Interpretations of Foucault’s trajectory are often clouded by academic specialism and national receptions. Foucault’s enduring appeal across academic disciplines often fosters an approach which seeks to use the ‘toolbox’ of his concepts, largely uncritically, applying them to every imaginable field of research. Useful in many ways, this approach can hide the discontinuities in his overall work or even worse, promote a decontextualised Foucault at a particular stage in his career as the definitive version. National receptions can play a similarly confusing role. A particular reflex has developed in relation to debates around Foucault, Marxism and his criticisms or sympathy towards Neoliberalism. Italian interpretations are undoubtedly shaped firstly by the far-leftist use of Foucault’s work by thinkers from Operiasmo and Autonomia traditions such as Antonio Negri or alternatively figures such as Giorgio Agamben. The Invisible Committee and more recently, Christian Dardot and Pierre Laval’s left-wing interpretations of Foucault emanate out of contemporary France. While a large section of Anglophone leftist academia, following the publication in 1985 of Jurgen Habermas’s The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity were taught that Foucault is a founder of the reactionary tide of postmodernism and a liberal brand of ‘identity politics.’  A mutual incomprehension has solidified between the ‘Anglo’ and ‘Latin’ interpretations. The recent wave of unpublished Foucault material is helping to cut through this deadlock, the recent English translation of the Japan Lectures: A Transnational Critical Encounter will further inform debates about Foucault’s trajectory, specifically on his shifting relationship with Marxism and Neoliberalism.

As I argued in my paper at the London Historical Materialism conference in 2022 (Foucault’s misunderstood Maoist phase: between Nietzsche and Marx) between 1968 and 1973 Foucault adopted numerous political positions associated with French Maoism in his interviews, statements and of course via his militant activity in the Prison Information Group (GIP) alongside members of the French Maoist Proletarian Left (GP). His theoretical output largely displayed a tension between the adoption of Marxist and Nietzschean concepts in this period. This tension was briefly resolved in the Punitive Society lectures in 1971-72 wherein Foucault adopts a Marxist approach both politically and methodologically. The effective dissolution of the GP in 1973 proved to be a major turning point. From 1973 onwards, Foucault became progressively more hostile towards Marxism, by the Society Must Be Defended lectures in 1975-76, Foucault had adopted a Nietzschean version of struggle as an alternative to Marxism. Foucault attempted to link Marxism (and pre-Marxist militant leftism) to racism in the lectures, declaring social democratic reformism carried the fight against racism on the left historically. Placing Foucault’s Collège de France lectures on neoliberalism in political context will help decipher what continues to be a contentious debate.

The importance of political context

Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora in The Last Man takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution rigorously detail the political positions Foucault adopted in the late 70s. Opponents of the idea that Foucault had sympathy for Neoliberalism largely ignore these details to the detriment of the debate. Foucault became close to the faction within the reformist Unified Socialist Party (PSU) called the ‘second left’ associated with the trade union leader Michel Rocard and the theorist Pierre Rosanvallon among others. The second left argued against the ‘statism’ of the François Mitterrand’s French Socialist Party (PS) and the French Communist Party (PCF), in its place they proposed an emphasis on autogestion (local workers control), an extension of civil liberties and a rehabilitation of the idea of the market and entrepreneurship on the left. Foucault participated in the second left’s ‘Vivre a gauche’ forum and praised Rosanvallon’s New Political Culture as a ‘breakthrough.’[1] Foucault would also support key thinkers from the anti-Marxist ‘new philosophers,’ praising André Glucksmann’s Masters Thinkers and François Furet’s books on the French Revolution.[2]  In 1977, Foucault participated in a televised discussion with leading ‘new philosophers’ Glucksmann, Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau at the invitation of Maurice Clavel.[3]  

