From the State to the Factory.Penality and the Critique of Political Economy between Marx and Foucault

Abstract

It has often been said that Foucault was critical of Marxism or even anti-Marxist. This has certainly been the case in relation to Foucault’s attitude toward the “official Marxism” of his times, that is the Marxism of the PCF or, to a lesser extent, of “extraparliamentary” groups. However, especially his analyses in Discipline and Punish and in the course of lectures that prepared it, The Punitive Society, can be made to frame a very different reading of the relationship between Foucault and Marx, a reading which, at the same time, challenges some of the most traditional interpretations of Marx. Contrary in fact to the traditional Leninist vulgate, centering power in the dubious entity called “the State”, I believe it is possible to anchor the idea of power in the dimension of “the factory”, stressing the continuity between the violent premises of accumulation within its “primitive” or “original” phase, and the power encysted in what Marx calls the “hidden abode of power” in the “sphere of production”, figuratively “the factory”. Hence, the centrality of the idea of “discipline”, which is crucial both to the most basic notion in Capital, the notion of the extraction of surplus value, and at the same time generative of Foucault’s key “sociological” work, Discipline and Punish (especially if read in conjunction with The Punitive Society). The elective affinity between a certain reading of Marx and Foucault’s most important work will appear particularly clearly in the rediscovery of a Marxism centered in the factory between the 1960s and 1970s, the years of working-class’ Pyrrhic victory over the Fordist factory.