Market/society: mapping conceptions of power, ideology and subjectivity in Polanyi, Hayek, Foucault, Lukács

ABSTRACT

In light of discussions around the common anniversary of the publication of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation and F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, this article puts these texts – iconic representations of social democratic and neoliberal political theory – into conversation with Michel Foucault’s subsequent, influential critique of neoliberalism, The Birth of Biopolitics. There are interesting points of contact in the way each text constructs its argument, even as they arrive at distinct positions vis-à-vis the material and subjective nature of market society, while nevertheless sharing an opposition to Marxian approaches. Yet the work of Polanyi and Hayek’s Marxian contemporary, Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness, offers precisely a critical framework for understanding the relationship between markets, liberty and society in which the material and the subjective need not be read as antagonistic. It is thus also examined here, in an effort to shed light on how discussions of contemporary neoliberalism are framed.

KEYWORDS:

• Neoliberalism
• market society
• commodity
• Marxism
• homo economicus

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Here ‘post-modern’ is used heuristically to signal a tradition of critique predominantly concerned with the question of subjectivity and that propose alternatives to ‘modern’ approaches to historiography, both characteristics of Foucault’s reading of neoliberalism. Debates about the exact parameters of postmodernism and questions of how The Birth of Biopolitics should be read within his oeuvre overall, lie outside the scope of this paper.

2. In Foucault’s own words:

 … American neo-liberalism seeks instead [of the German emphasis on the state regulation of prices] to extend the rationality of the market, the schemas of analysis it offers and the decision-making criteria it suggests, to domains which are not exclusively or not primarily economic: the family and the birth rate, for example, or delinquency and penal policy. (Foucault, 2008, p. 323)

In other words, there is an intensification of the role of the state precisely because it becomes an agent for the promotion of market logic within society (Foucault, 2008, p. 247), and in the expansion of the exercise of state power through the Law (‘there is an inflation of forms and bodies of knowledge, of discourse, a multiplication of authorities and decision-making elements, and the parasitic invasion of the sentence in the name of the law’ (Foucault, 2008, p. 250)).

3. The nature of this discussion involves focus on a specific text and space does not permit a comprehensive examination of the now sizable literature on the relationship between Foucault and Marx. Yet, given its focus on neoliberalism, I would suggest that The Birth of Biopolitics represents a particularly interesting text for considering Foucault’s reading of Marx / Marxism. Broadly, in any case, the discussion here is sympathetic to Étienne Balibar’s conclusion that of the four paradigms for considering the relationship between Marx and Foucault – articulation (borrowing from each), subsumption (reading one through the other), ‘meta-theory’ (the proposition that ‘the oeuvres of Marx and Foucault the expressions of one same underlying theory, and as this theory is brought to light Marx and Foucault are shown to be variations on the same problematic’) and the notion that they are irreconcilable, the last is most compelling (Balibar, 2015, as cited in; Keucheyan, 2016) (see also, inter alia: Bidet, 2016; Macherey, 2014).

4. Foucault did ask a question in the concluding lecture that seems to run counter to his previous assessment of Marxism:

Similarly, we can say that government regulated according to the truth also has not disappeared. For after all, what in the end is something like Marxism if not the pursuit of a type of governmentality which will certainly be pegged to a rationality, but to a rationality which is not the rationality of individual interests, but the rationality of history progressively manifesting itself as truth? (Foucault, 2008, p. 313)

However, when considered with his arguments against historicism, this would not seem to be much of a mitigating observation vis-à-vis the previous claim. Furthermore, in the passage cited above, it is clear that Foucault relies on a clearly non-Marxian, socially-disembedded definition of capital (Foucault, 2008, p. 165).

5. As Marx elaborates in the Grundrisse (Marx, 1973 (1861)),

What distinguishes [the Proudhonists] from the bourgeois apologists is, on the one hand, their awareness of the contradictions inherent in the system and, on the other, their utopianism, manifest in their failure to grasp the inevitable difference between the real and the ideal shape of bourgeois society, and the consequent desire to undertake the superfluous task of changing the ideal expression itself back into reality, whereas it is in fact merely the photographic image [Lichtbild] of this reality. (cited in: Jameson, 1990, p. 96)

6. Indeed, Jameson suggests, broadly informed by Lukács’ approach, that (contra Foucault’s assessment) Marxism does follow a theory of ‘governmentality’. As he frames it, the conventional charge that Marxism lacks ‘any autonomous political reflection as such’ is true, but represents a strength, not a weakness. Thus Marxism is not ‘a political philosophy of the Weltanschauung variety’, i.e. of the same type as categories such as liberalism, conservatism, populism, but in fact is focused on questions of economic cooperation and organization, not organized around an abstracted political end per se. Thus, for Jameson, the true bourgeois ‘homologue’ to Marxism is not fascism, as is so often asserted, but neoliberalism: as both privilege questions of economic organization over political philosophy. As he formulates his proposition, ‘we have much in common with the neo-liberals, indeed virtually everything – save the essentials!’ (Jameson, 1990, pp. 99–100).

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Nicola Short

Nicola Short is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics, York University, Toronto, Canada. Her current research focuses on the material and ideational dimensions of neoliberal social relations.