The Productive Subject

viewpointmag.com/2015/10/31/the-productive-subject/

The Productive Subject Pierre Macherey October 31, November 1,

2015 2015

It is impossible at the present time to write history without using a whole range of concepts directly
or indirectly linked to Marx’s thought and situating oneself within a horizon of thought which has
been defined and described by Marx. One might even wonder what difference there could
ultimately be between being a historian and being a Marxist. 1

Power: From Politics to the Economy

In the concluding section to The Will to Knowledge, Foucault explains what led him to
consider power, as it exists today, not from a negative perspective – as a constraint that is
initially juridical in form – but from a positive one, inasmuch as power relies on mechanisms
that materially organize and even help to “produce” human life, instead of imposing
boundaries on it. This idea is at the very core of his conception of “biopower.” As he writes
about it:
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 This biopower was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the
latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of
production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes. But this was
not all it required; it also needed the growth of both these factors, their reinforcement as well as
their availability and docility; it had to have methods of power capable of optimiz​ing forces,
aptitudes, and life in general without at the same time making them more difficult to control. If the
develop​ment of the great instruments of the state, as institutions of power, ensured the maintenance
of production relations, the rudiments of anatomo- and biopolitics, created in the eigh​teenth century
as techniques of power present at every level of the social body and utilized by very diverse
institutions (the family and the army, schools and the police, individual medicine and the
administration of collective bodies), ope​rated in the sphere of economic processes, their
development, and the forces working to sustain them. They also acted as factors of segregation and
social hierarchization, exerting their influence on the respective forces of both these move​ments,
guaranteeing relations of domination and effects of hegemony. The adjustment of the accumulation
of men to that of capital, the joining of the growth of human groups to the expansion of productive
forces and the differential alloca​tion of profit, were made possible in part by the exercise of
biopower in its many forms and modes of application. The investment of the body, its valorization,
and the distributive management of its forces were at the time indispensable. 2

To put it schematically, Foucault explains in this passage the need to rethink power by
freeing it from the grip of politics, so as to bring it closer to the concrete level of the
economy; an economy that is primarily concerned with the “management” of life, bodies
and their “powers” – a term that persistently recurs here – even before having as its focus
the value of traded goods within an economy of things. Furthermore, for Foucault, it is
important to restore a historical dimension to this new understanding of power, which he
does by relating it to the development of capitalism and the specific social relations of
production set in place in the context of the Industrial Revolution. Although the term “class”
is not overtly mentioned, it is clearly implied with the reference in the above passage to the
“factors of segregation and social hierarchization, exerting their influence on the respective
forces of both these move​ments, guaranteeing relations of domination and effects of
hegemony,” and “the joining of the growth of human groups to the expansion of productive
forces and the differential allocation of profit.” Foucault appears here to almost flirt with
Marx’s analyses in Capital, which he reconciles with his attempt to view power from a
positive and “productive” perspective.

Coming back to this point in a lecture given in Bahia in 1976, published under the evocative
title “The Mesh of Power,” 3 Foucault explicitly confirms this convergence. There, he writes:

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 How may we attempt to analyze power in its positive mechanisms? It appears to me that we may
find, in a certain number of texts, the fundamental elements for an analysis of this type. We may
perhaps find them in Bentham, an English philosopher from the end of the 18th and beginning of
the 19th century, who was basically the great theoretician of bourgeois power, and we may of
course also find these elements in Marx, essentially in the second volume of Capital. It’s here, I
think, that we may find some ele​ments that I will use for the analysis of power in its positive
mechanisms.

Foucault means that Bentham and Marx are basically talking about the same thing, even if
they do so in different ways: the emergence of a new configuration of power, coinciding with
the rise of capitalism and the bourgeoisie, did not solely consist of an institutional change or
a seizure of political power, since it fundamentally depended upon an original harnessing of
the forces of life itself, providing the economy with its specific object ‒ an economy whose
transformations have driven social change. This perspective, it could be argued, moves
toward the thesis of the determination by the economy in the last instance, on condition
that the concept is extended to eventually subsume the management or the “production”
(to follow Foucault’s ambiguous term) of life in all of its forms. In the rest of the lecture,
Foucault enumerates the four dimensions that characterize this historical and social shift in
power, and insistently refers to Marx for each one: the dispersion of power into a
multiplicity of heterogeneous powers; its detachment from the state-form; its positive,
rather than prohibitive or repressive, orientation; and finally, its progressive technicization
that developed unplanned through trial and error, and thus was not subordinated to any
devised or preconceived ends. Foucault considers this last point to be the most important: it
appears in the passage from the Will to Knowledge cited above concerning “methods of
power capable of optimiz​ing forces, aptitudes, and life in general without at the same time
making them more difficult to control.”

When Foucault cites the “second volume of Capital,” he clearly has in mind the second
volume of the French edition of Marx’s work, published by Éditions Sociales, which
comprises Parts 4, 5, and 6 of Volume I, the only volume to appear in Marx’s lifetime, the
final editing of Volumes II and III being posthumously completed by Engels. Althusser, in a
preface written for the 1969 publication of Volume I of Capital in Flammarion’s GF book
series, had recommended reading it by starting directly with the second half, that is, by
skipping the first part, as its interpretation poses the most problems, problems only
resolvable when one gets to the end of the work and can grasp the argumentation as a
whole. Foucault seems to go even further, advising that Marx’s book be approached through
the fourth part, which deals with “The Production of Relative Surplus-Value (Mehrwert).”
Indeed, in this passage he sees, appearing for the first time, the elements enabling the
definition of the new configuration of power, heralded from the end of the 18th century by
theorists such as Bentham: namely, “bourgeois power” and its mechanisms, i.e., the specific
procedures pertaining to a technology of power, to whose analysis Marx made the greatest
contribution. By focusing his attention on this part of Capital, Foucault thereby finds a way
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of distancing himself from the polemical presentation provided in The Order Of Things – not
of Marx’s thought stricto sensu, as found in his own texts, but what arose from it in the form
of “orthodox” Marxism, in which Foucault had detected an avatar or epiphenomenon of
political economy in its Ricardian form, full stop. From this point of view, it is as if Foucault
proposed to add a new chapter to the project Althusser himself initiated with the
publication of Reading Capital, which had already begun to challenge traditional, orthodox
Marxism.

