In a discussion of “flexible accumulation” they suggest that one of the crucial analytical tasks we face is to demonstrate how [such] contingent circumstances become internalized within and recomposed by the advancing development of a regime of flexible accumulation. We need to show, in short, how particular contingencies that on first sight appear as external and arbitrary phenomena are transformed into structured internal elements of the encompassing social logic of capitalism. This means that we reject the idea that there is some kind of absolute opposition between theory and contingency in historical materialist analysis.