Foucault and Marxism: rewriting the theory of historical materialism

This article explores the relationship of Foucault to Marxism. Although he was often critical of Marxism, Foucault’s own approach bears striking parallels to Marxism, as a form of method, as an account of history, and as an analysis of social structure. Like Marxism, Foucault represents social practices as transitory and all knowledge and intellectual formations as linked to social relations and power. In this he asserts the historical relativity of all systems and structures – of society, of thought, of theory and of concepts, while at the same time not denying a materialism of physical necessities. Yet while Foucault’s approach reveals these important similarities to Marxism, the differences, claims the author, are fundamental. These concern his rejection of Hegel’s conceptions of history and society as a unified developing totality, his rejection of essences and teleology, and his rejection of any utopian impulse revolving around the laws of economic development or the role of the proletariat in history. Foucault’s own conception of change, in fact, is represented in ways that are altogether different to Marx’s approach, and ultimately supports localistic forms of resistance and specific forms of democratic incrementalism, rather than revolutionary or totalistic strategies as the basis of transforming society. Gérard Raulet: ‘But does this reference ... mean that, in a certain way, Marx is at work in your own methodology?’ Michel Foucault: ‘Yes, absolutely’. (Foucault, 1988, p. 46) I have never been a Freudian, I have never been a Marxist, and I have never been a structuralist. (Foucault, 1988, p. 22) This article explores the relationship of Foucault to Marxism. Although he was often critical of Marxism, Foucault’s own approach bears striking parallels to Marxism, as a form of method, as an account of history, and as an analysis of social structure. If Foucault’s worldly post-structuralism can be represented, as Poster (1984), Rabinow (1984), and I (Olssen, 1999) have argued, as a form of both historical and materialist analysis, the questions I will start this article with are, how does Foucault’s form of historical materialism differ from that of Marx, and, to the extent he does differ, what alternative conceptions does he embrace? Marxist Preliminaries: a brief summation Marx’s economic discourse comes under the rules of formation of the scientific discourses that were peculiar to the nineteenth century ... Marxist economics – through its basic concepts and the general rules of its discourse – belongs to a type of discursive formation that was defined around the time of Ricardo. (Foucault, 2001, p. 269) In the Marxist conception of historical materialism, discourse is represented as part of the superstructure which is split from material practice (the economic base) and subordinated to it. In the same way, the mental operations of consciousness are represented as derivative from the Foucault and Marxism 455 material base of society. The most famous expression of Marx’s conception is from the Preface of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Karl Marx, 1904, pp. 11-12): In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society – the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material forces of production in society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or – what is but a legal expression for the same thing – with the property relations within which they had been at work before. From forms of development of the forces of production these relations turn into their fetters. Then comes a period of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations the distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic, or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out ... . No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces, for which there is room in it, have been developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society. Therefore, mankind always takes up only such problems as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation. That Marx’s formulation led to charges of economic determinism is evident from the political debates of his own day. Joseph Bloch had levelled such a charge, and in replying to Bloch’s accusations in 1890 Engels (1978, pp. 760-761) sought to defend Marx’s conception: According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure: political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and then even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas, also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents ... the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. In the twentieth century one of the central issues addressed by Western Marxists has been an attempted resolution and reconceptualisation of the nature of the relation between the economic base and the cultural superstructure of society. In the classical Marxist model both the character of a society’s culture and institutions, as well as the direction set for its future development, are determined by the nature of the economic base, which can be defined as the mode of production at a certain stage of development (Williams, 1980, p. 33). The simplest nature of this relation, as Williams (1980, p. 33) tells us, was one of ‘the reflection, the imitation, or the reproduction of the reality of the base in the superstructure in a more or less direct way’; that is, a relation in which the economic base and specifically the forces of production constituted the ultimate cause to which the social, legal and political framework of the society can be traced back.