What could have interested Foucault in the passages from Capital, beginning with Part 4, to
the degree that he presents them as sources for a positive study of power, rooted in the
development of the economy and its “forces?” We would like to clarify this point by
returning to Marx’s text, which Foucault’s suggestion prompts us to read in a manner that
might be called “symptomatic,” since it is not at all obvious at first glance how one might
derive the principles for an analysis of “power” which is at best implicit in Capital, hovering
in the background. To roughly pose our question: how is it possible to draw the elements of
a theory of power from the explanation of the process of the production of relative surplus
value, without falling into overinterpretation, since the problem of power, if not completely
extraneous to this explanation, is only posed at its margins? Let us say straight away that
this question, which involves the particular relation that power maintains with the economy
of capitalism, and which leads us to bracket the relations that power might otherwise have
with political and state forms, also leads us to take into account and re-establish the primary
importance of the notion Marx himself saw as his principal theoretical innovation, because it
enabled him to radically break with Ricardian economics: the concept of “labor-power,”
whose wording contains precisely a reference to “power,” a reference Foucault attaches
such importance to in his own conception of the new economy of power. This economy, it
can be said, is not an economy of things or goods but an economy of “forces,” and as such,
inextricably an economy of persons; an economy which in reality is closely integrated with
procedures for the subjection of persons and, more precisely, bodies. To put it in Foucault’s
terms, we must ask ourselves how capitalism, by utilizing the exploitation of labor-power,
developed “methods of power capable of optimiz​ing forces, aptitudes, and life in general
without at the same time making them more difficult to govern.” It should be noted that the
aim of such an inquiry is not to demonstrate that Foucault’s ideas are already black and
white in Marx’s text, which would amount to inventing the fiction of a “Marxist” or
“Marxisant” 4 Foucault, as such an heir to Marx, but to enrich our potential understanding of
this text, by clarifying it in light of the hypotheses Foucault advances and thus traversing the
path that leads from Foucault back to Marx in the hope of revealing new aspects of the
latter’s thought and – this is the point that primarily concerns us – reframing the question of
power in particular by shifting it from the level of politics to that of the economy. 5

The System of Wage-Labor and the Exploitation of Labor-

Power
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In order to answer the questions that have just been raised, we must first return to the
theory of wage-labor, which, according to Marx’s presentation, forms the basis of the
capitalist economy and radically distinguishes it from preceding modes of production. We
can summarize this theory by identifying three major traits. In the specific context of
capitalism itself, the production of value-bearing, and thus exchangeable, commodities
depends on the productive consumption of labor-power; this last, labor-power, is the
property of the proletarian, and in exchange for a wage, the capitalist acquires the right to
use it for a certain time within the space of his enterprise, where it is “consumed.” When he
talks about the labor contract, Marx often writes that the proletarian sells its labor-power to
the capitalist, a misleading shorthand if taken literally. What the worker actually alienates in
exchange for a wage is not his labor-power as such, considered in its substance as
something embodied in him, in the sense of being inseparable and even indiscernible from
his bodily existence; if he were to do that, he would become, in a way, a slave to his
employer – he would no longer be free and would lose as a consequence the responsibility
of maintaining this substance that is one with his person. In exchange for the wage, the
proletarian in reality only grants the right to exploit his labor-power for a certain time and in
a certain place: he rents it out, strictly speaking, with the stipulation that the rent he is paid
in exchange under the terms of this transaction is deferred, the wage not being paid until
after use and not before, as is the case in the majority of rental contracts. This provision
renders the exchange relation unequal from the start, insofar as it represents a form of
pressure exercised by the buyer over the seller. It follows that if we want to understand
what wage-labor is, we must carefully distinguish between labor-power as such – what we
have called its substance – and its employment, which is measured in time and space, the
basic unit of this measurement being formally constituted by the working day as organized
within the bounds of the enterprise (at least until the end of the nineteenth century, manual
laborers were generally hired and paid by the day, which distinguished them from salaried
employees).

The wage-labor system, which determines the relation of capital to labor, presupposes the
separation of these two aspects – the substance and its employment – and therefore that
labor-power, as an aptitude borne by the body throughout its life, is in fact separated from
the conditions of its activation as it is implemented within certain time limits and in the
specific space of the enterprise, where the worker must go, bringing his labor-power with
him, so that it can be used under suitable conditions. The existential capacity remains the
inalienable property of the worker who, in exchange for a wage, concedes to his boss the
possibility of using it, of putting it to work for his profit for a certain period within a given
framework. This first point shows that the notion of labor-power, while it initially appears as
a simple, unified, natural given, as a “power” originating in life and the body, is much more
complex; the historical intervention of capitalism and its specific mode of production, it
could be suggested, has the precise effect of complicating this notion by exploiting the
aforementioned division, none of which is at all natural.

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In this respect, Foucault would be entitled to talk of a technical procedure resulting in the
establishment of a power relation: in effect, when he exchanges the employment of his
labor-power for a wage, the worker is only formally “free” to do so. But for the procedure to
work, the worker must actually be made to do so, because in order to survive, he is placed
in the position of a job-seeker; a docile position, it could be said, insofar as it complies with
an “economic” necessity that in the last instance has nothing juridical about it. In other
words, the fact that labor-power is separated from its usage is historically conditioned: it
corresponds to the development of a specific mode of production that depends on the
exploitation of labor-power made possible by this separation, and whose very first effect is
to bind the worker, the bearer of labor-power, to the constraints of the job market. Indeed,
it is not enough that he “has” his labor-power, in the sense that his body belongs to him, as
it still needs to be able to be set to work under certain conditions independent of him.

But that’s not all. At the outset, wage-labor appears as an exchange which, like all exchanges
between commodities, should in principle be an exchange of equal values. What the worker
brings to the labor market is himself: his body, his labor-power, whose usage he alienates;
and, for this, he receives a wage which, in principle, must pay for what he has sold at its
value, corresponding to its maintenance over the period during which he grants its usage.
Maintenance should be understood as everything that enables the regeneration of this
power as is necessary both for the survival of the individual worker, and also that of his
family. Not only is his own labor-power reproduced within the family, but also that of his
offspring; and in paying the wage, the capitalist takes out an option on this latter, thereby
exercising a sort of pre-emptive claim over it. For the system to function normally –
according to rules, thus making it legally indisputable – the commodity must be sold at its
true price, which fluctuates around an average value determined by market conditions, that
is, by variations in the relationship between supply and demand, as is the case for all
market transactions. When he gets his wage, the worker therefore has not been robbed or
plundered, which he implicitly acknowledges by complying with and willingly complying with
the terms of the exchange, and formally speaking does so willingly. Nevertheless, one
cannot leave matters here. For the exchange to effectively take place, it must reflect the
interests that concretely bind the contracting parties. The seller’s interest is completely
clear: the worker transfers the use of his labor-power for the wage because without it, he
could not satisfy his needs or those of his family. If he brings his “commodity” to the labor
market, then it is simply because he cannot do otherwise: it is the condition of his survival.
But in regards to the buyer, who will employ this labor-power to his benefit, things are much
less clear: what the capitalist bought at its value, he in fact intends to exploit, not at equal
value, but in order to derive from it an additional value that will represent his profit, a profit
destined to either increase his production or his wealth; at every turn he wins, and if this
wasn’t the case, the transaction would not interest him the slightest. So there is something
strange, anomalous, in the way that this relation is established. Under the terms of the
exchange between the wage laborer and the person paying him, if one of them, the worker,
strictly speaking, loses nothing, he does not gain anything either, that is, he cannot hope to
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gain more than he has initially pledged; and, if turns out that his wage even marginally
exceeds his real needs, allowing him either to spend wastefully on extras or to save for
himself, a correction almost automatically takes place and his wage drops, eventually
bringing about a fall in the average value of the wages for all the other workers. Whereas,
under the terms of the same exchange, the other party, the buyer, aims not only to recoup
his stake, therefore losing nothing, but to increase it, proving this exchange of equal value,
from which the system of wage-labor derives its legitimacy in terms of law, masks a
conjuring trick which transforms equality into inequality, without, however, formally
violating the commercial right of exchange. What has happened?