The Birth of Biopolitics lectures

Foucault’s political positions are consistent with the theoretical discussion of economic liberalism in The Birth of Biopolitics lectures in 1978-79. Rather than discuss why Foucault took up the positions he did, there is still a debate about what he said and meant in these lectures. Layers of secondary interpretation have twisted many of Foucault’s positions into the opposite of what he intended. Foucault described liberalism as:

‘veridiction of the market, limitation by the calculation of governmental utility, and now the position of Europe as a region of unlimited economic development in relation to the world market. This is what I have called liberalism.’[4]

‘the market constitutes a site of verdiction, I mean a site of verification-falsification for governmental practice’[5]

Liberalism is a ‘consumer of freedom, it is a consumer of freedom inasmuch as it can only function insofar as a number of freedoms actually exist: freedom of the market, freedom to buy and sell, the free exercise of property rights, freedom of discussion, possible freedom of expression, and so on’

‘It consumes freedom, which means that it must produce it’

‘Liberalism formulates simply the following: I am going to produce what you need to be free’[6]

Foucault praises Ordoliberal thinkers and the post-Second World War German Social Democratic Party’s (SPD) adoption of the market and their formal rejection of the aim of a socialised economy.

‘consequently, to enter into the political game of the new Germany, the SPD really had to convert to these neo-liberal theses’[7]

Socialism is described as lacking a governmental rationality:

‘Socialism can only be implemented connected up to diverse types of governmentality. It has been connected up to liberal governmentality, and then socialism and its forms of rationality function as counterweights, as a corrective, and a palliative to internal dangers’[8]

Is Foucault then attempting to create and begin to formulate a governmentality for socialism? The answer is no in The Birth of Biopolitics. The governmentality Foucault wants to adopt is an existing one, that is the market economy of liberalism, as it consistent with the politics of his allies in the second left. Rather than formulating a new socialist governmentality Foucault believes ‘we do not have to carry on with capitalism so much as invent a new one.’[9]

Those that believe Foucault is carrying out an immanent critique of neoliberalism have difficulty finding the critical element of his presentation. Foucault distances himself from the ‘usual’ critics of Neoliberalism that it is just:

 ‘Adam Smith revived; second, it is the market society that was decoded and denounced in Book 1 of Capital; and third, it is the generalisation of state power, that is to say, it is Solzhenitsyn on a world scale’[10]

‘Neoliberalism is something else’[11]

The last lectures of The Birth of Biopolitics focus on the utility of Gary Becker’s concept of ‘human capital’ against Marx’s notion of labour-power. Human capital is human behaviour viewed as profit and loss maximisation. Formal education should be seen as an investment in yourself as business, for which you should be rewarded. Foucault describes the concept of human capital as the adoption of:

‘the view of the worker and, for the first time, ensure that the worker is not present in the economic analysis as an object – the object of supply and demand in the form of labour power – but as an active economic subject’[12]

Foucault visits Japan in 1978 with The Birth of Biopolitics lectures being delivered in 1979, his frank discussion of political issues in interviews and lectures in Japan brings greater clarity to his theoretical stances at the time, particularly around his break from Marxist concepts.

The Japan Lectures and Marxism

Foucault’s discussions of Marxism range from asides, short answers to specific questions and lengthier analysis, almost all the references to Marxism theoretically and as a movement are negative. Foucault frequently explains his positions contrasting it to Marxism, in his interview with Shiguéhiko Hasumi, Marxism is described as developing in the 19^th century as a response to poverty and economic inequality. Marxism could not explain fascism or the behaviour of the Soviet Union, nor could it explain why France maintained colonialism in Algeria beyond economic reason. Foucault sees this as evidence of power operating beyond an economic perspective, power getting ‘carried away’ with itself.[13] At a conference he would say rather than power deriving from the state, the state’s power is based on local power relations[14] for example ‘in the USSR the ruling class changed but the old power relations remained.’[15] Foucault says ‘many interesting people’ attempted a Trotskyist critique of the ‘bureaucratic phenomenon’ well before 1956 but this analysis relied on seeing power as derived from a ‘single origin like the state and the bureaucracy of the state’.[16]

