I recently stumbled across this essay I wrote some five years ago on the nature of power, resistance, and history in Marx, Althusser, and Foucault. I think it remains useful today, so I am sharing it here.
Analysis of schemas of power and resistance provides a framework through which to understand theorists’ conception of the nature of society, the possibilities of resistance and change, and their theory of history itself. This essay analyzes the impact of Karl Marx, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault’s theories of power and resistance on their radically different approaches to and theories of history. Marx’s teleological view of history follows from his conception of power as the repressive domination of society by a ruling class. Class struggle to obtain state power (and thus remake society) is the driving force of historical progress. Louis Althusser expands upon the classical Marxist theory of power through his focus on ideology and the productive role of Ideological State Apparatuses alongside the Repressive State Apparatus. Foucault, on the other hand, rejects the Marxist theory of power and reimagines it as a diffuse, generative force that acts imminently through every social relation. Struggles over state power do not have grand historical import for Foucault; instead, he reimagines history as a genealogy of beginnings, series, discontinuities, and juxtapositions that challenge positivist and evolutionist theories of history. While their theories vary dramatically, the three thinkers are united by their belief in the possibility of resistance and revolution to challenge power and produce a better – or at least differently configured – world.
Classical Marxist conceptions of power emphasize its class character and centralization in the repressive apparatus of the state. Power is always exercised by one class dominating another. While power originates in the economic system, it is alienated (or we could say exteriorized) into the class power of the state. Out of the “contradiction between the interest of the individual and that of the community the latter takes an independent form as the State” which, Marx says, is based “on the classes, already determined by the division of labor.”[1] Each economic mode of production throughout history has its corresponding version of state power based on class rule. The ruling class in each era wields state power to perpetuate its economic domination and repress resistance. As Althusser succinctly puts it, “the Marxist tradition is strict […] the State is explicitly conceived as a repressive apparatus. The State is a ‘machine’ of repression which enables the ruling classes […] to ensure their domination over the working class, thus enabling the former to subject the latter to the process of surplus-value extortion.”[2] Thus under capitalism, Marx famously argues, “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”[3]
Part of the appeal of classical Marxism lies in the straightforward relationship between its critique of capitalism and its theorization of the corresponding form (and historical inevitability) of resistance and revolution. Despite its ostensibly competitive individualism, capitalism necessarily socializes production. Workers, forced together in the factory through various processes of enclosure and primitive accumulation, must labor together and thus organize collectively. As Marx argues in the Communist Manifesto, “the advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association […] What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”[4] The very functioning of capitalism brings the proletariat into contact with each other, makes workers depend on each other, and reveals the form of struggle necessary to complete the socialization of the production and distribution of goods. Workers must complete the process of socialization by assuming state power and collectively controlling the means of production.
The classical Marxist conception of resistance and revolution privileges the conquest of state power as the necessary condition for social transformation. If power is centralized in the state, then the object of political struggle is clear: communist workers must seize state power and wield it in the class interests of the proletariat rather than the bourgeoisie. In The German Ideology, Marx explains that “every class which is struggling for mastery, even when its domination, as is the case with the proletariat, postulates the abolition of the old form of society in its entirety and of domination itself, must first conquer for itself political power in order to represent its interest in turn as the general interest.”[5]Thus the replacement of the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” by the “class dictatorship of the proletariat.”[6] Of course, the proletariat uniquely wields state power in order to abolish the state itself. Its dictatorship is “the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally” and thus what Lenin would come to call the “withering away” of the state.[7] This is the ultimate end point of Marxist historical progression: a classless, stateless society in which power is no longer alienated into the state but instead is collectively exercised by all people. Even in his early writing, Marx recognizes “human emancipation” as when “[man] has become a species-being; and when he has recognized and organized his own powers […] as social powers so that he no longer separates this social power from himself as political power.”[8] The collective organization of social power is what he would soon call communism.
