Foucault, Marx, Poulantzas

LeoCasey at aol.com LeoCasey at aol.com
Tue Jun 19 11:52:17 PDT 2001


Justin:

The provocation and the red herring is, unfortunately, in your perception, since -- by the time I finished reading your reply -- the position I had taken in my original post was unrecognizable to me.

To begin, there was a context to what I wrote. The thread and my intervention was clearly focused on the modern epoch -- the capitalist epoch in Marxian theory -- so the notion that I was making some trans-historical statement that applied to pre-capitalist epochs and/or social formations is clearly a misreading of what I said, and of the thread itself. The discussion focused on how to understand and how to integrate Marx's analysis of class relations under capitalism with Foucault's analysis of disciplinary power in the modern period. If that wasn't clearly enough delimited, certainly my introduction of Poulantzas' _State, Power, Socialism_, with its analysis of the contemporary state and contemporary political strategies of the socialist left, should have left no confusion about what I was referring to.

Nor did I say that Marxism sees other power relations -- gender, racial, etc. -- as a form of capitalist class relations. For one, I can't even make sense of the thesis you are attributing to me: it is like saying that an apple is a form of an orange. For another, since I was responding to Yoshie, I was referring to arguments she had made. As I read her arguments -- and I am happy to be corrected by her if I misread them -- she believes that the explanation for the existence of other, non-class forms of power relations, from those of race and gender to those demarcated by Foucault's notion of disciplinary power, lies in the capitalist system [mode of production] and its class relations. In her view, capitalism needs or requires such disciplinary power apparatuses as the asylum. By contrast, I do not think that capitalism needs/requires the asylum, or that the asylum needs/requires capitalism, just as I do not think that capitalism requires racism, or that racism requires capitalism. There is, in my view, no necessary, functional relationship between those two forms of power, simply a contingent, historical relationship. The relationship is not one of essence and necessity, but of articulation and contingency. I may be wrong, but as I understand the position Yoshie has put forward here, she sees the relationship as necessary and essential. What Foucault does for her is fill in the gaps in Marx's analysis of capitalism as a system, by providing historical, local analyses of institutions and practices which are a necessary, functional part of capitalism, but which Marx never addressed. For her, Marx [the analysis of class relations] does not fill in gaps in Foucault's theory [the analysis of disciplinary power]; Foucault [the analysis of disciplinary power] fills in gaps in Marx's theory [the analysis of capitalism as a social system]. That was the position I was engaging.

Now, I do not particularly care by what criteria individuals choose to consider themselves Marxists are non-Marxists. If you want to call yourself a Marxist, or a historical materialist in the Marxian tradition, that is a matter of self-identification, and it does not make much sense to argue over it. But it does seem to me that there is a core to Marx's analysis, and to the Marxian tradition that was built upon that analysis, and that is worth clarifying. This core involves, however you want to express it, the primacy of class relations in human history. [All hitherto history has been the history of class struggle...] For the Marxian tradition, it is only in reference to capitalism as a system, with its dynamic of class struggle, that one can make ultimate sense of other relations of power, from racism and sexism to the asylum and the prison. As far as I can see, that is the logical corollary of the primacy of class struggle in history. And that is what I meant by the phrase that "capitalism is the defining essence of all power relations." Certainly, formulations that the class struggle [or the economy] is determinative only "in the last instance" allow for considerable mediation and complexity in explanation, but, by their very terminology, they still accord trans-historical [that is human history as we know it, bracketed on one end by 'primitive communism' {hunting and gathering societies} and on the other end by 'communism proper'] primacy to the class struggle.

If I had to locate myself on the terrain of theories of power relations, I would define myself, following Laclau and Mouffe, as a post-Marxist, rather than a Marxist, precisely because I do not see power relations as an unified, closed field, defined by some primary, essential contradiction. There is a lot to be gleaned from Marx's analysis of the capital-labor relationship, as well as from figures in the Marxian tradition, such as Gramsci, who worked to develop a radical democratic political theory based on class relationships. Class struggle has been a central, albeit far from exclusive, terrain of radical democratic struggle in the modern epoch, and for the foreseeable future it will remain quite important. That is why, in part, one chooses to call oneself "post-Marxist": it not only reflects a political trajectory, it also allows one to identify with a lot of valuable theoretical analysis in the Marxian tradition. But it is also "post-Marxist" because it has moved beyond that central core of Marxian analysis, and sees a much more contingent, much more historical, much more articulated field of power.

At 09:37 PM 06/18/2001 -0400, you wrote:
> >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, you have been so reasonable for so long, and now this unnecessarily
>provcative red herring. There is not a single Marxist here, not even
>Charles, who thinks that "the defining essence," whatever that is, of "all
>power relations" is capitalism. Even a class reductionist would not be so
>narrow (what about feudal or slave relationships before the rise of
>capitalism?). And even a fairly ortho Marxist need not be a class
>reductionist.
>
>A historical materialist like myself (as I have explained, I doubts about
>the utility of the "Marxist" label, and don't care to either fight _for_ it,
>or because of it) is perfectly happy to say that there are all kinds of
>power relationships with all kinds of different bases. It's just that if you
>want to understand class societies, including our own capitalist one, class
>relationships are particularly salient for a lot of purposes, e.g., if you
>want to figure out who runs the government and why, or why the press lies
>the way it does, or why voting for Democrats somehow fails to being long
>term large scale improvements beyond holding the dike. Do I insist, or
>suggest, that sex oppression is really capitalist exploitation under its
>skin? Of course not. That dog won't fight. So why bring it up?
>
>- --jks

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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