Michel Foucault, Neoliberalism

and the Failures of the Left

Rather than criticizing and working against the rise of a free marketoriented liberalism, sociologist Daniel Zamora argues that Foucault
was actually somewhat sympathetic to it.
http://inthesetimes.com/article/19246/foucault-and-the-failure-of-the-left

The work of the late French social theorist and philosopher Michel
Foucault has had a tremendous impact on progressive and leftist
movements in the United States and around the world in recent
decades. Though Foucault's heyday was in the 1980s and '90s, he is still
a staple of undergraduate reading lists and his work has helped shape
the common sense that guide the work of many 21st-century activists.
His work is generally seen as essential in order to understand
neoliberalism and criticize its intellectual foundations. But Belgian
sociologist Daniel Zamora has raised some doubts about Foucaults
relation with neoliberalism in the late 1970s. In this interview, Zamora
coeditor of Foucault and Neoliberalism with Michael C. Behrentunderlies
the overlap between Foucault's views at that moment and the rise of
neoliberalism in France. Rather than opposing it, Zamora argues,
Foucault was seduced by some of the key ideas of neoliberal ideology.
Zamora was interviewed by Dave Zeglen, a graduate student in Cultural
Studies at George Mason University.
Let us begin with your primary thesis: How did Foucault understand
neoliberalism, and how did he actually position himself within the shifting
political currents of the 1970s? How was his thinking shifting on questions
related to the social democratic welfare state? What factors contributed to
Foucaults opposition to socialism and the state in France?

These are some of the most important questions to ask in order to

understand Foucaults relationship to neoliberalism. And we cant
understand that relationship without placing Foucaults work within the
French context of the mid-1970s. More specifically, Foucaults work is
situated in the conflict between Old and New Lefts, in the post-1968
Lefts increasing opposition to the postwar Left.
It is not difficult to discern Foucaults animosity toward the post-war Left
project. Obviously he was very hostile to Marxism. In an interview for a
Japanese journal titled How to Get Rid of Marxism, he openly
described Marxism as nothing more than a modality of power in an
elementary sense. He elaborates: the fact that Marxism has
contributed to and still contributes to the impoverishment of the political
imaginary, this is our starting point.
In another interview with the new philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy, he
discusses the question of revolution. For Foucault in 1977, the return of
the revolution, thats our problem () You know it very well: its the
desire itself of the revolution that is a problem. This assertion is very
interesting, as Foucault not only dismisses the idea of revolution but also
makes a subtle reference to its return in the context of the union of the
Left and its expected victory in the legislative elections of 1978.
At the time (1972 to 1981), the Left was united under a union of the
Left that included the French Communist Party, the Socialist Party, and
the MRG (mouvement des radicaux de gauche). All three parties agreed
on the common program in 1972; it called for nationalization of the
banking system, reduction of the workweek, a broad expansion of social
security, an increase in wages, etc.
In that context, the common program was seen by its proponents as a
way to induce structural economic changes in Frances class relations
and ultimately as a way to open the path to socialism.
So, Colin Gordon is correct in writing that Foucault was obviously not a
Marxist or a supporter of any existing model of revolutionary socialism.

But what he and many others refuse to admit (or are ignorant of) is that
Foucault was not only opposed to Marxism but also to the much wider
political vision. Its not only about Marxism as a political doctrine, but,
more generally, as the symbol of the political project of the postwar
Lefta project that included strong labor unions and militant socialist
organizations.
Thus, what Foucault and many intellectuals at that time were struggling
against was not only a certain kind of socialism abroad (e,g., the Soviet
Union) but also a certain kind of socialism in France. Thats what he
meant when he asserted in 1977 that all that the socialist tradition has
produced in history is to condemn. And thats also the main reason why
Foucault did not vote for Mitterrand in 1981, as his close friend and
historian Paul Veyne notes.
To understand the full force of this you have to realize that this election
was not seen at the time as a standard choice between the lesser of two
evils. Just the opposite: Mitterrand had intense support from 70 percent
of the working class who saw in his election a real opportunity for real
social transformation. So its really striking that not only did Foucault not
vote for Mitterrand, he was surprised that Veyne did.
Obviously we now know that the expected transformation did not
happen. But Foucaults vote against Mitterrand in 1981 was about more
than just a vote; it revealed his deep suspicion of the whole project of the
Left after 1945, with its strong state, universal rights, and public services.
The new philosopher Andre Glucksman summarized this sensibility in
The Master Thinkers a book that Foucault endorsed in a long review
and characterized as brilliant: what have we won in replacing a
capitalist with a functionary? In his view, in the long run, nationalization
is domination.
So its in the context of a continual refutation of the old socialism that
neoliberal ideas seemed interesting to Foucault and many other post-68
intellectuals. Neoliberalism afforded them an opportunity to think about
what an anti-statist Left would look like.

