The key chosen by Macherey to identify the concept of production (and of a productive subject), retracing it from Foucault to Marx, is conceptual – namely that there is no case for going to look for direct references to Marx in Foucault; rather one has to reply, via Marx, to a few questions posed by Foucault; to interpret, via Marx, some of the conceptual machinery that Foucault constructed. First, one has to understand whether the structural dispositifs of Foucault’s theory of power find a correspondence in Marx, or maybe even their source. Second, we have to understand whether the Marxian concept of ‘living labour’ is similar to, or even the same as, Foucault’s conception of production and the productive subject. Third and finally, having answered ‘yes’ to these two questions, Macherey sets out to compare the reading of Foucault’s figure of power, or rather of biopower, with how it operates in the contemporary world, stressing the fact that here its definition (which is consistent with Marx’s presuppositions) broadens its descriptive power to encompass the new social figures, in which capital (its power of exploitation of the whole of society and its ability to represent itself as state) expresses itself in our present times.
On the first point, Macherey points out in general terms that, although the word ‘class’ is not present when – at the end of the Leçons sur la volonté de savoir – Foucault defines biopower (as a force that determines social hierarchy and segregation – or ‘the social division of labour’ – and guarantees relationships of domination and effects of hegemony, understood as the social and statal organisation of exploitation), nevertheless this is the selfsame framework that, in Marx, characterises capital as a structure of domination over the forces of production. To determine the concept of power, Foucault too fixes economics as a place of ‘final instance’. ‘Here Foucault seems to come close to flirting with Marx’s analyses in Capital, in the attempt to locate power in a perspective that is positive and “productive”’ (Macherey, unpublished manuscript).*
Macherey then follows, in Capital (in the chapters in which value and surplus value, absolute surplus value and relative surplus value are discussed), the path taken by Marx’s research, observing that the definition of power in Foucault finds its most solid support there. We shall not follow Macherey in this effective and evocative in-depth analysis: we shall simply note a few points where, particularly strikingly, Foucauldian discourse – in the account given by Macherey – integrates and develops the thinking of Marx (and thus does not just ‘flirt’ with it). Such an ‘overinterpretation’ gives fruits that are important and often unexpected. The first consists in considering ‘living labour’ exclusively as a productive force and in defining its ‘excedent’ character in relation to all causal or physicalist, Aristotelian or positivist, in short, deterministic interpretations of the concept of ‘force’. The force of production consists in fact in the ambiguity of living labour, because it permits the latter to manifest its ‘excedence’ simultaneously ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the relationship that binds it to capital: it is ‘inside’ because capital appropriates that excedence to itself, making use of the legal contract that imposes the expropriation of the producer; but it is ‘outside’ because the excedence of living labour is unique and powerful, and brings living labour to life beyond the capitalist capacity of exploitation. This gives rise to a concept of power that is always inclusive of a balance of power. Indeed, just like the concept of power in general, capital too is a relationship. Every substantialist conception of power and of capital is thus voided. Around the concept of power, which is central to political theory, Marx and Foucault coincide. The second effect of the ‘overinterpretation’ is to show living labour as a determination intrinsic to the machine of power that commands it. The force of living labour is not only opposed to capital but also intimately connected to it, so much so that it creates its overall structure [assetto complessivo]. Moreover, in exercising itself as the source of surplus value, inserted within the system of machines, labour power not only produces capital but also composes and organises a society: it is over this society that the machine of power extends – commanding it, organising it, and disseminating its contradictory potential. And from this a further effect follows: from the factory to society, this machine of command progressively extends itself, dominates every space, permeates populations and is, for this reason, subjected to a constant movement and tendency to rupture.
This interpretative framework can generally be drawn from Marx and Foucault. But, after taking this first analytical glimpse, I have a question to put to Macherey: Why does this enlargement, this intensification of the reading (via Foucault) of Capital, still hold for him (Macherey) – despite his having internalised labour power within a capital that is in expansion and having grasped the overlap between the organisation of economic exploitation and the organisation of political command? Why, then, does this excedence of ‘living labour’ remain extrinsic to its self-constitution as a subject, and thus to the production of subjectivity in this story?
The result of this extrinsic determination is that Macherey captures just a first stage, the one in which exploitation is transformed and consolidated into a habitus: discipline in the form of life. However, continuing his investigation, Macherey goes deeper. First of all he returns to the concept of labour power as a force of production and studies the grids within which it is constrained into producing capital under the command of capital. Production here is entirely enclosed within capital. We could talk, or so Macherey seems to say, of a narrow and insuperable technological connection between labour and capital. In fact labour power is so internal to the system that it can only express itself in the capital relation – in a manner that is actual but also virtual (that is, with an ontological intensity that expands its effects into future time): this is a dimension that Macherey captures perfectly (Marx would say that the power [potenza] of living labour is present in the continuity of the machinic operation). Intensifying the question, however, it seems that, for Macherey, one should conclude, from the internalness of labour power within the ‘technical composition’ of capital, that labour power itself is, so to speak, ‘preconstituted’ by capital.
