Homosexuality and Surplus Value

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Sun Dec 3 17:45:35 PST 2000


Carrol wrote:


>This seems generally accurate, but there exist some questions. (And
>let's remember Engels's warning that not every detail of daily life
>and culture could be explained -- which fits in with the emphasis that
>Yoshie, I, and others have, following Gould, put on sheer contingency.)
>
>It seems fairly clear that it is *within capitalism* that heterosexism and
>the classification of "homosexual," etc. developed. But it was also inside
>fairly late capitalism that the classification of "teenager" developed. (And
>"juvenile delinquency" was a category that appeared for the first time
>within my own lifetime.) That is, in general capitalism seems to *allow*
>(perhaps demand) the proliferation of categories grounded in real or
>imaginary individual traits. I think it would be useful to explore this
>more general tendency of capitalism without commiting oneself in
>advance to any direct connection between some *specific* category
>and the needs of capitalism. Capitalism *needs* lots of individual
>categories. Does it *need* (as oppose to allow) any given category?
>
>One might try the thought experiment of imagining a capitalism free
>from racism, sexism, and heterosexism, and speculate if other false
>divisions would spring up to keep the population "diversified" into
>sub-groups.

I don't think that it was inevitable that such categories as "homosexual" & "heterosexual" emerged, and I agree with you that capitalism seems to possess a tendency to generate spurious categories (categories of sexual identities among them) endlessly. I think Foucault was trying to name this tendency when he came up with the cumbersome term "governmentality":

***** ...Foucault (1979, p20) defines governmentality as: "the ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principle form of knowledge political economy and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security."

The process of governmentalisation involves the development of specific apparatuses of intervention and the construction of a field of knowledge through which the objects of government are constituted, thought and acted upon. Government of the population is not, however, necessarily (or even mainly) directly exercised by the state. Forms of power outside the state apparatus "...often sustain the state more effectively than its own institutions, enlarging and maximising its effectiveness." (Foucault, 1980, p73)....

Foucault, M. (1979) `Governmentality', Ideology and Consciousness, no.6, pp5-21.

Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge, (ed) Gordon, C, Harvester Press, Brighton.

<http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~mayer/mm/d1/atkcomm.htm> *****

Not exactly a happy formulation, but I think Foucault was onto something.

Yoshie

P.S. It's hard to avoid functionalism when we discuss the relation between primary & secondary contradictions. Thanks for a reminder.



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