From: "Stephen D'Arcy" <darcy-AT-chass.utoronto.ca>
Subject: Re: Individualising effects of power
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 1996 16:44:05 -0400 (EDT)


Ross writes:
> 
> I would like to start a new thread in this list,

Under the circumstances, I'm sure I speak for all but one person on
the list when I say: THANK-YOU.

> namely, the individualising
> effects of power.  It blows away the Marxist concept of the 'class
> struggle'.   I'll give you an example.  In a recent study of redundant
> workers, there is an individisible connection between thought and action;
> how human beings   see themselves  positioned in the world and ideas that
> have been psychologically inculcated  over time.  When individuals in the
> study were repeatedly turned down for jobs, damage to the self had already
> been legitimised through historical conditioning.  What is more, pressure to
> believe they were inadequate was intensified through the individualising
> effects of power  which pits potentially redundant and workers actually
> redundant against one another.  Thus they became pawns to classify,
> categorise and control.
> 
> [etc.]

Ross,

The examples you give may well suggest that what Foucault says about
"the individualising effects of power" has some "empirical" support.
Fair enough.  The examples also suggest, more generally, that Foucault
has some interesting things to say, and that those interested in
social theory (etc.) ought to take his ideas seriously.  I would be
the LAST person to deny that.

However, you haven't made it clear why you think that the ideas in
question "blow away the Marxist concept of the 'class struggle,'"
which you even enclose in scare-quotes (perhaps suggesting that there
is no such thing).

First of all, do you really think that an account that tells people,
as you put it, how "they became pawns" is capable of replacing an
account of how it is that groups of people act collectively (as they
sometimes do) to radically transform political and economic
structures?

(By the way, I think Foucault's notion of power, which explicitly
entails that power cannot operate except in a context of antagonistic
interaction -- i.e., in the face of resistance --, specifically rules
out the idea that human beings can be made pawns, strictly speaking;
but either way, Foucault does not seem to offer a competing theory of
social-structural change, "a theory of social evolution," as Habermas
calls historical materialism).

Finally, I will ask a very specific question: do you think that any
conception OTHER THAN the Marxist conception of class struggle can
offer a credible accout of what was happening in France, from October
to December of 1995, when literally MILLIONS of French workers
participated in a strike wave, supported by millions more who joined
them in hundreds of mass demonstrations.  This wave of POLITICAL
STRIKES, in which millions of workers attempted to use their potential
power to stop production as a means to enforce changes to a government
austerity plan, is readily intelligible in Marxist terms.  If any 
perspective hopes not only to supplement Marxism, but to "blow it
away," it would have to be capable of explaining the French strike
wave at least as well as Marxism can.  Nothing in your post indicated
how Foucault's insights into the "individualising effects of power"
were capable of doing any such thing.

(Marx's idea, of course, is that the events like those in France are
"political struggles, i.e., struggles of class against class," and
that it is struggles of THAT KIND that account for radical
social-structural changes, such as the transition from Feudalism to
Capitalism.  Strictly speaking, Marx had a much more complicated
theory, which distinguished between the "immediate" cause -- class
struggle -- and the cause "in the last analysis" -- the dialectic of
forces and relations of production.  But I don't think that these
matters are relevant here).

The question is: can we dispense with the concept of class struggle,
even in our efforts to understand CURRENT EVENTS (e.g., the USA's
"Contract with America", the French strikes, and so on)?

Steve D.
SoBlo
Toronto
(C.U.P.E. Local 3902!!!)