This, by the way, also shows us how we should understand one of the
aims of his lectures on the birth of biopolitics. Foucault focused part of
his interest on Valery Giscard DEstaing and Raymond Barres neoliberal
policies, and Helmudt Schmits SPD policies in Germany. This choice of
focus might seem strange for anyone who is interested in the rise of
neoliberal governmentality in the late seventies. Indeed, why is there no
mention of Pinochets brutally violent coup dtat against Allende and the
neoliberal experiment that followed in Chile? Why was he only interested
in a very theoretical version of neoliberalism, without considering any of
the conservative effects that were already plainly visible in Chile and
would soon be on display in Reaganite and Thatcherite revolutions? He
doesnt even discuss Friedrich Hayeks aristocratic understanding of
democracy or Milton Friedmans defense of Pinochets coup.
Serge Audier elucidates one of the reasons for this bias in his last book.
He argues that if Foucault was interested in neoliberalism at that
moment, its in part because of good relations between the neoliberal
government of Valery Giscard Destaing in France and the socialdemocratic government of Schimdt in Germany and what those relations
meant for the future of socialism. As Audier suggests, if Foucault
assumes a very German-centered point of view, its because he is
questioning the destiny of France and of French socialism in 1979: If the
neoliberal policies of Barre and Giscard seem to partially imitate the
social-democratic policy of Schmidt, what then does socialism mean
today?
From this perspective, Foucaults lectures on biopolitics appear to be
deeply concerned with the crisis that faced the union of the Left at that
moment (they lost the elections of 1978) and the whole project of the
postwar Left.
Without understanding the French political and intellectual context of that
time it is thus very difficult to grasp the complete meaning of Foucaults
last decade of work (or at least his reflections on neoliberalism and
politics). Lets not forget that at that moment, he thought that the French

Left had no proper governmentality. In other words, the socialists

hadnt invented a governmental rationality of their own. From that
perspective, neoliberalism was thus attractive for a rethinking of the
Lefta rethinking that would put aside all his ideas of revolution and of
socializing the means of production.
You argue that one of the main consequences that emerges out of
Foucaults interest in neoliberalism is that he helped displace the centrality
of the working class with the new plebians, contributing to the
contemporary Lefts lumpen-idealism (which we see in Antonio Negri,
David Harvey, Slavoj iek, Herbert Marcuse, et al). What are the stakes
of this displacement for you?
This shift of attention to the margins of wage-labor was very strong after
May 1968. It is well known, for example, that what Marx called the
lumpenproletariat and its struggles were very important for the Maoist
movement, especially La Gauche Proltarienne. This group had a
significant cultural impact on the intellectual field between 1968 and
1973 and was very active in campaigning on behalf of immigrants,
undocumented workers, and prisoners.
For the French Maoists, as Daniel DefertMichel Foucaults
companionhas said, new principles of identification were replacing the
unity that working class culture had created in the 19th
century. Marginal or excluded groups were said to be in a relation of
autonomy from the field of proletarian struggles.
These new struggles fell within what Foucault called in 1972 an entirely
new phenomenon, which is related to the appearance of the new
plebeians who constitute the non-proletarianized faction of the working
class. These struggles, which he characterized as revolts of conduct,
became more important as Foucaults analysis shifted to the study of
governmentality and biopower. For him, the problem was no longer
about exploitation or inequality but about micropowers and diffuse
systems of domination, more about being less governed rather than
taking power.