To understand this better, it is useful to apply the schema elaborated by Marcel Mauss – in
another context, to account for the mechanism of the gift, an exchange which puts two
parties in a relation of reciprocity – to the labor contract that sanctions the exchange. 6 This
schema is triangular, and articulates three operations: “giving,” “receiving,” and “returning.”
Let us suppose that the labor contract, which is the basis for wage-labor, falls under this
schema. The giver in this case is the person offering the commodity he seeks to part with:
namely, the worker who brings his labor-power, his body – whose employment he rents out
to someone else – to the market. In exchange, the buyer, his future employer, “returns” to
him a value equivalent to the maintenance needs of this power. But, when this buyer is the
capitalist, what is therefore “returned” – recompensed in the form of wages – isn’t exactly
the same thing as what is “received” by the one who, in terms of the exchange, occupies the
position of purchaser: this is the condition for this exchange of equal value to produce
inequality. In other words, what the capitalist acquires in exchange for the wage, and
granting him the right to exploit it according to his own wishes, in a manner consistent with
his interests, is not exactly what has been brought, “given,” or formally sold in exchange for
this wage. Thus, at this level, the previous division reappears, splitting up labor-power into
two sides: one of these is “given” by the seller, the worker, and the other “received” by the
buyer, the capitalist; the aforementioned conjuring trick depends on this splitting, which
turns an exchange of equal values into an operation that benefits only one of the
contracting parties, and is only possible because this exchange occurs within the framework
of a power relation wherein one party, the seller, occupies the subordinate position and the
other, the buyer, the dominant position, enabling the latter to impose their interests. For
the system of wage-labor to take effect, the worker has to be placed in the position of a split
subject who, while remaining entirely in control of his labor-power, alienates only its usage,
which presupposes that this power can effectively be separated from its use.

On this basis, we can evaluate the break introduced in the explanation of the system of
wage-labor by the substitution of labor-power for labor, a break that Marx presents as his
principal theoretical innovation. 7 If the seller, the wage laborer, alienated his labor, and if
this was paid at equal value, as classical political economy until Ricardo supposed for all
exchange, then the buyer, the capitalist, would gain nothing further, and the exchange
would not happen simply because it would not present any interest for him. But if what the
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seller brings – “gives” – is his labor-power, or at least the possibility of employing it for a
certain time, then the same cannot be said: for what is transferred, “received” at the end of
the exchange is not exactly the same thing as presented at the beginning. What is received
is the possibility of employing labor-power over and above its real value, and therefore to
profit from its use. This profit is reserved for whoever buys the right to employ labor-power
at its value, which is not what it produces, but what produces it, that is, the value necessary
for the maintenance of the power that once produced, produces, as the bearer of the
capacity to produce in excess of the value needed to produce it. Anticipating concepts that
will be introduced later on, we can say that at the moment he accepts the provisions
stipulated by his employment contract, the worker undergoes a quasi-miraculous mutation:
he ceases to be his body in person, whose existence is by definition equal to no other, and
becomes a “productive subject,” a bearer of “labor-power,” whose performance – “social
labor” – is subjected to a common evaluation; and, in this fashion, he is subjected [assujetti],
in all senses of the word. 8

At stake here is the ambiguity surrounding the concept of labor, an ambiguity reinforced by
the French language, which combines in one term two things that the English language and
the German language distinguish: on the one hand, in these two languages, the terms Werk
and work indicate the result of labor, once it is finished and thus when it has attained its
end; and on the other hand, there is the operation or the process that produces, that is to
say the activity of production as it is actually in progress, and is headed toward its end but
has not attained it yet, which is indicated by the terms Arbeit and labor. One could say this
terminological distinction is taken up metaphorically by Marx in his discussion of “dead
labor” and “living labor.” Dead labor is “finished,” objectified labor, crystallized in the product
wherein its trajectory is completed. Living labor is labor in the course of its execution, on a
level that gives it a particularly dynamic range, while the product representing dead labor
exhibits only a static dimension. In forging the concept of “labor-power,” his own
contribution to the theory of wage-labor, Marx introduced these two aspects into this
compound formula, just as the capitalist mode of production, which presupposes the
possibility of substituting one for the other even though they correspond to different
determinations, does in reality. One side of labor-power is decidedly dynamic, a power, with
the dimension of capacity that defines it and has living labor as its bearer; dead labor is the
other side, the static side of labor, in the sense of being the result of the completed labor
process. 9 The concept of labor-power, which joins these two aspects together, in this way
allows for an understanding of what really happens when living labor transforms itself into
dead labor and vice versa. 10

Let’s return to the triangular model of the gift on this basis. In exchange for a wage, the
worker brings to the labor market something that economically represents dead labor – that
is to say, the value of the goods that are necessary for his maintenance and enable his
labor-power to exist, inasmuch as labor-power is itself the product of a labor whose value is
equal to that of these goods. This is what is paid to the worker, what is “returned” to him as
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the wage. From this point of view, labor-power is a product. But what the capitalist
“receives,” with the aim of exploiting it, is living labor, the possibility of employing or
activating the capacity that labor-power is the bearer of when it is exploited beyond what’s
required for its subsistence, during the portion of time in which the worker, having ceased
to work for himself, works for the capitalist, that is, his profit. This is no longer a product
strictly speaking, but what Marx rather enigmatically calls a “productive power,” meaning a
power defined by the activity of production that it is conditioned to exercise. By playing with
our terms, we can say that what the worker alienates is the usage of his Arbeitskraft, his
labor-power as it is wholly constituted since it it is one with him; and what the capitalist
exploits is a Arbeitsvermögen, which through a process of exteriorization has been employed
within the framework of productive activity. We now understand why the capitalist is the
winner – and even in a “win-win situation” – in an exchange that is equal in principle, but in
reality is a fool’s bargain, as most juridical relationships are, inasmuch they tacitly conceal a
relationship which itself is not juridical.

