion of iron and steel, closing the frontier with the railroad to the Pacific; on the other, social reproduction was still largely based on pre-capitalist domestic labour and—in the misery of the industrial slums—low levels of working-class consumption. During the third period, 1919–45, this mode of regulation was plunged into a series of crises and epic labour struggles, which produced a new regime of accumulation: Fordism.

Fordism is usually understood as a simultaneous, mutually reinforcing expansion of supply and demand: Henry Ford paying his assembly-line workers five dollars a day so that they could afford to buy the Model-Ts they were turning out. But historically, Aglietta showed, the Fordist transformation of the labour process long preceded any rise in the level of working-class consumption. In his view, it was the American labour struggles of the 1930s and 40s that brought this into being. The corporations conceded a reorganization of wages through collective bargaining—the trade-union leadership negotiating pay and conditions with management across the sector, averting wildcat strikes. For Aglietta, collective bargaining would prove one of Fordism’s most essential ‘structural forms’. At the level of the labour process, it institutionalized the class struggle in a way that left management in control of investment and the production process. Through the introduction of healthcare plans and pension funds, it stabilized Fordism by helping to cover the cost of social reproduction, while channelling contractual savings into the credit system, which in turn helped to support a new social norm for working-class consumption, defined by ‘a car and a house’.

Though the Fordist mode of regulation appeared to solve the problems of capitalist reproduction, it produced its own structural contradictions. Blockages in the accumulation process were no longer relieved by fluctuations in the rate of unemployment, but by rising prices, passed on to the working class through inflation. At the level of the labour process, increases in ‘intensive’ extraction ran up against the physical limits of assembly-line speed-up, and a series of wildcat strikes in the auto and steel sectors disrupted the harmony brought by collective bargaining. At the level of social reproduction, contradictions began to emerge in the provision of collective services like healthcare and education that were needed to sustain the new mode of working-class consumption. Persistent inflation and erosion of monetary value threatened a crisis for contractual savings and insurance systems. From 1966, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation argued, the Fordist regime of accumulation entered a generalized crisis; only a massive extension of credit in the 1970s prevented a new Great Depression.

Hazarding a guess at what a new capitalist ‘solution’ would involve, Aglietta envisaged a new global regime of accumulation based on the semi-automation of the labour process through new cybernetic-electronic technologies, with the dispersal of production to break up the older industrial concentrations of the working class. Fordism’s segregation of the labour market by sex and race would be repealed, and minorities and women fully integrated into the surplus-extraction process. But the post-Fordist regime would also need to find a new way of organizing the provision of collective services for social reproduction, which would otherwise, the implication was, prove an ongoing point of tension for the new mode of regulation.

Conceptual contribution

Aglietta’s differentiation of sectors, modes and ‘structural forms’ seemed to be a development of Althusser’s claim that the dialectic of capital and labour is ‘never active in the pure state’.footnote⁹ Critically, Aglietta argued—against the presumptions of neoclassical economics and general equilibrium theory—that an investigation of capitalist dynamics needed to explain both the continuity of the system—the processes of reproduction that allow it to go on existing—and the historical experience of transformation, ‘rupture’ and qualitative change.footnote¹⁰ Second, and this would be a decisive factor in the Regulation School’s research strategy, qualitative transformation within the capitalist mode of production is primarily driven by the reconfiguration of its different elements. In the introduction to the first edition of Régulation et crises du capitalisme, Aglietta referred to Étienne Balibar’s point that it was necessary to study how the different types of class struggle in a given conjuncture were determined by one of them in particular, since it is their ‘internal articulation which explains the extreme variety of their forms.’footnote¹¹

Articulation involves an ordering in terms of structural explanatory weight—a hierarchy of forms. For Aglietta, the attempt to define a system in movement implied ‘the conception of a hierarchy in the constitutive relations of the system, and not merely a functional interdependence’.footnote¹² The character of a given configuration lay in this structured inter-relation of the different forms, while a rupture corresponded to a change in that order. This crucial premise was a complete break from crude conceptions of historical ‘becoming’ driven by the quantitative expansion of productive forces. It was also a distinct advance on the ‘polycrisis’ framework so popular today, which acknowledges a complex set of interlocked determinants while refusing to qualify them by weight or causal importance.footnote¹³ Avoiding both mechanistic determinism and strategic indeterminacy, the Regulation School would insist on both the complementarity and the hierarchy of structural forms as a key to the characterization of capitalist regimes.

