> Marx's point is different. He says that less developed society
> depends on direct coercion because the indirect compulsion of the
> market is not yet in place. Foucault's argument stresses the
> continuity between direct coercion, and internalised self-
> repression. Marx's argument stresses what is historically specific
> to capitalism, that it does not rest on direct coercion. Foucault
> makes the prison the model for the factory, Marx shows how the
> factory displaces the prison.
Marx's ontological and anthropological ideas are antithetical to those elaborated by Foucault in "Nietzsche, Geealogy, History". Marx's are sublations of the ideas of Kant and Hegel that Foucault (quoting them without saying so) contrasts with those he elaborates.
Marx, sublating these ideas, claims "the development of the human mind", and, hence, of knowledge, through labour within successive forms of relations of domination “is tied to the constitution and affirmation of a free subject” actualizing the “good” in the “good” life that constitutes “the true realm of freedom”, the ethical aspect of this “good” being universal relations of mutual recognition.
Foucault, elaborating Nietzsche, claims that:
“Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination." <http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/j/m/jmh403/nietzsche_genealogy_history.htm
>
and that:
“Knowledge does not slowly detach itself from its empirical roots, the initial needs from which it arose, to become pure speculation subject only to the demands of reason; its development is not tied to the constitution and affirmation of a free subject; rather, it creates a progressive enslavement to its instinctive violence.” <http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/j/m/jmh403/nietzsche_genealogy_history.htm
>
Postone also rejects these ideas of Kant and Hegel, but he misreads Marx in consequence, e.g. according to Marx, what is "socially constituted" by the "labour process" in the successive "relations and forces of production" that define each of its stages is the degree of "integral development", of "all-round development".
The degree of this development is expressed by these relations and forces themselves, understood as objectifications of the "intellectual wealth" - the "knowledge" - the development as "development of the human mind" creates.
The "integral development" facilitated by the capitalist labour process eventually creates an "individuality" with the developed "powers", the "universality", required to perceive that these "relations and forces" are objectifications of these "powers", to "appropriate them" and to "turn them into free manifestations of their lives". It's in this Hegelian sense that the capitalist labour process is "contradictory", i.e. "begets its own negation with the inexorability which governs the metamorphoses of nature".
The idea of "freedom" embodied in the idea of "free manifestations of their lives" in "the true realm of freedom" sublates Hegel's idea of it as "the unity of the universal and individual", the unity of "freedom" and "necessity". This idea makes the ontological assumption that there is a knowable and objective "good". It's this "good" that Marx treats as "transhistorical", as the "unmoved mover" in human history.
The idea can't be reasonably rejected merely on the ground that it's inconsistent with the "materialist" ontology now dominant. Reasonable rejection, like reasonable grounding, can only be based on a "phenomenological" (in the sense of Husserl) interrogation of experience.
“private property can be abolished only on condition of an all-round development of individuals, precisely because the existing form of intercourse and the existing productive forces are all-embracing and only individuals that are developing in an all-round fashion can appropriate them, i.e., can turn them into free manifestations of their lives.” <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch03o.htm
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“the historic tendency of [capitalist] production is summed up thus: That it itself begets its own negation with the inexorability which governs the metamorphoses of nature; that it has itself created the elements of a new economic order, by giving the greatest impulse at once to the productive forces of social labour and to the integral development of every individual producer.” (Letter from Marx to Editor of the Otyecestvenniye Zapisky 1877) <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/11/russia.htm>
Ted