The question, then, is how such a thing, improbable once its principle is revealed, can come
to realize itself in fact. What brings the worker to “freely” – the quotation marks are in Marx’s
text – submit to the conditions of this peculiar contract that is in principle between equal
values but only in principle, since only one of the contracting parties emerges as the winner,
and even cannot lose from an exchange which cannot be said to really “benefit” the other
party engaged in this relationship, because it cannot do otherwise? This anomaly can be
explained as follows: within the framework of the exchange in question, reciprocity is only
apparent because, in the very process of the exchange, following its own trajectory, its
nature has changed. At the start of this trajectory, as we have assumed, there is the
Arbeitskraft of the worker, that is to say, his labor-power, meaning his personal labor, which
is embodied in his individual existence; and it is precisely as an individual and on his own
behalf that he agrees to enter into the labor contract, by which he transfers for a certain
time the use of his labor-power in exchange for a wage. But at the end of its course, that is,
when the buyer – the capitalist – takes delivery of the commodity he has bought, the latter
presents itself in a whole new light: it has become labor-power, exploitable within
conditions that are no longer those of individual labor, marked by the specific
characteristics of the powers of initiative of the person who performs the work, but which
define productive activity in general, subject to common norms. Once he has entered into
the system of wage-labor, the worker, without even realizing it, has ceased to be the person
he is, with his individually constituted Arbeitskraft; truly subjected, he has become the
executor of an operation that surpasses the limits of his own existence. This operation is
“social labor” which strictly speaking is no longer his labor, or at any rate not only his, but
labor carried out under conditions which escape his initiative and control; these conditions
are the regulation or rationalization of labor, or what is called at the end of the nineteenth
century, by Taylor in particular, the “organization of labor,” whose outline is already traced
by Marx. To return to the terminology employed previously, what the worker “gives” is the
usage of his body inasmuch as it is the bearer of his own power, and what the capitalist
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“receives,” with the aim of exploiting for his profit, is the right to use this power as a
productive force, whose capacities are assessed, calibrated, formatted, and, one can say,
normalized according to principles that condition its optimal use, in the sense of the
conditioning of a product – an operation in which a product is reclassified in order to meet
common standards. If the exchange authorized by the system of wage-labor takes place, it’s
because in the course of the exchange the instrument of the exchange has been
transformed without the person looking for work being aware of it, with the consequence
that this transformation is not taken into account in calculating the terms of the exchange,
an exchange that takes place between equal values while still being unequal, conforming to
the interest of the person who in this same relation holds the position of both payer and
receiver or buyer. This is what defines the capitalist mode of production: labor-power is
treated as a two-sided reality, and so is not exactly the same thing for the person who is its
natural bearer and for the person who has become its user. This results in the possibility of
deriving a profit from its use, kept by the capitalist for himself in the form of a surplus value
(Mehrwert) that is not compensated by the wage and thus appears as a surplus. The
exploitation of worker relies on this “trick”: although he remains in possession of his labor-
power, he is relinquishes its use, as if its usage was no longer part of this power and as if
this force existed independently of its exercise. It really is a sleight of hand, whose invisibility
is the condition for its efficacy. This leads us to extend the scope of the concept of industrial
revolution, accompanying the development of capitalism. Besides sophisticated machinery
(with the steam engine as prototype), the industrial revolution depended on the invention of
the “productive power” essential to the operation of these machines, “labor-power,” the
result of a technical invention associated with the deployment of specific procedures of
power, as Foucault explains following Marx. Machinofacture is a complex system of
production that besides physical equipment, includes the more or less skilled agents who
run it and are at the same time incorporated into its system as bearers of a labor-power
destined to be productively consumed. The images in Chaplin’s film Modern Times show
precisely this: they present a particularly forceful analysis of the mode of labor specific to
industrial capitalism, in which inanimate machines and human machines are closely
intertwined.

The surplus generated by the exploitation of labor-power is variable by definition, insofar as

it is itself the result of a variation. In order to theoretically calculate the rate of exploitation
(surplus value), Marx uses the model of the “working day”: i.e., the total amount of time
during each workable day (and, as we have remarked, in the nineteenth century, manual
laborers were generally employed “by the day,” ensuring maximum flexibility in their
employment) that the worker spends working, thus activating his labor-power under
conditions imposed on him by the entrepreneur. This working day is ideally represented in
the form of a segment that can be broken down into its elements, which, according to
Marx’s analysis, correspond to two distinct periods of time: one devoted to “necessary
labor” (notwendige Arbeit) and the other to “surplus labor” (Mehrarbeit). Necessary labor is
labor undertaken to produce a quantity of value equivalent to that required for the
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maintenance of labor-power as Arbeitskraft: it is this value that is effectively paid by the wage
given to the worker in exchange for the right to exploit his labor-power, even though the
result of this exploitation represents a value that is not the same as that remunerated by
the wage. Surplus labor formally corresponds to the other part of the day during which the
worker performs tasks that are not remunerated by his wage, since they produce a quantity
of value exceeding that necessary to maintain his labor-power, a quantity of value that,
consequently, within the framework of the performance of the labor process where
Vermögenskraft is employed, represents the productive activity whose exploitation releases
a surplus value, Mehrwert. One must not however lose sight of the fact that this division of
the working day into two periods, represented by sub-segments following each other on a
single line, has a purely theoretical significance. Only for the purposes of formally
calculating the rate of exploitation of labor-power is it assumed that the worker, in
performing necessary labor, works for himself until a certain hour of the day, and beyond
this limit, for the exclusive benefit of his employer; in reality, from the first hour to the last –
every moment the worker activates his labor-power – his time is composed of fixed
proportions of necessary labor and surplus labor, whose borderline is not clearly
discernible. This is made possible by the fact that, quite unbeknownst to the worker, who
has no way of knowing when he is still and when he is no longer working for himself, his
labor-power is simultaneously exploited in its dual aspect: as Arbeitskraft, whose value is
measured by the quantity of labor necessary to produce it; and as Vermögenskraft, whose
value is measured by the quantity of labor that it is capable of producing. This being said,
Marx introduces the capital distinction between absolute surplus value (to which the third
section of Volume I of Capital is devoted) and relative surplus value (to which the fourth
section is devoted, that is to say, the part of the text that particularly interested Foucault for
reasons yet to be specified) on the basis of this formal division, and to simplify its proof.

Thus, let the working day be a line (with a direction, as it represents the passage of time in a
certain direction) divided into two parts which are meant to succeed one another:

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The capitalist has an interest in changing the proportions between the two quantities of
time (represented above) in his favor; wherein the first segment (A), if it costs him nothing
because the value is fully contained in the product he keeps, it also brings in nothing, while
only the second segment (B) represents a profit for him, because he does not need to invest
the quantity of value represented by the payment of a wage to have at his disposal the
goods this segment produces. To succeed in changing the relationship between these two
elements, A and B, in his favor, the capitalist can take two courses of action according:
lengthen the sub-segment on the right of the diagram, which interests him because it yields
a profit, either by extending it to the right (thereby producing absolute surplus value), or by
shortening it to the left, thereby reducing the length of the first segment (and producing
relative surplus value).

