To begin, I think that any attempt at such an integration needs to start with Poulantzas' _State, Power, Socialism_, because that text had as its theoretical backdrop Poulantzas' efforts in precisely this area. Indeed, it was _State, Power, Socialism_ which, some twenty-odd years ago when I first read it, convinced me to take up a serious reading and study of Foucault. Poulantzas takes the position, with which both Yoshie and I would agree, that Foucault's neglect of the state, captured in his famous statement that he "had beheaded the king in theory," is a central flaw in his work. Contrary to Foucault's view that disciplinary power is dispersed, without a center, Poulantzas shows that there is a central, standard logic to disciplinary power, a logic seen in the spatial and temporal matrices of what, in his heterodox Marxist perspective, he understands to be the capitalist mode of production. Poulantzas argues that every mode of production organizes time and space in different modalities, and that the capitalist organization of time and space organizes it in standardizing, homogenizing modalities. This allows Poulantzas to show how not only disciplinary apparatuses such as the prison and the asylum, but also such phenomena as the nation-state, are the structural product of capitalism. It also allows him to make a case that state authoritarianism is an intrinsic dynamic within capitalism. [Poulantzas is even able to draw Deleuze's and Guattari's concepts of de-territorialization into this discussion, making use of some of the most obscure texts of radical post-modernism.]
Poulantzas understands that the absence of a well-defined theory of the state, of political theory proper, is a problem in Marx as well as Foucault. Yoshie wants to fill that gap with Lenin's theory of the state and political theory, but Poulantzas -- and here is where both he and I would differentiate ourselves from the position taken by Yoshie -- understands that Leninism is, in far too many ways, an extension of the authoritarian statism of capitalism. It is in this text, Poulantzas' last, that he is at his most Gramscian and democratic, and not coincidentally, that he makes the strongest critique of Leninism. He understands the need to move beyond Foucaultian micro-politics, and to develop a theory and practice of broad radical democratic/democratic socialist politics. In his critique of such basic Leninist notions as 'dual power,' he offers an alternative model of broad social transformation.
My differences with Poulantzas rest on the extent to which he sees the organizing logic of the state as one defined by its intrinsic capitalist nature. I am not convinced of this essentialist view of the state. Rather, I find more plausible a view of the state as an articulating center, one which combines relations of power which have no necessary, or intrinsic, linkage. I am not convinced, for example, that capitalism needs homophobia and racism, or that homophobia and racism need capitalism; certainly, they have been historically articulated to each other, but that may be a matter of historical contingency. The capitalist workplace can just as easily be seen as one manifestation of disciplinary power, as disciplinary power can be understood to be a manifestation of capitalism.
Yoshie wants to use Foucault to fill out what she sees as 'gaps' in Marxism analysis of the apparatuses and practices of power under capitalism. But this can be done in many ways. One can do it in a minimalist fashion, as I read her account which wants to preserve Leninist politics; one can do it in a more ambitious way, as Poulantzas does in efforts to create a Marxist political theory which is radically democratic; or one can dispense with the Marxist premise that capitalism is the defining essence of all power relations, and see what Marx and Foucault can tell us about a more contingent, more articulated field of power.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 212-98-6869
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --
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