I don't think Foucault is as crude as you think he is, though maybe enough of his followers are that it's become a popular caricature. At least later in his life he tried to correct that caricature... This is from Mark Kelly's just-published 'The Political Philosophy of Michel Foucault'. Sorry to paste such a lot, but it all seems relevant:
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Of course, the extent to which power relations are reversible varies extremely widely, and this variation is of the utmost importance. For this reason, Foucault goes on in this interview to outline a tripartite typology of power relations based on their reversibility.
At one extreme is the state he calls domination, in which power relations have become ossified and inflexible (EW1 285; see also EW3 347; Foucault 1988, 11). This situation is one in which reversal is a possibility, but a bare possibility, requiring drastic action to break up the existing inflexible structure. This drastic action is called liberation (EW1 282). This liberation is the precondition for the creation of a more readily reversible form of power relation, the kind of everyday interpersonal power relation which we can be ambivalent about, like that between two lovers, which Foucault calls freedom. This kind of power relation is marked by a constant play of reversibility; neither partner is truly dominant. “Between” these two situations is what Foucault terms government, wherein there is an obvious power imbalance, but not one which has become either ossified or inflexible.
This notion of liberation from domination, qua inflexible power relations, as producing a state of freedom, qua highly flexible power relations, takes the place of the more traditional notions of liberation and (negative) freedom from power itself per se; since power is for Foucault not something that can be eliminated from social life, no such liberation could be hoped for. Foucault’s point is that power is neither good nor bad in itself, just so long as it is reversible:
"Power is not evil. Power is games of strategy. We all know power is not evil! For example, let us take sexual or amorous relationships: to wield power over the other in a sort of open-ended strategic game where the situation may be reversed is not evil; it’s a part of love, of passion and sexual pleasure." (EW1 298)
Here we have the exact reason Foucault adopts the notion of the strategic game. However, it is not as if Foucault did not realise that power could be so ambivalent before, having already said in a 1976 interview,
"Between every point of a social body, between a man and a woman, between the members of a family, between a master and his pupil, between everyone who knows and everyone who does not, there exist relations of power." (PK 187)
If one couples this with Foucault’s insistence that power could not be abolished, it seems that he always thought substantially the same thing, even if previously he had taken the more suspicious tone exhibited by Nietzsche (Z 2 “Of Self-Overcoming”).
In fact, Foucault was to continue to advocate suspicion, while obviating any need for a total opposition towards, or paranoia about, power. In a 1980 interview, Foucault (1988, 1) starts off saying, “We need to rise up against all forms of power,” but later clarifies himself:
"If I accepted the picture of power that is frequently adopted—namely that it’s something horrible and repressive for the individual—it’s clear that preventing a child from scribbling on the walls would be an unbearable tyranny. But that’s not it: I say that power is a relation . . . in which one guides the behavior of others. And there’s no reason why this manner of guiding the behavior of others should not ultimately have results which are positive." (Foucault 1988, 12)
Indeed, while Foucault (SD 26–27) himself confesses that he was largely focussed on domination in his earlier 1970s work, which is natural, especially when he was working on the prison, this notion of differentiating different kinds, different severities of power relation is not in itself new for Foucault. Firstly, he already understood that power’s multidirectionality did not simply mean that everyone was in an equal position apropos of power, saying in 1977, “In so far as power relations are an unequal and relatively stable relation of forces, it’s clear that this implies an above and a below, a difference in potentials,” (PK 201) whilst on the other hand realising that power is such that it is never entirely fixed, and that no domination is total (as class domination is often supposed to be):
"Power comes from below; that is, there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations, and serving as a general matrix—no duality extending from the top down and reacting on more and more limited groups to the very depths of the social body. One must suppose rather that the 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. These then form a general line of force that traverses the local oppositions and links them together; to be sure, they also bring about redistributions, realignments, homogenizations, serial arrangements, and convergences of force relations. Major dominations are the hegemonic effects that are sustained by all these confrontations." (WK 94)
The notion of domination is one that explains what it means conventionally to say someone is “powerful” or “has power,” but in fact sees power not as a possession, but as a structural difference. The basic Foucaultian schema of power, including the principle of reversibility, was included in Foucault’s thinking all along, as demonstrated by this passage from Discipline and Punish:
"[Power relations] are not univocal; they define innumerable points of confrontation, of hotbeds of instability, each of which carries its risks of conflict, of struggles, and of an at least temporary inversion of the force relations. The reversal of these “micropowers” does not, then, obey the law of all or nothing." (SP 32; cf. DP 27)