Concretely, the first solution consists in extending the length of the vital part of the day,
devoted to the performance of productive tasks, as far as possible, by postponing the end of
the working day: the worker, instead of working a total amount of time, X, will work X+X’,
then X+X’+X’’, etc…for example, if we take 12 hours of work activity as a starting point, then
14 hours, 16, 18, etc …This tendential increase, however, encounters a natural limit: the
astronomical day has a fixed duration of 24 hours. If the capitalist could further prolong this
length of time and therefore find the technical procedure allowing it to last for (why not?) 26
hours or 28 hours instead of 24 hours, enabling him to produce more absolute surplus
value, he would not hesitate one second; but this procedure has not yet been discovered
(he might pull it off by sending his workers to work on another planet without changing their
conditions of pay; but the transport costs might burn a hole in his pocket, making the
operation unprofitable). On the other hand, regardless of this natural obstacle, regrettably
insuperable, the tendency toward the increased production of absolute surplus value
encounters two limits: if the capitalist wants to fully profit from the worker’s labor-power for
at least the period paid for by the wage, he must also concede a break period of non-work,
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devoted not to unproductive leisure but to recuperation, and more generally to procedures
of maintenance and renewal of this labor-power: to eating, perhaps to procreation, and in
this case to have some time to devote to his children, since if he did not do so, his capacities
would be rapidly exhausted (as intensive agriculture may, beyond certain limits, exhaust the
soil’s yield) and then the colorful expression that “the worker works himself to death” would
no longer be just a metaphor. The capitalist who employs this labor-power must take into
account the fact that it wears down and that its power would completely dissipate unless
given time, even a minimum amount, to restore itself. The tendency toward the increase in
production of absolute surplus value encounters another limit, namely the resistance
generated by the employer’s insatiability, which pushes him to go ever further in this
direction, and thus to continually increase, little by little, the length of labor time: at a certain
point, the workers, who are always asked to do more, and realizing that enough is enough,
understand that it is in their interest to unite to advance their demands. This terrifies the
capitalist because for his enterprise of extracting surplus value to produce maximum
returns, he must be able to deal with the workers who appear before him as individual
workers, whose divisions he can exploit – not as a group, which would increase their
capacity to resist. When it assumes a collective form, this workers’ resistance carries the
additional inconvenience of becoming public: the capitalist hates publicity! He especially
does not want people shoving their noses in his business, which he means to carry on as he
pleases! And what really perturbs and infuriates him is when the workers’ demands, after
obtaining a measure of publicity and official status, are taken up by public bodies and
institutions. Lo and behold, the idea of legally regulating working hours appears, in
particular the limitation of child labor, a process that once set in motion expands to include
adolescent and adult labor. Then inspectors, who do not necessarily share the
businessman’s point of view, and (how narrow-minded! how naïve!) claiming that all they
are doing is enforcing the law, begin to visit the workshops, make reports, record violations,
levy fines, etc., etc. – intolerable from the businessman’s perspective, because as owner of
his company, he is resolved to remain master of his own house and rejects out of hand any
external control over his activities. The lengthy tenth chapter in the third part of Volume I of
Capital on “The Working Day” (Chapter 10 of the French edition translated by Joseph Roy
under Marx’s direction) provides abundant (and terrifying) documentation relating to this
theme, which Engels had already used in 1845 to write his book on The Condition of the
Working Class in England (After the Observations of the Author and Authentic Sources), one of
the foundational texts of what would later be called the “sociology of work.” The current
controversy around the issue of the 35-hour week demonstrates that this chapter of
workers’ struggles is not yet closed, and that the capitalists have not given up on squeezing a
maximum of absolute surplus value from the exploitation of labor-power, while deploring
the concessions to which they been forced to very reluctantly submit due to the balance of
forces; but they always remain hopeful that they can renege on these concessions
whenever the opportunity arises, and specifically, that labor time can be extended (at the
same wage-rate, of course).

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When the possibility of increasing the production of absolute surplus value is blocked
despite the capitalist’s efforts, he leaves open the option of switching sides, thus increasing
the length of sub-segment B in the overall schema of the working day by stretching it, not
towards the right, in the direction of the production of absolute surplus value, but towards
the left, in the direction of the production of relative surplus value. How does he do this?
Since he understands cost calculation, his specialty, he realizes that this operation, whose
goal is to reduce to a minimum the portion of time devoted to necessary labor, is
conditional on lowering the value of labor-power in the strict sense, i.e., the Arbeitskraft
remunerated by the wage that pays necessary labor and nothing more. There is no other
way of doing this other than by lowering the overall cost of goods, which automatically
results in a decrease in the amount of value needed for the maintenance of Arbeitskraft,
without this decrease being accompanied by a fall in the quantity of value created by the
productive activity in the form of Verm[o]genskraft. Not only will this quantity of value not
decrease, it will increase: for this to happen, less is paid for the same amount of labor time,
creating more value, with this decrease and increase being strictly correlative. In other
words, to increase his profit, the capitalist will capitalize on the productivity of labor-power
as a “productive power” from which, in the same period of time, and with the production of
absolute surplus value having been provisionally stabilized, he can extract a much greater
quantity of value in the form of relative surplus value. This notion of productivity allows us
to understand the capitalist mode of production by going to its very heart, that is, its vital
principle, its driving force.

Labor-Power as Productive Power

What should be understood by the “productivity” of labor-power? To answer this, it is
necessary to revisit the concept of “productive forces” whose significance is crucial in this
respect. Here, invaluable elements of explication may be found in the Dictionnaire critique
du marxisme (Critical Dictionary of Marxism), edited by Georges Labica, in Jean-Pierre
Lefebvre’s article on “productive power/productive forces.” 11 By productive forces in the
plural, Produktivkräfte, is meant the totality of the physical and organic elements which enter
into the labor process: that is, both the natural and artificial means serving production as
well as bodily dispositions activated by workers to employ these means to produce material
goods – the ultimate goal of craft and industrial production. When Marx’s text employs this
same concept in the singular, not without a certain terminological inconsistency,
Produktivkraft refers not to the elements present, whether these are raw materials, technical
instruments or living bodies, but something quite different. It refers to a capacity the force
has inasmuch as its reality is “dynamic” in the proper sense of the word, that is, it represents
a “power,” a Vermӧgen. Dunamis, in the Aristotelian sense (Metaphysics Delta, 12) is “a source,
in general, of change or movement in another thing or in the same thing qua other.” It is the
expression of the tendential and continuous process through which what exists at first as
“potentiality” is destined, under the right conditions, to realize itself “in action.” For example,

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when the art of the doctor manages to transform the sick body into a healthy body,
representing a change in the state of the body, the doctor does so by exercising the specific
“virtue” that applies to him and makes his art effective. From this perspective, the power is
meant to represent the cause to which a change is imputed. Before this change takes place
or is produced, it exists as a possibility realizing itself only when the change has taken effect,
that is, when all the effects have been derived from the cause. The reference to a power
assigns to this potentiality a quasi-existence, between being and non-being. For this reason
it is marked by an indelible ambiguity, insofar as it “already is” that which it “is not yet,” two
formulas where the verb “to be” has two different values mistaken under the same term.
The capitalist exploits this ambiguity to the full: with the wage he pays labor-power for what
it “already is,” as Arbeitskraft [labor-power], reserving for himself the right to use it for what it
“is not yet,” as Arbeitsvermӧgen [labor-capacity], which he intends to mold according to his
wishes in order to put it to work. As we have seen, the miracle that the system of wage-labor
performs consists in separating power from its action by artificially creating conditions that
allow a power to be considered independently from its action, as if a non-acting power, a
power that would not be active, would still be a power. From the physical point of view, this
is more than a mystery: it is an absurdity.