Explaining ‘rupture’ involved going beyond purely economic processes. Aglietta’s introduction to the English edition of A Theory of Capitalist Regulation added a new section on the state—‘the Achilles heel of the social sciences’ as he put it.’footnote¹⁴ Distancing himself from the Keynesian approach to the state as little more than an agent of effective demand, he indicated that historical materialism could provide an explanation of the state as a mode of social cohesion ‘required by relations of production that divide society into conflicting groups with heterogeneous objectives and unequal possibilities of action.’ By contrast, the pcf saw the state as devoid of internal contradiction; once freed from the monopolies, it could lead the transition to socialism. Aglietta aligned himself instead with a heteroclite group of left thinkers—James O’Connor, Antonio Negri, Joachim Hirsch, Manuel Castells—who conceptualized the state in terms of ‘the institutionalization of the wage relation’. He also welcomed ‘internal analyses of the political field’ such as Ralph Miliband’s, which he thought could be integrated with Gramsci’s concept of the hegemony of a social class in the specific conditions of each nation.footnote¹⁵

A Theory of Capitalist Regulation prompted major critical engagements in the Anglosphere and beyond, not least the substantial statement by Robert Brenner and Mark Glick in New Left Review. David Kotz drew out the correspondences with the somewhat similar Social Structure of Accumulation approach developed around the same time at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.footnote¹⁶ Regrettably, neither Aglietta nor his fellow regulationists engaged seriously with the theoretical and empirical objections raised by the American Marxists. In France, the Regulation approach took off. In the late 1970s, a series of seminars engaged in comparative research on the ‘Big Four’ capitalist economies, the us, Japan, Germany and France, drawing in a younger cohort of scholars, including André Orléan, Pascal Petit and Bruno Amable. An important strand of research investigated the ‘structural forms’ of financialized capitalism as a successor to the Fordist regime.footnote¹⁷

Repositionings

The late 1970s was a fraught period in French intellectual life, with the rise of the violently anti-Marxist nouveaux philosophes in reaction to the Union of the Left, a joint electoral slate of the Socialists and the pcf. Aglietta was not directly involved in the discussions around the Union of the Left’s Common Programme, nor did he play a role in the team led by François Morin that designed the nationalizations of industrial and financial enterprises implemented during Mitterrand’s first year. He was strongly opposed to Mitterrand’s 1983 austerity turn—le tournant de la rigueur—under Jacques Delors’ direction, and sided with Pierre Mauroy in calling for devaluation and a relaunched industrial strategy rather than accommodation with the neoliberal Zeitgeist. The battle lost, however, Aglietta rapidly repositioned himself, arguing that Europe was now the main arena.footnote¹⁸

The whiplash effects on European economies of Nixon’s revocation of Bretton Woods and the 1979 Volcker Shock had galvanized French attempts to promote a common European currency—one robust enough externally to stand up to the dollar system, but flexible enough internally to prevent dominance by the heavyweight German economy. Aglietta backed the idea of the ecu as a parallel currency that could be used by the bloc vis-à-vis non-members, while allowing time for a gradual harmonization of the economies within it. In practical terms, the problem was how to develop the ecu into a reserve asset; in theoretical ones, how to conceptualize the relationship between currency and finance. The Regulation approach seemed well suited to address that task, being capable both of looking inside the ‘structural forms’ of money, banks, capital, interest rates and international currency markets, understood as institutionalized social relations, and of specifying their determining relations to each other. Aglietta and his colleagues now undertook a major research programme aimed at elaborating a general theory of monetary systems.

