[lbo-talk] Jacobin debate up

Mike Beggs mikejbeggs at gmail.com
Thu Oct 20 16:11:26 PDT 2011


On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 5:28 AM, Eric Beck <ersatzdog at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 6:52 PM, Mike Beggs <mikejbeggs at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I'm not sure what Foucault would have said about the possibility of
>> interacting "in an uncoded way".
>
> He wouldn't have liked it, but I think you are being too literal and
> less than charitable. She clearly meant something like
> becoming-decoded or working at undoing capitalist coding.

I'm all for creative misreadings of Foucault, if something useful comes out of it. There's a lot that's useful in Foucault's idea of a micro-physics of power. But it's more threatening to classical anarchism, with its fetishism of the State and its Manichean treatment of state power, than it is to a Marxism that treats the state as a complex of social relations intermeshed with other social and economic structures.

The core is dropped from Foucault's analysis, the point completely missed, when the 'micro-physics of power' is reduced to something that grasps and motivates individuals by their attitudes and feelings - as if it's a brainwashing (a 'coding') that could be undone by a subjective 'recoding'. The missing dimension is the strategic - that power is a complex of relations that emerges from people's more-or-less rational strategic interactions. Existing power relations reflect a stalemate, continually tested and shifting from time to time with the balance of forces.

Power is, Foucault writes, "the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organisation; as the process which through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or system, or the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect... the name that one attributes to a complex strategic situation in a particular society." (History of Sexuality, vol. 1, tr. Robert Hurley, Pantheon Books, 1978, pp. 92-93)


>> But anyway, is this not saying 'it's
>> all in our heads', the manacles are mind forg'd?
>
> No, it's exactly the opposite. I agree with Shag: it's deeply
> materialist. Instead of assuming that capitalist command works because
> people lack the nerve, will, or organization to throw it off (as soft
> materialism believes), it recognizes that it works at all levels of
> existence, not just the obviously economic ones, and that we reproduce
> it every day in our actions, relationships, etc.

I agree that it would be materialist if it dealt with 'all levels of existence', but as it is it is primarily focused on the 'every day actions relationships, etc.', and thus at a flat level. This is to confuse 'material' with 'concrete' or 'everyday'. This is a mistake because the everyday is structured by forces at other levels, which need to be dealt with at those levels.


> This is the meaning
> of the quote Angelus passed around: Capitalism works because you do.
> There's no moralism in that; instead, it's an acknowledgment of
> capital's working in every pore of society, its ability to touch every
> aspect of our lives. But it's also an acknowledgment of its
> limitations: it always relies on reproductive labor it can never fully
> control.

'Capitalism works because you do.' The problem here is a mistaken treatment of our work as the independent variable. 'We work', therefore capitalism works. But why do we work? Because we have coded positive feelings in our head about capitalism and want to make it work? So if only we could have some transformative experience that changes our feelings on the matter we would realise how foolish were we to work, and we would decide to stop reproducing capitalism? Hardly. We work because we need to in order to get the means to live, regardless of our feelings on the matter. It's a strategic response, given our place in society. Strategies aimed at changing the conditions in which we make that everyday strategic decision are inevitably going to involve working at a political level, in the boring state-oriented sense.

Mike



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