Week Four: So is Foucault a Marxist or what?

One of the things that struck me the most in the lectures was Foucault's juxtaposition of the mercantilist state against the more modern conception of the state promoted by the economistes, which dictated that the state should only intervene in order ensure the good circulation of natural phenomena--whether that be the laissez-faire regulation of grain scarcity or the relations of human beings with each other and their production--either of goods or commodities.

I think that he perhaps explicitly refrains from positing whether this transition is a good thing or a bad thing--that is, the transition from a police-state mercantilist system to the laissez-faire roots of free trade, but you definitely can understand why Sartre would lambast him as being the last defense of the bourgeoisie...although that would seem to be a misinterpretation.

And yet, you could say that Foucault's analysis, whether he says that it is more an analysis of the emergence of the art of governmentality, is really a Marxist, or class analysis of society. I just want to highlight one particular moment in the 13th lecture: "Apparently the development of the market economy, the multiplication and intensification of exchanges in the sixteenth century, and the activation of monetary circulation, all introduced human existence into the abstract and purely representative world of the commodity and exchange value. Maybe, and maybe it should be deplored, in which case let's deplore it" (338).

He then goes on to say that what is more interesting for him is the analysis of the art of government and how to control the state forces through manipulation of the population etc. Yet all of this is based on a fundamental shift in the transition of economies: from mercantalist to free market. Perhaps even though we can't say that he is bona fide, card carrying Marxist, he is still intimately wedded to the Marxian critique of history.