In his interview with Nemoto and Watanabe Foucault describes his idea of everyday struggle as one that does not aim to ‘seize power’[17], later adding that ‘in Europe the so-called far left parties have what you might call a propensity to fail.’[18] Adopting a tactical vision from Marx in which:

revolutionary force is all the more important as discontent increases’ means that the far-left do not want their campaigns to be successful. If the campaign is successful, it means it has been reincorporated into the system.[19]

Foucault understands the Narita affair in which there was mass opposition to the building of an airport, despite the large-scale involvement of Trotskyist militants and the Japanese Communist Party, as an example of immediate struggles that are not economically based but rather are a rejection of an imposition of power:

These struggles are not following the great Leninist principle of the main enemy or the weakest link. These immediate struggles no longer await a future moment that would be the revolution, that would be liberation, that would be the disappearance of classes, that would be the withering away of the State as the solution of problems.[20]

We are perhaps living the end of a historical period that, since 1789 to 1793, has been, at least in the West, dominated by the monopoly of revolution, in conjunction with all the effects of despotism that may be implicated[21] feminist, ecological, medicine, health and death all struggles that are ‘altogether different from the aims involved in revolutionary struggles.[22]

Foucault’s interview with Yoshimoto subtitled How to Get Rid of Marxism is the formers most in-depth engagement with the topic of Marxism in the Japan Lectures. In the interview, Marxism is described as having ‘coercive effects’ and contributing to the ‘impoverishment of the political imagination.’[23] Marxism is a set of ‘power relations’ as a ‘scientific discourse, Marxism as prophecy, Marxism as state philosophy or class ideology.[24] The inability for Marxism to exist without a political party is a problem as it leads to the marginalisation of the issues of medicine, sexuality, reason and madness.[25] The fact that Foucault was a militant alongside a Marxist group (GP) in the early 1970s that helped initiate struggles around migrants, prisoners, students and mental illness seems long forgotten, along with the fact that the modern French feminist and gay liberation movements arose from French Maoist circles. Foucault definitively states:

‘when one thinks of the critical activities going on every day in the countries of Eastern Europe, the need to be done with Marxism seems obvious to me.’[26]

Beyond Neoliberalism and back to May 68?

In my paper The Last Foucault: In and beyond neoliberal logic at the London Historical Materialism conference in 2023 I described Foucault’s last collège de France lectures on the ‘Subject’ and ‘Truth’ from 1979 to 1984 as grappling with the role of the intellectual in society, particularly in the context of the election of Mitterrand’s French Socialist Party and the widespread discourse of ‘anti-totalitarianism’ of the period. Foucault’s concepts of ‘care of the self’ within the subject and truth lectures have convinced some of his readers to mistakenly believe this is a continuation of a neoliberal promotion of the ‘entrepreneur of the self’, a completely different concept. The care of the self is about being fit to rule others, the examples Foucault draws upon are Marcus Aurelius’s Stoic routines and Plato’s account of Socrates advice to the young aristocrat Alcibiades. Foucault in The Courage of Truth lectures states ‘the care of others thus coincides exactly with the care of the self.’[27]

Surprisingly the Japan Lectures contain the outlines of the argument Foucault would make in his last years in the subject and truth lectures. At the Ashai Kodo conference Foucault concisely describes the three roles of the anti-despotic philosopher in Ancient Greece:

The philosopher has been anti-despotic in defining the system of laws according to which power had to be exercised in a city, in defining the legal limits within which it could be wielded without danger: this is the role of the philosopher-legislator. This was Solon’s role.

The second possibility: the philosopher can be anti-despotic in making himself the counsellor of the prince, in teaching him this wisdom, that virtue, or that truth that would have the capacity to keep him, when it is his turn to govern, from abusing his power. This is the philosopher-pedagogue: it is Plato making pilgrimage to Dionysius of Syracuse.