Marx’s theory of power leads directly to his materialist theory of history. History, as we know from the famous beginning of the Manifesto, “is the history of class struggles.”[9] These class struggles are fought largely over control of the state machinery in order to exercise class power over the economic system of society. Class struggle itself is based on the economic progress of society and conflicts over the relations of production. Marx argues in his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy that “at a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production [and] thus begins an epoch of social revolution.”[10] He clarifies in the Communist Manifesto that each of these periods of conflict ends “either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”[11] History progresses in economic stages based on the outcome of class struggle.[12] Revolutionary classes drive history forward by seizing state power and remaking society in their image. Of course, historical development all leads down the inevitable path towards communism, which will bring “the prehistory of human society to a close” through the abolition of classes themselves.[13] This teleological historical schema depends on Marx’s conception of power as based in class struggle and centralized in the state.
We may read Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” as a bridge between the classical Marxist theory of power and Foucault’s radical reimagining of it. Althusser maintains much of Marx’s original conception of power in his idea of the Repressive State Apparatus (RSA). The core of the state still functions via repressive force in the RSA, which includes “the Government, the Administration, the Army, the Police, the Courts, the Prisons, etc.”[14] Althusser’s main innovation to the Marxist theory of power is his addition of the Ideological States Apparatuses (ISAs) which reproduce the relations of production through the inculcation of ruling class ideology. There are many ISAs, ranging from religious and educational systems to unions and political parties, which all reproduce ruling ideology in their own particular fashion.[15] Althusser emphasizes that “no class can hold State power over a long period without at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the State Ideological Apparatuses” (italics in original).[16] Althusser frames the distinction between the RSA and the ISAs as primarily between repression and ideology.[17] Although he never uses this wording, we may interpret that he sees power as performing both repressive and productive roles.
While Althusser ultimately believes in the need for proletarian revolution to seize the Repressive State Apparatus, he also asserts the importance of ideological struggle within the Ideological State Apparatuses. Simply seizing the RSA is not enough to revolutionize society, as unreformed ISAs will continue to reproduce the same capitalist ideology. Althusser points to Lenin’s “anguished concern to revolutionize the educational Ideological State Apparatus (among others), simply to make it possible for the Soviet proletariat, who had seized State power, to secure the future of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the transition to socialism.”[18] ISAs, Althusser argues, “may be not only the stake, but also the site of class struggle, and often of bitter forms of class struggle,” for “the resistance of the exploited classes is able to find means and occasions to express itself there, either by the utilization of their contradictions, or by conquering combat positions in them in struggle.”[19] Althusser analyzes the historical example of the Church as the main ISA under feudalism and thus the center of ideological social struggle, and argues that the school is the dominant ISA under capitalism.[20] Schools are integral to capitalism because they force children to learn “a certain amount of ‘know-how’ wrapped in the ruling ideology […] or simply the ruling ideology in its pure state,” and prepare them to fill their roles as particular kinds of workers in the capitalist machinery.[21] It follows that the “unprecedentedly deep crisis which is now shaking the education systems […] takes on a political meaning” and threatens the entire capitalist system.[22]
While Althusser expands upon the classical Marxist theory of power, Michel Foucault turns it on its head and reimagines it as a productive rather than repressive force. Foucault clearly demarcates his opposition to traditional conceptions of power: “I do not mean ‘Power’ as a group of institutions and mechanisms that ensure the subservience of the citizens of a given state. By power, I do not mean, either, a mode of subjugation which, in contrast to violence, has the form of the rule. Finally, I do not have in mind a general system of domination exerted by one group over another.”[23] Power is not centralized but diffuse, not top-down but bottom-up, not repressive but generative and productive, and finally not exterior but imminent to every social relation. Perhaps the most succinct definition Foucault offers is that “power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitutes their own organization . . . [Power] is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.”[24] Power acts as the level of each social relation through a “directly productive role” and infuses all of society.[25]
Foucault further distinguishes power through its modern function as “biopower” which generates and governs life itself. Power works to “incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: [it is] bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than […] impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.”[26] In modern Western civilization, “the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.”[27] Power over life operates through discipline of the body and regulation of the population. Foucault argues that the development of biopower was “without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism,” which depends on “the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes” as well as “the growth of both these factors, their reinforcement as well as their availability and docility.”[28] Power is no longer the sovereign right to kill; today, power operates through the productive realm of life itself.