Aglietta’s foundational contribution to this project was La violence de la monnaie, co-authored with André Orléan, a young polytechnicien at insee. This constituted something of an intellectual swerve: ‘the violence of money’ referred not just to the currency shocks of the period but to a psycho-anthropological theory of ‘mimetic desire’ which the authors imported wholesale from the Stanford deconstructionist René Girard to use as the groundwork for their general theory. According to Girard, humans have no intrinsic, authentic desires and this lack compels them to imitate others, inciting the rivalry of their chosen model and thereby generating violence; social institutions emerged in primitive societies in order to control this violence by channelling it into ritualized forms of sacralization and scapegoating.footnote¹⁹ In La violence de la monnaie, speculation represents a type of mimetic rivalry in search of authentic wealth, whose violence had to be controlled by the sovereignty of the monetary order. Adumbrating a range of possible monetary orders, Aglietta and Orléan argued that, to be viable, such systems needed to be heterogeneous enough to respect the ambivalence of money as both public good and private asset, avoiding inflationary deterioration and deflationary scarcity.footnote²⁰

This was a radically money-centred view of the economy, with no place for use values. The sidelining of issues of capitalist exploitation in La violence de la monnaie, and its apparent plunge into irrationalism, shocked the Regulation School left. As Lipietz put it, Aglietta and Orléan’s discussion of ‘forms of socialization’ tended to obliterate ‘what is socialized’: the labour of exploited working people.footnote²¹ Suzanne de Brunhoff also warned against trying to deduce social relations from commodities and money, which ‘are not socially neutral. They are the general expression of the division of society into private processes of production and exchange.’footnote²² Nevertheless, Aglietta and Orléan’s contribution led to a flourishing research programme on the institutionalization of money, grounded in the claim that it is constituted by a relationship of mutual acceptance, or trust. The monetary order exists in intimate relation to the sovereign state which declares the currency to be legal tender, backed by its own powers of taxation; in return, the central bank as summit institution of the monetary order undertakes to be the state’s lender of last resort.footnote²³

One implication of this analysis was that a monetary crisis is always the manifestation of a socio-political crisis. An excessive hardening of constraint will result in monetary fragmentation, as with the rise of barter amid the chaos of the post-Soviet Russian economic crisis in 1992–93. Inflationary crises, on the other hand, call for a process of centralization, as with the Reichsmark during the German hyperinflation of the 1920s, or the dollar pegs—or outright dollarization—in Latin America in the 1990s. Interestingly, Aglietta’s analysis began exactly where the approach of Modern Monetary Theory leaves off: with the premise of monetary sovereignty.footnote²⁴ Indeed, as Orléan has put it, the limits that a state faces in ‘monetizing its difficulties’ reveal that, if it is to be compatible with the reproduction of market relations, the management of money requires the legitimation of social acceptance.footnote²⁵

Worker capitalists?

In late 1995, France was paralysed by the largest wave of strikes and mass protests since 1968, a popular uprising against the Juppé government’s spending cuts and in defence of the public-pension scheme. Aglietta took the opposite side, aligning with the liberal centrists and the cfdt, tamest of the unions, while arguing for the transformative potential of pension funds in the hands of the employees whose savings they invest. In a long afterword to the 1997 re-edition of Régulation et crises du capitalisme, Aglietta argued that the Fordist regime of accumulation had gone for good. With globalization, ‘intensive’ labour processes had penetrated non-Western societies, while financial liberalization empowered capital to arbitrate freely between countries and classes of assets. Finance was emerging as the dominant mediation mechanism in the new growth regime. In the spirit of Marx, Aglietta looked for positive ways to resolve the contradiction that workers’ savings constituted vast pools of capital in the hands of institutional investors.footnote²⁶ With the right political backing, he claimed, fund managers could be recast as the workers’ agents, leading to the socialized ownership of enterprises in which they held shares. Pension funds could become a paramount ‘structural form’, a key social-mediation mechanism, a component in a new mode of regulation. A share-holding labour force could re-orient capital investment towards the development of collective productivity, reducing working hours and supporting life-long education.footnote²⁷ It hardly needs to be said that those hopes proved to be illusory, mirroring, to some extent, the decay of the Swedish Meidner Plan of the late 1970s. The reason for this is not that the tendential socialization of ownership could not lay the ground for an internal upheaval in capitalist logic, but rather that control of financial assets on their own does not change the operative dynamics. Instead, the inner logic of liberalized finance produces more inequality and less investment.footnote²⁸ Nevertheless, practicing what he preached, Aglietta became a consultant for the asset-management arm of Groupama, a French insurance conglomerate incorporating the mutual funds set up by proto-Proudhonist farmers in the nineteenth century. When the Socialists returned to office in 1997, he joined Jospin’s economic advisory council.

