The political context of the 1960s, with its radical critique of all 'repressive' institutions, and the irruption of Marxism into the academic field, laid a fertile ground for the emergence of critical perspectives on social and penal control. The sociological foundations of what would later become the political economy of punishment had already been laid down in the late 1930s by Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer in the early pages of their classic Punishment and Social Structure. Capitalism liberated labor from feudal exploitation only to subject it to a purely economic form of subordination. Wacquant's attempt to assign proper weight to the discursive and symbolic effects of penal politics provides important insights toward a post-reductionist revision of the materialist critique of punishment. The concept of 'regime of accumulation' has been elaborated by neo-Marxist political economists belonging to the so-called 'regulation school'. The epistemological shift proposed here would enable neo-Marxist criminology to approach penal politics no longer.