The third possibility: the philosopher can be anti-despotic in saying that, after all, whatever abuses power may level at him or at others, the philosopher, insofar as he is a philosopher, remains, both in his philosophical practice as in his philosophical thought, independent in relation to power. He laughs at power. This would be the position of the cynics.[28]

In his last Collège de France lecture series The Courage of Truth (1983-84), Foucault chose the cynics as a model for the intellectual. The cynics live a ‘true life’ that is ‘a radically and paradoxically other life,’[29] ‘the militant life, the life of battle and struggle against and for self, against and for others.’[30]  Rather than the militancy of the sect, the cynics practiced ‘militancy in the open’[31] ‘in the world and against the world.’[32] The cynic knows who its enemy is, sees themselves as a soldier and lives a ‘style of existence.’[33] Although a minority of the population, the cynic espouses an ‘ethical universality’[34] that does not address humankind but an individual bond with individuals.[35] Foucault potentially talking to himself declares ‘you will not be Solon, you must be Socrates.’[36] The emphasis is on Socrates last statement before his execution (Apology) wherein he says he spent his days talking to the citizens of Greece rather than making speeches in the assembly. Foucault makes the parallel between cynicism and revolutionary movements explicit declaring:

Cynicism, the idea of a mode of life as the irruptive, violent, scandalous manifestation of the truth is and was part of revolutionary practice and of the forms taken by revolutionary movements throughout the nineteenth century.[37]

The revolutionary movements Foucault has in mind are predominantly anarchist or thinkers such as Nietzsche that influenced anarchism as stated in The Hermeneutics of the Subject lectures,[38] however in the Courage of the Truth he also speculates in reference to Marxism:

It would be interesting to see how the problem of the style of life was raised in the Communist Party, how it was posed in the 1920s, and how it was gradually transformed, elaborated, modified, and finally reversed.[39]

Conclusion

In the late 1970s atmosphere and ‘new philosopher’ milieu Foucault was embedded in, productive critiques of certain aspects of Marxist theory or practice were largely overlooked for simplistic equations between the writings of Marx and the seeds of the gulag. Rather than producing a balance sheet of the experiences of the ‘Maoist moment’ in May 68 thought and practice, which Foucault was well placed to carry out, he would largely write off Marxism as tainted from the beginning. The Japan Lectures contain many of the errors of future discourse that would come to dominate parts of 1990s Northern academia, including the re-labelling of explicitly Marxist led movements as unconsciously anti-Marxist. While Foucault’s statements on the notion that Marxism only being able to exist in a party form do not further longstanding debates on the organisational question and the legacy of revolutionary parties. Foucault’s last Collège de France lectures in 1983-84 marks a return to one of the two central ethos’s of post-May 68 thought, the revolutionising of everyday life, the other being the seizure of power. The militant’s style of existence is not a total island of ‘anarchism’ cut off from society, but the emphasis is on an anarchist way of everyday relations and selective interventions with and against the world. Foucault does not critically engage with the experiences of a section of militants of May 68 attempting to implement local anarchist experiments (with contradictory results), that had many parallels to how he sees the Cynic life. Ever alert to new trends of thought and movements, Foucault is not a thinker that usually explicitly revisits prior periods of thought. Foucault was sympathetic to neoliberalism for a time but ended up somewhere else entirely, a return to the revolutionising of everyday life and strident opposition to the seizure of power. Foucault’s last lecture was with and against May 68 thought.