As Foucault himself wrote, the problem is essentially power itself, much

more than anything like economic exploitation, much more than anything
that looks like an inequality. The central question of those struggles is
the fact that a given power is imposed and that its very imposition is
unbearable.
The obvious problem is that two incompatible versions of a Left politics
emerged out of this shift. One version aimed to abolish difference and
the class structure itself, and thus did not exclusively focus on the way
power was exercised. The question was not about brutality or the
normative effects of exploitation but about the very fact that there was
exploitation and inequality.
Foucaults approach was emblematic of the other version. His analysis
focused on the process that distributes the effects of inequality rather
than those who produce it in the first place. Forms of discrimination,
stigmatization, and exclusion from the labor market clearly structure the
organization of class, but they produce neither unemployment nor
unstable employment.
The problem that I am attempting to underscore is not that a range of
previously ignored forms of domination have now been recognized, but
the fact that they are increasingly theorized independently of any notion
of exploitation. So, far from drawing a theoretical perspective that
examined the relationship between exclusion and exploitation, Foucault
gradually saw the two as opposed, even contradictory, principles.
It is this shift of the locus of political action from the working class to
more marginal groups that would lead Sartre to speak of essentially
moral gestures and the emergence of a moral Marxism. Its moral
dimension lay in its concern with minorities, marginals, and the
excluded, and thus with issues of domination and discrimination. Thats
precisely what the historian Julian Bourg saw in those actions: a turn
to ethics on the French Left; a turn that not only transformed the main

subject of social change, but also revolutionized what was the very
notion of revolution itself.
In the long term, this change will lead to the substitution of human
rights for class struggle. This later struggle will be, in many ways,
perfectly compatible with capitalism. In this regard its interesting to
mention a 1981 text of Foucault titled Against governments, human
rights. In that essay, he praises the action of NGOs like Amnesty
International and sees in those humanitarian organizations a new
political form of resistance against governmentality and an alternative to
the state for political action.
So to revisit your first question: Foucaults focus on forms of
normalization produced by the state and oppressive institutions will also
be a reason for Foucaults interest in neoliberalism. He thought that
neoliberalism represented an interesting new form of governmentality, a
form that was less concerned with how people behaved. He thought that
neoliberal governmentality, in that perspective, could be less normative.
But lets not forget two things. First, Foucault did not see neoliberalism
as an attempt to create a mass consumption homogenized society (this
is an implicit critique of Debord or Marcuses ideas); rather, he
understood neoliberalism as a governmentality that produces difference.
In his lecture on German neoliberalism, Foucault asserts that it involves,
on the contrary, obtaining a society that is not orientated towards the
commodity and the uniformity of the commodity, but towards the
multiplicity and differentiation of enterprises.
Second, Valery Giscard DEstaings arrival to power in 1974, and his
accompanying neoliberal policies, were viewed with a certain interest by
the post-1968 Left. His liberal reforms on youth, prisoners, women and
immigrants were seen by Foucault as the sign of the development of a
new art of governmentality in France that could free the Left from the
state.

Sociologist Loic Wacquant (in your volume) and many others argue that
the Americas mass incarceration problem is an important issue for the
Left since U.S. prisons contain the deproletarianized portions of the
working class that might otherwise become disorderly or politically
problematic. Given that the U.S. incarcerates far more people than any
other country in both per capita and raw numbers, couldnt the new
plebians be a fairly important group of people for the Left to put their
energy into helping?
This question is at the heart of the decline of the Left since the crisis of
the seventies. Its not only mass incarcerationwe dont have it in
Europebut the growth of unemployment in the industrialized world (the
consequences of which the American system deals with punitively, we
might say). As income inequality rose in our countries, so did inequality
of unemployment. By inequality of unemployment I mean the ratio of
risk for the most wealthy to fall into unemployment as compared to those
at the bottom of the distribution of income.
Contrary to ideas popularized by Ulrich Beck and Zygmunt Bauman, the
distribution of riskat least for unemploymentlooks a lot like the
evolution of the distribution of wealth inequalities that was recently
popularized by Thomas Piketty. That is to say, since the seventies,
unemployment has been highly concentrated in a specific fraction of the
workforce. There is no such thing as a generalization of risk. Not
coincidentally, this errant notion that class inequalities no longer
mattered provided the context for understanding the social question
more and more as a problem of exclusion rather than exploitation.
The effects of this development are quite problematic because the more
the left understood these problems in moral and ethical terms, the more
they disconnected them from the general question of capitalism.
Consequently, the Right (which also has a moral narrative) started
winning important factions of the working class with a narrative on the
welfare queen, the privileged living on the dole, and an overarching
narrative of government dependency. Rather than finding a way to