In a scathing essay on the trajectory of the Regulation School, Michel Husson, another radical statistician at insee, denounced this ‘harmonicist turn’.footnote²⁹ Husson perfectly captured the political evasions of the leading regulationists and their lack of understanding of the dynamics of social conflict at that time. Symptomatically, the concept of ‘regime of accumulation’ had now been been replaced by the politically innocuous—and analytically vacuous—‘growth regime’. But Aglietta had not entirely lost his critical spark. During the 2010–15 Eurozone crisis he assailed the design of the euro that had emerged from the Maastricht Treaty as ‘essentially a foreign currency for every Eurozone country’, binding them to rigid exchange rates, stripping them of monetary autonomy and—at the insistence of Berlin—shifting the entire burden of adjustment onto the debtor countries.footnote³⁰ He was also closely following the rise of China. The calamitous decline of public administration in France under neoliberalism may help to explain his fascination with Chinese policymakers’ ability to pursue long-term collective goals. His study of La Voie chinoise, co-authored with the management scientist Guo Bai, set the prc’s economic take-off in the context of the country’s imperial past.footnote³¹ In a 2019 paper, the co-authors are unrestrained in their praise for China’s ‘mix of state capitalism, managed markets and authoritarian rules’ which they describe as ‘a recipe for a long-term view’, contrasting the prc to a Europe floundering in economic stagnation and political discontent. Widespread domestic support for the Chinese government, they argue, stems from ‘the ability of the development-oriented state to modernize, while ensuring political and macroeconomic stability.’footnote³² Aglietta’s greatest—and frustrated—ambition was undoubtedly to be involved in a state-led politico-technocratic developmental process of the same historical magnitude as China’s.footnote³³

Parting words

In Au loin la liberté, Jacques Rancière described Chekov’s stories as portraying an era driven by implacable social mechanisms which could nevertheless still be torn by the possibility of freedom—something might happen; nurturing this hope without resolving it was Chekov’s great merit.footnote³⁴ Aglietta’s final work, Pour une écologie politique, co-authored with Étienne Espagne, illustrates this willingness to preserve the contradiction. The authors argue that mainstream green macro-economics fails to consider ‘capitalism in its long-term dynamics’ as the relevant focus for tackling the ecological challenge—and thus to consider the possibility of a future beyond it.footnote³⁵ Aglietta and Espagne sketch the framework for an ambitious eco-regulationist perspective, introducing a mathematical viability theory to conceptualize the interdependencies between environment and society as a basis for modelling strategies. Utilizing contemporary environmental history and ecological-economic research, their aim is not to replace a Marxist explanation of history but rather ‘to reintroduce nature into the Marxist equation.’

This allows them to identify four periods within the Capitalocene: the origins of Atlantic capitalism (1500–1800), the classical age (1800–1914), the Great Depression to the Great Acceleration (1918–73) and the neoliberal era (1973–2020). This vast historical fresco ends on a pessimistic note: the ‘viability regime’ of financialized neoliberalism comes at the price of social involution and ecological catastrophe. This is a striking contrast to the hopes held out for pension-fund socialism in the late 1990s. Instead, Pour une écologie politique states bluntly that establishing a political ecology compatible with planetary limits would require making the logic of capitalism obsolete.

Aglietta’s final text was a policy brief for cepii, a public economics research institute, comparing the systemic risks of structural inflation in the 1970s and the 2020s.footnote³⁶ It argued that the combined effects of geo-economic fragmentation, the green transition and labour shortages caused by ageing populations created coordination challenges on a scale that required a major institutional reordering. In the regulationist grammar, such a reshuffling would correspond to toppling finance from its dominant position in the hierarchy of structural forms—or, perhaps, a step beyond this mode of production itself. In his last published words, Aglietta concludes: ‘Preserving the planet’s common goods is becoming so important that it calls into question the continuation of capitalist accumulation. It will be up to future generations to grapple with this new world.’