Prosperity, crises and accumulation: Socio-metabolism and regulation theory applied to the case of France from 1960 to 2022

Prospérité, crises et accumulation: Socio-métabolisme et théorie de la régulation appliqués au cas de la France de 1960 à 2022

Alban Pellegris and Victor Court ()
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Alban Pellegris: LIRIS - Laboratoire interdisciplinaire de recherche en innovations sociétales - UR2 - Université de Rennes 2
Victor Court: IFPEN - IFP Energies nouvelles

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Abstract: The deregulation of the financial system is naturally cited as the main cause of the 2007 financial crisis. The real estate bubble is said to have been made possible by risky sub-prime lending, and this accumulation of risk is said to have been encouraged by securitization, shadow banking and the FED's interest rate cuts. While the price of energy rose sharply in the 2000s, the role of this variable in the genesis of the crisis has received little attention. This is all the more surprising given that most American recessions since the post-war period have been preceded by a sharp rise in oil prices. This article proposes an energy history of this crisis. To achieve this, it systematically integrates energy flows into the analysis of accumulation regimes. Two usually separate literatures are brought together: the analysis of social metabolism and the theory of regulation. Where social metabolism focuses on the energy flows that irrigate the economy, regulation theory enables a historical analysis of capitalism and its crises. We show that, far from being an exogenous shock, energy appears to be a key endogenous variable, a source of contradictions, which the historical configurations of capitalism must contain and overcome in order to allow accumulation to continue. A comparison between the crisis of the 1970s and that of 2007-2008 in the case of France supports our argument. While Fordist capitalism succeeded in overcoming its energy contradictions by becoming neoliberalism, the emergence of new contradictions in the early 2000s has not yet been overcome by neoliberalism. This diagnosis seems to point to the existence of a pivotal period in the reconfiguration of French capitalism.

Date: 2024-03-18
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