While Foucault is sometimes accused by Marxists of neglecting or even negating the possibility of resistance and revolution, his work points instead towards new imaginings of networked forms of resistance within and against the matrix of power. Indeed, far from denying the possibility of resistance, Foucault argues that resistance to power will always exist, as “where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power.”[29] As power is distributed into each social relationship, the possibility of resistance is also ever-present on the micro level. Foucault speaks of a “multiplicity of points of resistance” which “are present everywhere in the power network.”[30] He rejects the idea of a “single local of great Refusal […] or pure law of the revolutionary” in favor of a “plurality of resistances” which he describes as “mobile and transitory points.”[31] Instead of what he would view as a misguided heroic proletarian struggle leading to a new revolutionary storming of the Winter Palace, Foucault identifies nodes of resistance that form a shifting “swarm” of what theorists in other traditions might call counterpower. And, as Foucault says, “it is doubtless the strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible, somewhat similar to the way in which the state relies on the institutional integration of power relationships.”[32] He stops short of explaining what form this “strategic codification” could take, leaving the theorization of biopolitical revolution to his successors.
Foucault’s theory of power is directly related to his fraught attempt to redefine historical work outside the traditional boundaries of the discipline. Patricia O’Brien argues that Foucault’s project was fundamentally meant to “represent a new history of Western civilization.”[33] Foucault scathingly criticizes the “stereotypical” historians, who see themselves as “the virtuous knight of accuracy […] the doctor of inexhaustible information […] the great witness of Reality […] the heartbroken scholar who weeps over his little piece of earth just pillaged by barbarians.”[34] Foucault’s project was explicitly conceived against the grain of historical work. Rather than write a “total” history, his project was to produce a “general” history, which rejects concepts of totality “in favor of interplays, correlations, dominances.”[35] A general history, Foucault writes, “would deploy the space of dispersion.”[36] Foucault calls as well for genealogical work, which he describes as “patiently documentary […] record[ing] the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality.” [37] Genealogy searches for beginnings, not origins, juxtaposition and differences rather than evolution or recurrence. It accounts for power’s dispersion and shifting relational forms. Genealogy and juxtaposition are used to “[undermine] progressive assumptions about change.”[38]
We can read The History of Sexuality as a case study of Foucault’s mobilization of his theory of power in the service of the history of sexuality and resistance. The book fundamentally challenges the “repressive hypothesis” of sexuality, the idea that sex(uality) really exists on some fundamental level which is then repressed by power. Foucault explains that rather than repressing sexuality, power has in fact generated sexuality itself through a far-ranging incitement of discourse. Rather than cataloguing repression, The History of Sexuality “[searches] instead for instances of discursive production […] of the production of power […] of the propagation of knowledge” and “[writes] the history of these instances and their transformations.”[39] Power employed various mechanisms, including confession and new scientific and medical technologies, to produce a “veritable discursive explosion” around sex.[40] Power deployed discourses of sexuality to accomplish specific aims of social control. Sex was “at the pivot of the two axes along which developed the entire political technology of life,” which allowed power to use sex as “a means of access both to the life of the body and the life of the species.”[41] Thus, sex was perfectly situated to enable power’s ability to discipline bodies and manage populations.