overcome this strong division within the workforce, the Left transformed
this sociological division into a political (or better yet ethical) program.
As the sociologist Michle Lamont has shown, this transformation
reshaped the symbolic boundaries of the working class, making ethnoracial boundaries more salient and increasing the antagonisms between
these two political factions of the working class. So if youre right to say
that the negative competition between these two factions of the working
class is partially responsible for the retreat of many social rights, we
have also to admit that the retreat from class politics in favor of a
defense of those fragments of the working class who were excluded
from wage labor wasnt the solution.
What we need now is a program and a strategy that can unite these two
factions. As Fredric Jameson has suggested, we need to think of
unemployment as a category of exploitation and not just as a precarious
status or a separate situation in relation to the exploitation of the
salariat. We can no longer separate discussion of the excluded from an
analysis the structural necessity for capitalism to create a reserve army
of the unemployed and to exclude whole sections of society (or here, in
globalization, whole sections of the world population).
And this perspective, for me, implies the necessity of rehabilitating
universal programs and rights that could at the same time address the
questions of the unequal effects of the market while also beginning to
decommodify important parts of our lives. Its not about making the
market more functional; its about limiting the market itself.
Speaking of policies intended to mitigate the unequal effects of the market,
in your chapter Foucault, The Excluded, and the Neoliberal Erosion of the
Welfare State, you mention that Milton Friedmans negative income tax
has been adapted by the New Left, notably by Andr Gorz, in the form of
universal basic income (UBI). This revolutionary reform sounds in line
with your sentiment about solutions that grow organically out of the
welfare state. Does UBI have the ability to help separate wages from labor,

as some have claimed? Would it be a game-changer in labor-capital

relations?
The question of basic income is a complex one, partly because of its
many different versions. Depending on the amount or the way its
implemented, it could have very different outcomes. But there are in my
view two main reasons why it cant be, in any way, a Left policy.
First, it is impossible to create a generous version of universal basic
income without cutting social spending. For example, consider a simple
mathematical formulation for a basic income scheme: only 1,000 dollars
for Americans 18 years old and above. Obviously, you cant choose not
to work with only 1,000 dollars per month if you want a decent life for
you and your family. So this would essentially become a government
subsidy for low-wage industries. The reality is that a version of UBI in
which you could choose not to work couldnt ever happen under
capitalism, it would be too expensive.
Look, this basic scheme of 1,000 dollars would cost more than 2.7 trillion
dollars a year. The total federal budget for social security, Medicaid,
Medicare and all the means-tested programs is about $2.3 trillion. So if
you supply a universal basic income by replacing all those programs,
you get a massive privatization of the public good. All the money that
was hitherto socialized to give social rights will be therefore privatized.
We give people money rather than rights because, of course, as Milton
Friedman would say, they know how to use their money better than the
state. This demise of the idea of public good itself or of socialized
wealth for the common good cannot, in my view, ever lead to social
progress. Obviously we could say that we should finance UBI by new,
very high taxes on income, so we could have both social security and
basic income. But the amount of income tax increase needed to finance
this scheme would be very high.
So why not use that money for free health care, free education, and
public housing instead? Rather than expanding the marketrather than