Should we not rather ask what were the effects of a dual concept, open and polemical, of the power relation? And what was the figure (and the actual numbers) of the different subjects of and within the balance of power? It is certain that, in Foucault, at least up to Surveiller et punir, exploitation subsumes the whole of society in its effectuality; and, if the whole of society is exploited, little space remains for the genealogy of subjectivity. Rereading these pages, we can certainly recognise in them many ideas drawn from the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. Discipline and authority are seen as one, and the same seems to be the case for alienation and exploitation. On the social terrain exploitation is directed; in the subsumption of society in capital it is no longer possible to distinguish between structure and superstructure and so on. But it is precisely in these pages, alongside the definitive recognition of the socialisation of exploitation, the definitive passage of critique from the factory to society, that Foucault (with great insight, as Macherey recognises) also accentuates his critique – and initiates the process of relativisation – of the absoluteness with which the concepts of norm, of discipline, and so forth, had been constructed up until that point. In contrast, what comes out of Foucauldian critique is that there is always resistance. The double nature of the power relationship is here restored to its truth. In the double nature of the power relation, that subjectivity that seemed to have been dissolved and set aside thus enters definitely into play. Instead there is resistance: the concepts of rule and discipline collide with practices of resistance, with logical revolts built on ontological ruptures. Temporally valid resistances, which work on spaces that are regional, micropolitical…
Macherey moves further forward into this field. Now it is no longer the pages of Marx that interest him, but increasingly those of Foucault, in relation to contemporary reality, to the reading of that book that today’s ethics and politics force us to read. Foucault, according to Macherey, puts us in a position of having to read the concept (and the reality) of power for what it has truly become: it is now a network in which the economy, the regulation of labour, the extraction of profit and so on are collected under the term ‘political despotism’ (exactly as Marx said). Looking at today’s world, we understand this despotic qualification better than Marx himself could do. It is very powerful, the system in which we are caught. Productivity is social, as is productive cooperation, too. There is no longer a specific space for ideology: there is no longer separated space, there is no longer given a world independent of consciousness in se [intrinsically] and per se, because capitalist exploitation has invaded everything – and the metaphysics of this social physics of production permeates everything. Macherey’s notes on the ‘physicality’ of capitalist metaphysics of value are really good in their finesse and precision, but they are not enough. Yes, let us fix the articulations and catalogue the internal divisions of this machinery in which we are immersed. And yet, once we have made our distinctions and specifications, we still find ourselves in there, inside the machine. At this point the essence of being human is directly exploited by capital.
Here I stop. Macherey seems to have arrived to the place where I was waiting for him. After having described his approach – so thorough and so important for the recovery of the power relationship through the analysis of living labour in its opposition to capital – I ask him why one cannot, at least on two counts, conclude with dispositifs other than those he has tracked here. The first count is that, if capital is a relationship and if, in the given conditions, the struggle between ‘living labour’ and ‘dead labour’ has never ended, nothing compels us to believe that this process cannot be interrupted. The emergence of subjectivity within the process of exploitation, or rather within the very concept of capital, forces us to admit it. The ‘excedence’ of ‘living labour’ is not prefigured by the capacity of subjection and exploitation of capital; it is not – by definition – ‘commensurate’. Rather it produces elements of hardness and resistance in relation to capital, and the ‘resistance’ is always an expression of freedom as well as of production. The second count consists in showing that, if this relation is currently controlled from above, by the commandimposing accumulation of ‘dead labour’, no determinism obliges us to think that it cannot be controlled from below. We should not pin our hopes on future catastrophes, or entertain mystical hopes for concretising logically this path from below. We need only think that, if within biopower there are forces in struggle – just as they struggle in capital and struggle in the process of producing (they produce through struggle) – then they do not produce only capital. First and foremost they produce, of course, their adversary – a capital that accumulates power until it’s able at times (not only in a sort of reformist compromise) to foreshadow those same productive forces that dialectically produce it. But when there is no meeting between two reformisms (that of capital and that of the subjected producer), the confrontation remains open – then, within this clash, there is always a production of subjectivity, because that power relation is not symmetrical, indeed it is always an intransitive relation, and it creates asymmetry now here, now there – sometimes on the side of the capital, at other times on the side of living labour. And when it is on the side of living labour, when the asymmetry is overdetermined on that side, production becomes a production of subjectivity and is revolutionary – without forgetting that the path to the liberation of living labour is from the bottom to the top.