Foucault calls for new forms of struggle against power’s deployment of sexuality. Resistance to power’s discourse of sexuality cannot take the form of sexual liberation, a naïve hope that if we can just cast off the yoke of repression then “tomorrow sex will be good again.”[42] It is worth quoting Foucault at some length here to understand his critique of the politics of sexual liberation and his call for a future with “a different economy of bodies and pleasures.”[43]
We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power; on the contrary, one tracks along the course laid out by the general deployment of sexuality. It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim—through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality—to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures.[44]
The pleasures and knowledges produced by the direct contact of bodies, ostensibly unmediated by power’s deployment of sexuality, might form nodes of resistance against power.
Active political struggle is the red thread running through Marx, Althusser, and Foucault; for each thinker, theory and practice were inseparable. Marx was constantly active in workers’ struggles across Europe, most notably in the International Workingmen’s Association, or First International. Althusser was a lifelong member of the Communist Party and active in ideological struggle within the university Ideological State Apparatus. Foucault came out of the Communist Party as well as Maoist and ultra-left milieus in the 1960s – which he rejected as his theoretical analysis progressed – and participated in many political struggles (including anti-racist and anti-prison activism) throughout his life. He also participated in the sado-masochist scene in San Francisco in the early 1980s, which he praised as allowing “the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure, which people had no idea about previously” and a “desexualization […] of pleasure. […] These practices are insisting that we can produce pleasure with very odd things, very strange parts of our bodies.”[45] For Foucault, the sado-masochist sex club is a starting point, a node in the networks of resistance that will eventually produce a “different economy of bodies and pleasures.”
Bibliography
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. London: Monthly Review Press 1972.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage 1990.
Halperin, David. “Queer Politics,” in The New Social Theory Reader, edited by Steven Seidman and Jeffrey C. Alexander, 294-302. London: Routledge 2001.
Marx, Karl. “The Class Struggles in France,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 586-93. New York: WW Norton & Co 1978.
———. “The German Ideology,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd Edition, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 146-200. New York: WW Norton & Co 1978.
———. “Marx on the History of His Opinions,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd Edition, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 3-6. New York: WW Norton & Co 1978.
———. “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd Edition, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 469-500. New York: WW Norton & Co 1978.
———. “On the Jewish Question,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd Edition, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 26-52. New York: WW Norton & Co 1978.
O’Brien, Patricia. “Michel Foucault’s History of Culture,” in The New Cultural History, edited by Lynn Hunt. Berkeley: UC Press 1989.
[1] Karl Marx, “The German Ideology” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 160.
[2] Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, 92.
[3] Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 475.
[4] Ibid., 483.
[5] Karl Marx, “The German Ideology” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 161.
[6] Karl Marx, “The Class Struggles in France” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 592-93.
[7] Ibid., 593.
[8] Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 46.
[9] Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 473.
[10] Karl Marx, “Marx on the History of His Opinions,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 4-5.
[11] Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 474.
[12] Karl Marx, “Marx on the History of His Opinions,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 5.
[13] Ibid.,5.
[14] Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, 96.
[15] Ibid., 96.
[16] Ibid., 98.
[17] Ibid., 97-98.
[18] Ibid., 98-99.
[19] Ibid., 99.
[20] Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, 102-3.
[21] Ibid., 104-5.
[22] Ibid., 106.
[23] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, 92.
[24] Ibid., 92-93.
[25] Ibid., 96.
[26] Ibid., 136.
[27] Ibid., 138.
[28] Ibid., 141.
[29] Ibid., 95.
[30] Ibid., 95.
[31] Ibid., 95-96.
[32] Ibid., 96.
[33] Patricia O’Brien, “Michel Foucault’s History of Culture,” 33.
[34] Ibid., 30.
[35] Ibid., 33.
[36] Ibid., 34.
[37] Ibid., 37.
[38] Ibid., 37.
[39] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, 12.
[40] Ibid., 17.
[41] Ibid., 145-46.
[42] Ibid., 7.
[43] Ibid., 159.
[44] Ibid., 157.
[45] David Halperin, “Queer Politics” in The New Social Theory Reader, 300.