In the case of a positivist philosopher like Auguste Comte, the causalistic interpretation of
power and its action is tainted with metaphysical presuppositions which render his
pretention to objectively understand real phenomena perfectly vain. At best, he can only
offer an approximate description of them. To say that opium puts one to sleep since it is
endowed with a soporific virtue constituting its power or its proper force, from which it
draws its capacity to act, does not in any way advance knowledge. This is merely to invent
the fiction of a “virtue” existing independently of its actualization, and consequently
preceding it so that it “would already be” before even occurring, thus without having “yet”
taken place. Therefore, when rational mechanics as a branch of mathematics – which spares
it the obligation of facing up to the givens of experience – employs the notion of “force” and
states, as Newton did, the laws of action of forces, one must be careful not to attribute to
this concept a physical reality. One should confine it to the role of an abstract concept or
intellectual construction which has a demonstrative value, but certainly not an explicative
one in the sense of a causal explanation. Stating that forces are causes of the motion they
generate simply means saying nothing at all. This is why mechanics abandons the
evaluation of forces for what they are and contents itself with calculating their “work,”
represented through their real effects.

From this point of view, we could say that when the capitalist occupies himself with his
workers’ labor-power, which he has acquired the right to employ in exchange for a wage,
treating it as a “productive power” whose productivity he intends to increase in order to
produce relative surplus value – he practices metaphysics not in a theoretical but in a
practical way. He practices this peculiar sort of metaphysics not during his leisure time, as a
distraction or mental exercise, as he would a crossword puzzle, but throughout the entire
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working day dedicated to production. By opening up his company to notions such as
“power,” “capacity” and “causation,” he thereby makes them a reality, realizing these
fictions, these products of the mind, which he then employs with daunting efficacy. In this
way, with payrolls and charts of organizational tasks at hand, he shows, better than a
philosopher’s abstract proofs, that the work of metaphysics could not be more material,
provided that one knows how to put it to good use in introducing it into the factory. One
could, incidentally, derive from this a new and caustic definition of metaphysics: in this
rather specific context, it boils down to a mechanism for profit-making, which is no small
matter. This means that, amongst other inventions that have changed the course of history,
capitalism has found the means, the procedure, the “trick” enabling it to put abstract
concepts into practice – the hallmark of its “genius.”

What in fact is this famous productivity attributed to labor-power in order to modify it, or
rather to re-modify it? It is the “virtue” or “power” that may be ascribed to it when one
begins to consider and treat it materially: as a “productive power” in the sense of a capacity
to be put to work. This power is not only measurable on paper but can be modelled and
modified so as to increase it. Such is effectively the goal of the rationalization of labor,
which, by subordinating it to norms, and by shifting these norms, intensifies labor’s
“productivity.” From this perspective, the norm not only has a constative but a performative
dimension. It serves not only to determine an average state, counted as “normal,” but itself
becomes “normative.” In other words, the norm acts to transform the reality to which it
applies, grasps it not as it is but as it could be if one were to develop its potential. This is the
theme tackled by Didier Deleule and François Guéry in their short book, The Productive Body,
where they draw attention to the fact that it is not at all the same to treat labor-power as a
power that produces and as a productive power. 12 If the capitalist were to pay a wage to
labor-power as the power that produces, he would then be formally placed under the
obligation of recompensing the worker with a quantity of value equal to that effectively
produced by the worker’s labor. Thus the thesis of Ricardian economics that the worker’s
labor is paid at its real value would be verified. But, quite evidently, such a thing cannot be
of interest to the capitalist because even if this transaction created value it would not make
him any profit, or would at least force him to share with the workers he employs the
surplus value created by the activation of their labor-power. If he was to confine himself to
the exploitation of the labor-power of his workers measured by results, that is to what it
really produces in value terms, such an approach would not generate any “growth” in his
terms; that is in the sense of an increase in the value of capital, “his” capital, which he jointly
owns with his shareholders, the only people he must account to for the way he manages it.
That is why the labor-power he employs interests him – in the strongest sense of the word –
not as a power that produces but a productive power. This creates the possibility of treating
it not as an active power, which it “already is,” but as a potential power, which it “is not yet,”
and as such the bearer of potentialities that one can apply pressure to and control so as to
intensify them.

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The notion of “living labor” thus attains a new dimension. Living labor is labor that not only
produces but is productive, that is, activates labor-power as a “productive power.” Living
labor produces value under conditions that can be regulated by exploiting the possibilities
for change that, thanks to its plasticity and adaptability, life is so rich in. The issue of
“flexibility,” so fashionable today, is at the core of this problem, which a metaphysician of
the caliber of Mme. Parisot 13 perfectly masters, being a metaphysician without knowing it,
making her “speculation” particularly effective. Precisely because it takes labor-power not as
the power that produces but as a productive power, capitalism can allow itself to treat labor-
power with a maximum of flexibility since it has everything to gain by doing so. To its dying
breath it rejects the rules that the law seeks to impose on it under the pretext that these
rules stultify a reality it considers to be living. As such, it treats reality as malleable, in the
manner of a wild animal to be tamed so that it performs amazing tricks, which at first sight
one would never have thought it capable, jumps through flaming hoops, spins faster and
faster in a revolving cylinder, etc., etc…In the sequences of his film Modern Times, Charles
Spencer Chaplin, a metaphysician of a different class than Mme. Parisot, provides a striking
illustration of the high-wire acrobatics perfected by capitalist production. There one sees his
hero, Charlot, being caught in an assembly line, his body becoming so supple that, flattened
by the conveyor belt, he merges and becomes indistinguishable from it. He becomes an
accelerated bolt screw, 14 to the point that once he gets out of the factory he neither knows
nor can do anything else, which is a way of showing his “power” no longer belongs to him
precisely to the extent that it has been separated from him. Of course, this management of
his capacities, which makes his labor-power “productive” as suits the capitalist, has the
effect of creating a new rigidity, riveting him to his assigned function. He must fulfil this
function obeying norms determined for him in the strongest sense of the term. In this way,
suppleness recreates rigidity. The capitalist does not content himself with being a
metaphysician. He is a dialectician, he reconciles opposites, which is his way of managing
the powers he exploits, not just by tracing their parallelogram in the manner of a
mathematician but by forcing them to enter into the schema he has established according
to his interests. This schema consists in extracting the maximum profit from the means of
production at his disposal, including the labor-power of his workers – in particular by
making them produce relative surplus value.

