Date: Sat, 20 Sep 1997 10:16:06 -0500
From: "Daniel F. Vukovich" <vukovich-AT-students.uiuc.edu>
Subject: Re: Foucault, Marx, Dictatorship, etc.


Stephen, or whomever:

Can you post the cite (via list or personally) of the printed version of
the Chomsky/Foucault debate?  Liked those quotes.....

p.s.  Steve and John: I think its important to remember that M. L. King was
a proud and fervent *socialist*, not a "liberal." Not just at some
imaginary level, either.  Remember where he was murdered?  In other words,
liberalism/socialism are not necessarily, mutually exclusive.  Those recent
MF quotes certainly imply this.
The one may well imply or require the other.  

Best,




At 10:43 PM 9/19/97 -0400, you wrote:
>
> As for the idea that everyone who advocates proletarian dictatorship as a
strategy for achieving a society of free human self-development
>must be in the grip of some cult of purification or must somehow be
racist, I defer on this question to Foucault:
>
>"When the proletariat takes power, it may be quite possible that the
proletariat will exert towards the classes over which it has just
>triumphed, a violent, dictatorial and even bloody power.  I can't see what
objection one could make to this.  But if you ask me what would be the case
if the proletariat exerted bloody, tyrannical and unjust
>power towards itself [i.e., toward working people], then I would say that
this could only occur if the proletariat hadn't really taken power, but
that a class outside the proletariat, a group of people inside the
proletariat, a bureaucracy or petit bourgeois elements had
>taken power." (MF, in his debate with Chomsky)
>
>Here Foucault offers an "essentialist" account of worker's power ("the
dictatorship of the proletariat"), and thus rejects the idea that any
red-flag-flying dictatorship counts as a dictatorship of the
>proletariat.  He agrees with Marx that one must look beyond favoured
public self-descriptions in order to discern the actual character of a
social order.  One only counts a social order as a proletarian 
>dictatorship if it is a social order in which workers are in control of
their workplaces, their communities, their relationships and their projects
of self-invention.  
>
>Foucault continues: "What the proletariat will achieve by expelling the
class which is at present in power and by taking over power itself, is
precisely the suppression of the power of class in general."  That is, it
is not "purity" that one seeks to attain through the suppression of
exploiting classes, but liberation from
>what Marx called "the ossified particularizations of the capitalist
division of labour."  That is, one seeks to free oneself, along with one's
fellow workers, from a society in which "each person has a particular,
exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him or
>her and from which he or she cannot escape" (Marx, GERMAN IDEOLOGY). Thus,
at least for Marx and Foucault, the dictatorship of the proletariat is
desired, not for the sake of purification, but because the suppression of
exploiting classes is necessary if we are to create
>for ourselves what Marx calls a "communist society, where nobody has one
exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch
[of activity] he or she wishes" (GERMAN IDEOLOGY). 
> 
>Steve D'Arcy
>New Socialist Group (Toronto)
>(Check out our web page, if you want to read a "real" socialist
>publication:  http://www.web.ca/~newsoc)
>
>
Daniel Vukovich
English; Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign