First of all, I thank you for making a great deal of investment (with money, time, & frustration) into fixing your e-mail program. Now your posts are readable!
>Yoshie:
>>Modern discrimination against & oppression of the disabled -- especially
>>the Great Confinement of the disabled & other groups that Foucault
>>discusses -- arose in response to capitalism that demanded the confinement
>>of the unproductive & the
>>disruptive (unproductive & disruptive from capital's point of view).
>>Medicine is but a vehicle through which capital's class power has been
>>exercised. Capital's power over experts (medical or otherwise), however,
>>is contestable. The best example may be the removal of homosexuality from
>>DSM in 1973, in response to the demand by the
>>rising gay liberation movement.
>
>This is too quick and facile an explanation, in my view. Disabled folks may
>be more unproductive, but how does it follow that the most efficacious way
>of handling unproductiveness, from a capitalist point of view, is
>confinement. What's wrong with having individual family units bear the cost
>of sustaining the unproductive? In some ways it is even more of a cost
>effective approach, since it places the economic burden on the individual
>family, thus avoiding the inevitable socialization of cost in mass
>confinement.
>
>In her rush to reduce all social oppression to the logic and power of
>capital, Yoshie elides the possibility that there may be other logics and
>other powers at work.
Not so fast, Leo. Justin has made an argument for using "Foucauldian-style institutional analyses to fill in the gap in historical materialist explanation"; and I've said that we might "leave out Foucault's theoretical premises & conclusions, while learning from him 'in medias res' as it were." The same goes for feminist & other analyses of institutions: e.g., feminist analysis of the professionalization of medicine, through which male doctors displaced female midwives & other practitioners, while claiming a moral & scientific standing by criminalizing abortion, inventing the mythical norm of "vaginal orgasm," and so on). That capital's class power is exercised through experts & institutions doesn't mean that there can be but one necessary expression of such power at any time -- hence, even under capitalism, norms defined by experts & institutions -- through which capital seeks to discipline the working class -- are contestable. At the same time, capital places limits upon the kinds & degrees of reforms possible under capitalism, even when the majority of experts make a vigorous argument for one: e.g., while the majority of scientists are in favor of curbing global warming, industrial capitalists do not want to make costly changes.
Now, let us return to Foucault. Why are experts & institutions so often punitive, for instance as Marta eloquently describes?
At 8:39 AM -0800 6/15/01, Marta Russell wrote:
> > There are a lot of
> > contradictions in the delivery of mental health services to those who
>> can't pay. One friend (schizophrenic) is obtaining fairly decent
>> treatment from CHS, and his condition is under fair control -- but what
>> he _really_ needs is at least $1000.00 more a month in personal income.
>> His remaining "peculiarities" would be no disaster were he financially
>> stable. As it is, he will be very lucky if he stays permanently outside
>> the clutches of the law.
>>
>> Carrol
>>
>Yes, this is a major problem. Lack of appropriate services at the
>onset of a mental (or really any) disability often means spending down
>all of one's income and this can result in homelessness. The system
>fails to provide the person with the underpinnings to make an
>adjustment and get proper services and financial aid that would allow
>the person to restabilize, find a job, a life, etc. The average
>federal SSI benefit is about $370 per month (states often supplement
>but not much) and the average SSDI benefit is $780 but these programs
>take lots of time to get onto, the qualification for them is rigorous,
>SSA is backlogged in claims, some people get denied and must appeal.
>All this can drive one into desperate poverty at the same time they
>are trying to refigure their lives. It is almost as if the system
>wants people to die. I actually had a SS worker tell me that the
>reason a disabled person does not get Medicare for two years after
>they get disability benefits is because lots of people die during that
>time and Medicare doesn't have to foot the bills.
>But this is the welfare state in the USA. Horrible, punitive.
>
>Marta
1. From the point of view of capital, social security benefits should never be so high & easily obtainable as to make them attractive alternatives to wage labor. If they were, fear of unemployment would diminish, enabling workers to demand higher wages, better working conditions, etc. more easily. If wages rose too high & too rapidly, outpacing the rise in productivity, capital would either try to take back working-class gains via inflation; go on the offensive (e.g., speed-up, automation, union-busting, attacks on social programs, factory closures & relocations to areas where cheaper labor is plentiful, etc.); and/or raise the rate of unemployment. That's the external limit upon the expansion & improvement of the welfare state & collective bargaining. That said, there is no narrowly "economic" reason why the US welfare state is _so horribly punitive_. Instead, the reason is political: weak business unions & weak social movements with narrow concerns (that are vicious dialectical twins); absence of working-class political parties worth mentioning; over-all disorganization & decentralization of leftists; and so on.
