“It is impossible at the present time to write history without using a whole range of concepts directly or indirectly linked to Marx’s thought and situating oneself within a horizon of thought which has been defined and described by Marx. One might even wonder what difference there could ultimately be between being a historian and being a Marxist.”
“In the concluding section to The Will to Knowledge, Foucault explains what led him to consider power, as it exists today, not from a negative perspective – as a constraint that is initially juridical in form – but from a positive one, inasmuch as power relies on mechanisms that materially organize and even help to “produce” human life, instead of imposing boundaries on it.”
“This idea is at the very core of his conception of “biopower.””
“cault explains in this passage the need to rethink power by freeing it from the grip of politics, so as to bring it closer to the concrete level of the economy; an economy that is primarily concerned with the “management” of life, bodies and their “powers” – a term that persistently recurs here – even before having as its focus the value of traded goods within an economy of things.”
“thermore, for Foucault, it is important to restore a historical dimension to this new understanding of power, which he does by relating it to the development of capitalism and the specific social relations of production set in place in the context of the Industrial Revolution.”
“cault appears here to almost flirt with Marx’s analyses in Capital, which he reconciles with his attempt to view power from a positive and “productive” perspective.”
“Five years later, coming back to this point in a lecture given in Bahia in 1976, published under the evocative title “The Mesh of Power,” Foucault explicitly confirms this convergence.”
“Foucault means that Bentham and Marx are basically talking about the same thing, even if they do so in different ways: the emergence of a new configuration of power, coinciding with the rise of capitalism and the bourgeoisie, did not solely consist of an institutional change or a seizure of political power, since it fundamentally depended upon an original harnessing of the forces of life itself, providing the economy with its specific object ‒ an economy whose transformations have driven social change.”
“This perspective, it could be argued, moves toward the thesis of the determination by the economy in the last instance, on condition that the concept is extended to eventually subsume the management or the “production” (to follow Foucault’s ambiguous term) of life in all of its forms.”
“In the rest of the lecture, Foucault enumerates the four dimensions that characterize this historical and social shift in power, and insistently refers to Marx for each one:”
“the dispersion of power into a multiplicity of heterogeneous powers;”
“its detachment from the state-form;”
“its positive, rather than prohibitive or repressive, orientation;”
“and finally, its progressive technicization that developed unplanned through trial and error, and thus was not subordinated to any devised or preconceived ends.”
“When Foucault cites the “second volume of Capital,” he clearly has in mind the second volume of the French edition of Marx’s work, published by Éditions Sociales, which comprises Parts 4, 5, and 6 of Volume I, the only volume to appear in Marx’s lifetime, the final editing of Volumes II and III being posthumously completed by Engels.”
“Althusser, in a preface written for the 1969 publication of Volume I of Capital in Flammarion’s GF book series, had recommended reading it by starting directly with the second half, that is, by skipping the first part, as its interpretation poses the most problems, problems only resolvable when one gets to the end of the work and can grasp the argumentation as a whole. Foucault seems to go even further, advising that Marx’s book be approached through the fourth part, which deals with “The Production of Relative Surplus-Value (Mehrwert).””
“Indeed, in this passage he sees, appearing for the first time, the elements enabling the definition of the new configuration of power, heralded from the end of the 18th century by theorists such as Bentham: namely, “bourgeois power” and its mechanisms, i.e., the specific procedures pertaining to a technology of power, to whose analysis Marx made the greatest contribution.”
“By focusing his attention on this part of Capital, Foucault thereby finds a way of distancing himself from the polemical presentation provided in The Order Of Things – not of Marx’s thought stricto sensu, as found in his own texts, but what arose from it in the form of “orthodox” Marxism, in which Foucault had detected an avatar or epiphenomenon of political economy in its Ricardian form, full stop.”
“From this point of view, it is as if Foucault proposed to add a new chapter to the project Althusser himself initiated with the publication of Reading Capital, which had already begun to challenge traditional, orthodox Marxism.”
“how is it possible to draw the elements of a theory of power from the explanation of the process of the production of relative surplus value, without falling into overinterpretation, since the problem of power, if not completely extraneous to this explanation, is only posed at its margins?”
“Let us say straight away that this question, which involves the particular relation that power maintains with the economy of capitalism, and which leads us to bracket the relations that power might otherwise have with political and state forms, also leads us to take into account and re-establish the primary importance of the notion Marx himself saw as his principal theoretical innovation, because it enabled him to radically break with Ricardian economics: the concept of “labor-power,” whose wording contains precisely a reference to “power,” a reference Foucault attaches such importance to in his own conception of the new economy of power.”
“This economy, it can be said, is not an economy of things or goods but an economy of “forces,” and as such, inextricably an economy of persons; an economy which in reality is closely integrated with procedures for the subjection of persons and, more precisely, bodies.”
“To put it in Foucault’s terms, we must ask ourselves how capitalism, by utilizing the exploitation of labor-power, developed “methods of power capable of optimizing forces, aptitudes, and life in general without at the same time making them more difficult to govern.””
“It should be noted that the aim of such an inquiry is not to demonstrate that Foucault’s ideas are already black and white in Marx’s text, which would amount to inventing the fiction of a “Marxist” or “Marxisant” Foucault, as such an heir to Marx, but to enrich our potential understanding of this text, by clarifying it in light of the hypotheses Foucault advances and thus traversing the path that leads from Foucault back to Marx in the hope of revealing new aspects of the latter’s thought and – this is the point that primarily concerns us – reframing the question of power in particular by shifting it from the level of politics to that of the economy.”
“Power: From Politics to the Economy”
“This text was originally written as a contribution to the collective research project headed by Macherey, “Savoirs, Textes, Langage,” and first appeared on the group’s website, “La philosophie au sens large.” It subsequently appeared in a slightly modified form in Macherey’s 2014 collection of essays, Le Sujet des normes. The present translation is based on the initial version. We thank the publisher of Le sujet des normes, Éditions Amsterdam, for allowing the release of the translation.”