Foucault and Political Economy

Abstract

Michel Foucault differed significantly in his relationship to Marxism, and to the critique of political economy initiated by Hegel and Marx, from many of the other thinkers considered here, notably Lyotard, Baudrillard and Gorz. The intellectual and political formation of these writers, and of other contemporaries such as Castoriadis, was in revolutionary political activity — for example, in the Socialisme ou Barbarie group for Lyotard and Castoriadis, in the circles around Sartre and Les Temps Modernes for Gorz and to a lesser extent Baudrillard, and with the Utopie collective for Baudrillard. For Gorz and for Lyotard the Algerian War was a crucial political experience and all these writers were deeply affected both by enthusiasm for (and in some cases participation in) the events of May 1968 and by the subsequent failure of the movement inaugurated by those events. The failure of this movement contributed to a more general questioning of the theoretical and political tradition which had previously influenced them, and in particular to a critique of the adequacy of Marxism as a guide to radical theory and practice. This questioning, in the cases of Gorz and Baudrillard, drew on writers who had influenced them during their earlier Marx-inspired work: Sartre, Illich and ecological thought in the case of Gorz; Durkheim, Marcuse and the sociological critique of consumption in the case of Baudrillard. However, instead of trying to incorporate insights from such writers into a Marxist critique of contemporary society, Gorz and Baudrillard increasingly used them to elaborate an alternative theoretical standpoint, not just counterposed to Marxism, but to Hegelian dialectics and to the project of a critique of political economy founded on dialectical thought.