One passage in Marx’s text strikingly illustrates this. This passage, which is at the end of
Chapter 12, “Division of Labor and Manufacture” (Chapter 14 of the Roy edition 15 ),
highlights the contrast between the form the division of labor within the factory already
takes under the control of the manufacturing capitalist, therefore before the system of
industrial machinofacture, and the form it takes within the wider framework of society:

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 While, within the workshop, the iron law of proportionality subjects definite numbers of workers to
definite functions, in the society outside the workshop, the play of chance and caprice results in a
motley pattern of distribution of the producers and their means of production among the various
branches of social labour…Division of labor within the workshop implies the undisputed authority
of the capitalist over men, who are merely the members of a total mechanism which belongs to him.
The division of labour within society brings into contact independent producers of commodities,
who acknowledge no authority other than that of competition, of the coercion exerted by the
pressure of their reciprocal interests, just as in the animal kingdom the “war of all against all” more
or less preserves the conditions of existence of every species. The same bourgeois consciousness
which celebrates the division of labour in the workshop, the lifelong annexation of the worker to a
partial operation, and his complete subjection to capital, as an organization of labour that increases
its productive power, denounces with equal vigour every conscious attempt to control and regulate
the process of production socially, as an inroad upon such sacred things as the rights of property,
freedom and the self-determining “genius” of the individual capitalist. It is very characteristic that
the enthusiastic apologists of the factory system have nothing more damning to urge against a
general
16 organization of labour in society than that it would turn the whole of society into a factory.

In this passage Marx pinpoints the paradox of liberal discourse, which is the warp and woof
of bourgeois ideology. If the latter defends laissez-faire, deregulation, non-intervention, it
does so to better establish a theory of authority, taking the form of the “lifelong annexation
of the worker to a partial operation and his complete submission to capital, as an
organization of labor that increases its productive power.” Therefore, a power relation
underlies the treatment of labor-power not only as a power that produces, but a power with
a measured productivity that can be gradually raised. It is a power imposed on the
individual worker, henceforth dispossessed of all initiative in the employment of his labor-
power, exploited in every sense of the word within the framework of a system of which he
has become a cog. Freedom is the word the capitalist constantly repeats and demands
exclusively for himself in order to turn it into a means of enslaving the working classes,
whose opinion he does not ask, let alone their consent, in subjugating them to the norms of
productivity which he, the apostle of freedom, has made into an “iron law.” Today, almost
two centuries after the factory system was established during the first half of the 19th
century, coinciding with the explosion of a frenetic capitalism, the rhetoric of the bosses has
not changed one bit: freedom is my freedom, from which stems the unlimited right to
enslave others, and is the condition of the production of surplus value under both of its
forms, relative and absolute.

Thus it is exactly where the labor process actually takes place that a system of power and
subjugation miraculously reconciling the opposing values of necessity and freedom is
established through the very forms in which labor is organized, that is controlled. Once the
worker has alienated the usage of his labor-power in exchange for a wage, it is as if he is
split into two and becomes a divided, overdetermined subject. On the one hand, he remains
the person he is, attached to his bodily existence, whose inviolable owner he rests to his
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death. He often drags it behind him like a burden, for he must feed it, shelter it, nurse it,
reproduce it (by having children), all this most often at his own expense and on his
responsibility, even when he lacks the material resources to do so. On the other hand, he is
transformed into a being whose power no longer depends solely on its own conditions of
existence because its usage and activation have become dependent on rules that transcend
it, turning him into a productive subject. He is the bearer and owner of a labor-power
divided into an Arbeitskraft which belongs to him and is his exclusive concern and an
Arbeitsvermögen that may be refashioned at will; its substance, Kraft, has been made supple,
flexible, so that it may be more closely annexed to the type of task assigned to the worker,
at a given level of productivity. Necessity in freedom: that is the great invention of
capitalism. And, in fact, it had to be invented and appropriate procedures found to put the
idea into practice.

This system of power, which dissolves the opposition between necessity and freedom, is of
a particular kind, specific to the epoch of the industrial revolution and the type of society it
establishes, which is, in Foucault’s terminology, a society of norms. This system presupposes
a complete redefinition of the very notion of power. Namely, for it to work, for the dialectical
miracle to happen, the relationship it establishes must not appear as a power on high whose
authority consists in the realization of an external order and therefore has the character of
a formal constraint that is above all repressive and negative. Quite the contrary, the project
of normalization, consisting in the organization of work so as to increase its productivity and
thereby the production of relative surplus value, is defined by fact that its intervention must
not appear as a command out of the blue. Rather it must be hand in glove with the living
reality, with “labor-power” as the “productive power” which it seeks to control and succeeds
in inhabiting so as to possess it in its very being. From this perspective, it appears a genuine
creation corresponding to the passage to a second nature.

The term second nature designates a necessarily equivocal, ambiguous plane of reality
which is a nature without actually being one and has the paradoxical character of a nature
that is not “natural.” Hence it is a nature not given as such but produced, created,
constructed from top to bottom, suited to become “productive,” flexible, transformable, to
comply with the objectives of growth. Itself the product of change, it is always open to
change, resulting in an order whose persistence is asserted in the principle of change.
Therefore, what we have here is an unstable condition which, in the absence of a base or
foundation or purpose to secure it, derives its very substance from its instability. It
represents the same through the figure of the other, permanence in the form of novelty.
That great practical metaphysician Mme Parisot might well adopt Nietzsche’s dictum
according to which “man is the not yet determined animal” (das noch nicht festgestellte Tier).
The meaning of this saying lies entirely in the “not yet” (noch nict), indicating the
fundamental precariousness of a form of existence in search of its realization, towards
which it does not cease to strive precisely in so far as it never attains it. Arguably, if the
human, together with human labor-power whose employment constitutes living labor,
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belongs to second nature, it is because everything in its “nature” or alleged nature is
potentially “secondary”; that is, not strictly speaking derived but having an absolutely
secondary character that cannot be related to any base or foundation. Therefore, a
procedure of expropriation, going beyond the alternative of perfect order and pure
disorder, lies behind the topic of second nature. This procedure represents an uncertain
mixture of order and disorder that is perpetually flexible and open to manipulation, always
ready to tip the scales in a literally never-ending back and forth, searching not above but
below, always plumbing the depths of the unrealized, of the “not yet fixed” where the idea
of “productivity” takes on its full meaning. 17