giving more people the chance to participate in it with basic income

lets instead get some of the most important things in our lives out of the
market.
Second, as Seth Ackerman has pointed out, UBI does not address the
problem of the unequal distribution of work. Indeed, unemployment or
McJobs are not randomly assigned but are distributed in a very
unequal way. For arguments sake, lets say that we did have a UBI that
could enable you to choose not to work and still have a decent quality of
life at the same time (which is very unlikely). This could be a gamechanger but it still assumes that those who are unemployed actually
dont want to work or would be happy not to work. And what if
they do want to work? Why would it be fair that some wont be able to
work and others will?
The idea that we should address the question of unemployment by
reducing the demand for work rather than working for full employment
doesnt offer a solution to why people want to work. It presupposes that
the despair the unemployed feel is just false consciousness that we
could mitigate by promoting non-work. But I think its a weak explanation
of what is at stake with the question of work. As Ackerman argues, so
long as social reproduction requires alienated work, there will always be
this social demand for the equal liability of all to work, and an uneasy
consciousness of it among those who could work but who, for whatever
reason, dont.
That is why I think full employment and reducing work-time are still, in
my view, the most important objectives for any Left politics. Collectively
reducing work time is both politically and socially more preferable than
creating a segment of citizens who are out of work with heavy
consequences for the workers. You can immediately see how this idea
would foster divisions within the working class (and how it has already
done this over the last thirty years).
Perhaps the Democratic primaries played out an opposition between the
radical popular politics that you advocate and the Left version of

neoliberalism that you critique: Democratic socialist candidate Bernie

Sanders called (and is still calling) for universal entitlements, while Hillary
Clinton calls for means-tested programs targeted at poor and
disadvantaged populations.
This campaign is very exciting in many ways. I cant help but note how
difficult it seems in the U.S. to understand the purpose of a universal
program without reducing it to mere economism. It was surprising to
hear Hilary Clinton at one of her events asking, If we broke up the big
banks tomorrow, would that end racism? Her answer is obviously no.
Her remark, and others like it, was obviously an attack on Bernies
program.
This position, in my view, has two major problems. First, the idea that
universal rights have nothing to do with race is in itself ridiculous. How
can universal free healthcare have nothing to do with race in a country
where African Americans and Latinos are disproportionately affected by
poverty? How is the demand for a minimum wage of $15 per hour also
not a race issue? In a country where 54 percent of African-American
workers make less than that, raising the minimum wage would
profoundly affect racial inequality.
But obviously, it seems that only a certain kind of disproportionality
interests Hillary Clinton, and perhaps she thinks that $15 is already too
much for lower-income African-American men and women. The reality is
that she is only concerned about race or gender if it does not affect the
market too much.
The essentially neoliberal idea that the only way to combat racism is
through means-tested policies meshes poorly with political reality. Today
in Europe, the rise of racism corresponds with the decline of the welfare
state and its associated entitlements. The welfare state is not the only
solution to racism, but reducing it (as Bill Clinton did during his
presidency) will only intensify racial inequalities.

In any case, we already know the story of what happened in Europe.

Attacks on universal programs in the seventies under the argument that
they did not help the excluded, that they would give free education to
rich people, or that their aim was to reproduce racist, gendered and
traditional familial structuresarguments that actually were all
addressable under the logic of universal entitlementultimately led to
the defunding of those programs in favor of means-tested policies. And
the resulting means-tested programs represented only a tiny fraction of
what was cut from the original programs.
Furthermoreand this is importantthe development of means-tested
policies makes it much more difficult to generate public support for those
programs in the long term. Many studies have shown that the more a
program is associated with a defined group, the less the general public
will support the program. Rather than being more efficient means of
redistribution than the universal programs of the post-war period, a lot of
means-tested entitlements created after the seventies undermined the
idea of redistribution itself. The point is to give everyone a stake in social
security, public health, and education rights. The point is to pursue goals
that promote a broad sense of social solidarity.
And there you have the crux of the matter, and what makes this primary
season so exciting. What we need today are not programs designed to
make the market more efficient and just for equal opportunity, but
programs designed to enact real change through the decommodification
of housing, education, and health.
This interview first appeared at the George Mason University Cultural Studies
Program's Edges blog.