Footnotes

[1] Mitchell Dean & Daniel Zamora, The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution, London: Verso, 2021, P. 70

[2] Mitchell Dean & Daniel Zamora, The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution, London: Verso, 2021, P. 47

[3] Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 68 and Contemporary French Thought, London: McGill-Queens University Press, 2017, P. 274

[4] Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-79, London: Palgrave, 2010, P. 61

[5] Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-79, London: Palgrave, 2010, P. 32

[6] Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-79, London: Palgrave, 2010, P. 63

[7] Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-79, London: Palgrave, 2010, P. 90

[8] Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-79, London: Palgrave, 2010, P. 92

[9] Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-79, London: Palgrave, 2010, P. 167

[10] Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-79, London: Palgrave, 2010, P. 130

[11] Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-79, London: Palgrave, 2010, P. 130

[12] Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-79, London: Palgrave, 2010, P. 223

[13] Michel Foucault, The Japan Lectures: A Transnational Critical Encounter, London: Routledge, 2024, P. 28

[14] Michel Foucault, The Japan Lectures: A Transnational Critical Encounter, London: Routledge, 2024, P. 56

[15] Michel Foucault, The Japan Lectures: A Transnational Critical Encounter, London: Routledge, 2024, P. 57

[16] Michel Foucault, The Japan Lectures: A Transnational Critical Encounter, London: Routledge, 2024, P. 35

[17] Michel Foucault, The Japan Lectures: A Transnational Critical Encounter, London: Routledge, 2024, P. 51

[18] Michel Foucault, The Japan Lectures: A Transnational Critical Encounter, London: Routledge, 2024, P. 51

[19] Michel Foucault, The Japan Lectures: A Transnational Critical Encounter, London: Routledge, 2024, P. 52

[20] Michel Foucault, The Japan Lectures: A Transnational Critical Encounter, London: Routledge, 2024, P. 71

[21] Michel Foucault, The Japan Lectures: A Transnational Critical Encounter, London: Routledge, 2024, P. 72

[22] Michel Foucault, The Japan Lectures: A Transnational Critical Encounter, London: Routledge, 2024, P. 77

[23] Michel Foucault, The Japan Lectures: A Transnational Critical Encounter, London: Routledge, 2024, P. 130

[24] Michel Foucault, The Japan Lectures: A Transnational Critical Encounter, London: Routledge, 2024, P. 132

[25] Michel Foucault, The Japan Lectures: A Transnational Critical Encounter, London: Routledge, 2024, P. 130

[26] Michel Foucault, The Japan Lectures: A Transnational Critical Encounter, London: Routledge, 2024, P. 134

[27] Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: Collège de France 1983-1984, London: Palgrave, 2011, P. 313

[28] Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: Collège de France 1983-1984, London: Palgrave, 2011, P. 61

[29] Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: Collège de France 1983-1984, London: Palgrave, 2011, P. 245

[30] Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: Collège de France 1983-1984, London: Palgrave, 2011, P. 283

[31] Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: Collège de France 1983-1984, London: Palgrave, 2011, P. 284

[32] Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: Collège de France 1983-1984, London: Palgrave, 2011, P. 285

[33] Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: Collège de France 1983-1984, London: Palgrave, 2011, P. 184

[34] Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: Collège de France 1983-1984, London: Palgrave, 2011, P. 301

[35] Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: Collège de France 1983-1984, London: Palgrave, 2011, P. 302

[36] Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: Collège de France 1983-1984, London: Palgrave, 2011, P. 81

[37] Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: Collège de France 1983-1984, London: Palgrave, 2011, P. 183

[38] Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Self: Collège de France 1981-1982 New York: Picador, 2005, P. 251

[39] Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: Collège de France 1983-1984, London: Palgrave, 2011, P. 186

References

Bourg, J. (2017). From Revolution to Ethics: May 68 and Contemporary French Thought, London: McGill-Queens University Press

Dean, M. & Zamora, D. (2021). The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution, London: Verso

Foucault, M. (2010). The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-79, London: Palgrave

Foucault, M. (2011). The Courage of Truth: Collège de France 1983-1984, London: Palgrave

Foucault, M. (2024). The Japan Lectures: A Transnational Critical Encounter, London: Routledge