2. As Foucault says, "Power comes from below....[T]he manifold relationships of force that take shape and come into play in the machinery of production, in families, limited groups, and institutions...are the basis for wide-ranging effects of cleavage that run through the social body as a whole" (_The History of Sexuality_, p. 94). For instance, as women, GLBT people, the disabled, concerned parents, victims of crimes, participants in community block watches, etc. get organized & demand better policing responsive to their victimization; more meticulous background checks of prospective care-giving employees by states & corporations; and so on, their voices from below merge in the cacophony of public discourse with voices of Law & Order from above (politicians, prosecutors, criminologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, union representatives of police & correctional officers, etc.). The merger is in the end managed from above, but without spontaneous consent to, or even active demand for, more discipline rising from below, there can be no hegemony of Law & Order (Cf. Gramsci). Law & Order, however, in the end disciplines more than those directly caught in the criminal justice system, in that, for instance, the state cannot expand & enhance policing without in the end turning the entire working class into potential offenders, whose urine must be examine, whose backgrounds must be collected & analyzed, who (& whose property & personal belongings) may be searched if police & even private security officers have "reasonable cause," etc. Foucault writes in _Discipline and Punish_: "[T]he celebrated _lettres de cachet_, or orders under the king's private seal, which were long the symbol of arbitrary royal rule and which brought detention into disrepute on political grounds, were in fact demanded by *families*, masters, local notables, *neighbors*, parish priests; and their function was to punish by confinement a whole infra-penalty, that of disorder, agitation, disobedience, bad conduct; those things that Ledoux wanted to exclude from his architecturally perfect city and which he called 'offenses of non-surveillance'" (emphasis added, p. 214). Demands for more discipline come from below & above, for different reasons, but their aggregate effects are to create "the basis for wide-ranging effects of cleavage that run through the social body as a whole" -- effects of cleavage that are rooted in & in turn reinscribe the contradiction between capital and labor.
3. Why 2? Why demands for more discipline from below? Because "[w]here there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power," says Foucault (_The History of Sexuality_, p. 95). To return Foucault to Marx & Lenin, a multitude of empirical relations of power constitute our multiple contextual identities as consumers, employees, women, parents, patients, victims of crimes, etc. locked into daily struggles against their dialectical opposites, rather than as members of the working class. Thus, for example, disabled recipients of social services experience themselves as consumers often victimized by care-giving employees, instead of experiencing themselves as fellow members of the working class to which care-giving employees, too, belong, & vice versa. Even in the midst of struggles between employers and employees, employees don't experience the contest between capital and labor; instead, direct experiences alone can only tell them that they are victimized by particular greedy employers supported by particular repressive agents of the state, not by capital in general. Direct experiences that are not clarified by Marxist theory may not only not produce an understanding of the relation between capital and labor; they may even give rise to demands for more discipline: you experience yourself as a consumer, you get mistreated by an employee, you call the manager to discipline the employee; you experience yourself as a concerned parent, you are poor, your public school is substandard, your child's teachers appear indifferent or even abusive, you see the rich sending their children to nice private schools staffed by enthusiastic & experienced teachers, you think unions exist to protect bad teachers from discipline at the expense of students, you give up on unionized public schools & demand school vouchers, so you, too, can send your child to a nice private school. Such experiential relations of power always existed under capitalism, but as service industries -- public & private -- rose & expand, they have & continue to multiply apace. Moreover, direct experiences get exaggerated by ideological fantasies, so much so that, for instance, residents in the safest neighborhoods may live in the most intense fear of criminals.
Therefore, to repeat, while a multitude of micro-politics of power that pit doctors against patients, teachers against students, lawyers against clients, social workers against participants in state-funded programs, etc. are not unimportant, focusing upon them in such a way as to put capital out of sight (of theory & practice) is in the end counter-productive. In fact, capital would love the disabled to think of doctors, nurses, orderlies, & other care-giving workers as their main enemies, just as it would love women to think of men as our main enemies. Micro-politics, instead, should be waged with a view to fitting them into the big picture: capital's exploitation of labor; & socialists' project to abolish it & establish the system of production for human needs & desires, not for profits. That's what is implicit in Marx's works, made clearer by Lenin's criticism of Economism (which also serves as criticism of narrowly focused social movements):
***** Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of relationships of all classes and strata to the state and the government, the sphere of the interrelations between all classes. For that reason, the reply to the question as to what must be done to bring political knowledge to the workers cannot be merely the answer with which, in the majority of cases, the practical workers, especially those inclined towards Economism, mostly content themselves, namely: "To go among the workers." To bring political knowledge to the workers the Social Democrats must go among all classes of the population; they must dispatch units of their army in all directions. <http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/what-itd/ch03.htm#03_A> *****
To change Foucault's theory to fit it into Leninism against his intention: particular resistances -- of workers against employers, of students against teachers, of the disabled against doctors, scientists, & care-giving workers, ad infinitum -- are "never in a position of exteriority in relation to power" on their own; in fact, the existence of particular power relations -- constituted by & constitutive of the contradiction between capital and labor-- "*depends* upon a multiplicity of points of resistance" (emphasis added, _The History of Sexuality_, p. 95). Political knowledge necessary for the abolition of capitalism & establishment of socialism can be gained only by stepping in theory outside particular dialectics of power & resistance & acquiring the point of view that can see "the sphere of relationships of all classes and strata to the state and the government, the sphere of the interrelations between all classes" that necessarily extends beyond national boundaries.
Yoshie
P.S. Allow me to cc this to PEN-l also, since the discussion here is related to the discussion there.