Foucault and the non critique of neoliberalism...

I can’t help but wonder if it might be beneficial to read the emergence of neo-liberalism from a more oppositional standpoint—what I mean is some sort of acknowledgment and opposition to the fact that the human agent through his or her labor has become a particular commodity—indeed, according to Marx, one of the most important in the capitalist system. Foucault seems to want to avoid going down the Marxist road, which he deems as inadequate due to its primary critique of classical economics and is thus insufficient for a critique of neo-liberalism.

He believes that it is insufficient to the critique of liberalism in that there has been a reversal in the logic of alienation and abstraction that Marx uses in Capital. For example, he eschews the notion that labor has been abstracted by capitalism—that is, turned into a commodity. Instead, he focuses on the neoliberal argument that has stipulated that it is actually the classical economic discourse that has abstracted it—that has viewed it as only a product of the capitalist machine. Furthermore, and I think this is one of the most revolutionary claims that Foucault is making, neoliberals have actually given agency to the worker within their framework: “the worker is not present in the economic analysis as an object—the object of supply and demand in the form of labor power—but as an active economic subject” (223). That is, an entrepreneur. The worker does not work for a wage, but an income that allows him to invest in various forms of satisfaction. Foucault somewhat leaves the analysis here and does not seem to want to engage with how this homo economicus, the entrepreneur, actually manifests itself on a daily basis.

Basically, I think what I’m saying with all of this is that I think Foucault misses something with this kind of tacit acceptance of homo economicus in that even though in the neoliberal discourse the worker as changed from the commodified object to active economic subject, one thing has not changed: those who control the means of production. The neo-liberal discourse seems to say that because the worker has been transformed into an active economic subject he is now in the position of creating new relations of production through his income (the means of production). However, I think that, and this would require some further research, one could simply say that this just isn’t the case. Just because the worker is now conceived of as an entrepreneur does not mean that the income/wages will endow the worker with the means of production to control a whole new array of relations of production. There are still differences of class, uneven distributions of capital, social or otherwise, and the very persistent reality (think of outsourcing and sweatshops) of the commodification of human labor. In this sense I think the Marxian critique is still valid, even in the age of neo-liberal economics. Although, perhaps the rhetoric needs to be updated to counter the current mode of discourse.