What is it that allows second nature to present itself as “a” nature even though it is no
longer “a” nature or “of” nature? It is the fact that it guides human behavior without ever
appearing to consciousness as its governing principle, this being the main condition of its
efficacy. It operates under the guise of spontaneity. To belong to second nature is to live
under compulsion while accepting this condition as self-evident, hence from the outset
refusing to question its raison d’être, the ends it serves and the specific limits placed on
these ends. This is, broadly speaking, what Bourdieu sought to analyse using the concept of
habitus, and Foucault that of discipline. When he puts forward the concept of habitus, 18
Bourdieu resists the temptation to put it under the heading of doctrines of “voluntary
servitude.” In his opinion these make the mistake of reintroducing a certain measure of
reflexivity into the adoption or acceptance of a type of behavior that is acquired without
even being aware of it and followed mechanically, so to speak naturally, except that this
“natural” belongs not to first but to second nature. In a similar spirit, Foucault refuses to
conceive of discipline as an order or injunction descending from the soul into the body: for
discipline is only established at the level of the body and its acknowledged powers through
a process of trial and error, relying on disciplining strategies which, as far their functioning is
concerned, do not obey any determinate finality that can be consciously understood. This is
the sense of the definition of discipline put forward in the lecture “The Mesh of Power”:

Discipline is basically the mechanism of power by which we come to exert control in the social
body right down to the finest elements, by which we succeed in grabbing hold of the social atoms
themselves, which is to say individuals. Techniques for the individualization of power. How to
supervise [surveiller] someone, how to control his conduct, his behavior, his aptitudes, how to
intensify his performance, multiply his capacities, how to put him in a place where he will be most
useful: this is what I mean by discipline. 19

When Foucault speaks, as he does here, of “the mechanism by which we come to exert
control,” a formulation which seems to confuse the positions of the one who analyzes the
system and the one who makes it function for his own benefit – and not about “the
mechanism by which control is exerted,” which would amount to separating out these
positions – he doubtless wishes to indicate that the existence of such a system is
consubstantial with what he elsewhere calls “the ontology of present,” in the sense of a
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present which cannot but be ours and thus coincide with our historical epoch. The
disciplinary mechanism imposes itself as something that appears natural precisely at the
level our actuality, to which it is strictly adapted as only a technology aiming at efficiency can
be. It is not self-evident that it should be observed from a distance and reduced to its
guiding principle, which is what Marx in a tour de force nevertheless managed to achieve.

Consequently, subjection to the order or disorder of second nature, according to the

specific procedures of a discipline or habitus, eliminates the formality of reasoned and
conscious assent: but this is to be subjected without any objection to the rule of “it is so,”
ruling out any prospect of reflection and critical distance, the bases of contestation. What
we have here is a form of subjection that creates a corresponding subject by recreating it ab
initio and entirely, denying it any prior, preconstituted reality preceding its imposition.
When it functions under these conditions, command transcends the alternative of violence
and consensus, as Foucault explains in his essay “The Subject and Power”:

The exercise of power may well inspire as much acceptance as one would like: it can pile up the
dead and hide itself behind whatever threats it can imagine. In itself the exercise of power is not a
violence which sometimes hides, nor is it an implicitly renewed consent. It is a set of actions upon
possible actions; it operates in the field of possibility where the behavior of acting subjects is
inscribed: it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult, it enlarges or limits, it
renders more or less probable; in the extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely; but it is
nevertheless always a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their
acting or being capable of action…to govern in this sense is to structure the possible field of action
of others. 20

The new power established in this way is one exercised not on real, already accomplished
actions, but on possible ones whose implementation it anticipates by “structuring the field
of possible action” in which the latter will take place. This field of possible action is precisely
what constitutes second nature, whose subjects are configured so as to respond to what is
expected of them without any need either to persuade or force them. For they themselves
are “possible” subjects, assembled from birth and trained so as to be more easily governed,
that is, from the perspective of our return to Marx, economically “productive.” Homo
oeconomicus, whose integration is accomplished by this structure, is a fiction in that its
reality or “nature” is completely fabricated as a second nature; but this fiction necessarily
became real from the historical moment when it became part of the functioning of the
mechanisms it blindly serves.

It should now be clear why Bourdieu and Foucault converge in dismissing the reference to
ideology, which purports to place between people, their natural dispositions, and the
historical forms within which these are exploited an intermediate layer occupied by ideal
representations located in the spirit. From this point of view, the Althusserian theory of the
ideological interpellation of individuals into subjects is inappropriate and is diagnosed as the
return of a rampant spiritualism. For them, the procedure of subjection takes place entirely
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at the level of the body as an act of penetration or possession which neither corresponds to
any recognizable goals of its own nor requires the mediation of any word, good or bad,
because it becomes identical with the course of its reproduction. And it should be
acknowledged that if the procedure by which the power that produces is transformed into a
productive power finds its justification in the ideology of growth which intellectually reunites
the outcome of the procedure in the discourse of the capitalist who has himself, little by
little, and blindly, developed this same procedure, not knowing exactly where he was going:
then this ideology, which intervenes after the fact and takes the form of a secondary
elaboration whose role is to justify recuperation, has at best only an auxiliary value. It does
not play any direct role in the operation through which this transformation takes place, a
transformation that cannot be reduced to a language game. It does not make the decision.
For the system of wage-labor – with its specific type of subjection that conditions the
existence of the productive subject and not only the subject that produces – to work it is not
necessary for ideas and words to be prime movers. What is required are technological and
institutional mechanisms which comprehensively refashion the status of the living beings
subject to this régime, that is the complex totality of the procedures which Foucault groups
together under the concept of “biopower.” Such a power is exercised and produces its
effects on the rhythm of life itself which, having taken over, it strives to recreate ab initio.
When the capitalist hires productive subjects –the bearers of a two-sided labor-power, both
Arbeitskraft and Arbeitsvermögen, a division that enables him to extract surplus value in its
two forms, absolute, by extending the length of the working day, and relative, by lowering
the cost of goods through raising productivity – he does not have to act the smooth-talking
salesman and convince them of the reasonableness of this division. This division appears to
them, that is the productive subjects they have become, an established fact that they do not
have the choice of accepting or refusing. Bourdieu is right to claim that their servitude is by
no means voluntary simply because there is no need, or even possibility, for it to be so
considered to be accepted. 21

In establishing second nature as part of the process of making labor-power “productive,”

capitalism has as it were dissolved ideology in economy, in the sense of both the system of
material production and the methods that organize it so as to extract maximum profit at
minimum loss. One of those methods, according to Foucault, is the disciplinary system
which he defines in general as follows:

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 Generally speaking, it might be said that the disciplines are techniques for assuring the ordering of
human multiplicities. It is true that there is nothing exceptional or even characteristic in this; every
system of power is presented with the same problem. But the peculiarity of the disciplines is that
they try to define in relation to the multiplicities a tactics of power that fulfils three criteria: firstly,
to obtain the exercise of power at the lowest possible cost (economically, by the low expenditure it
involves; politically, by its discretion, its low exteriorization, its relative invisibility, the little
resistance it arouses); secondly, to bring the effects of this social power to their maximum intensity
and to extend them as far as possible, without either failure or interval; thirdly, to link this
“economic” growth of power with the output of the apparatuses (educational, military, industrial or
medical) within which it is exercised; in short, to increase both the docility and the utility of all the
elements of the system. 22

Foucault clearly indicates here that this disciplinary economy applies not to individuals
taken separately but to “multiplicities.” It is precisely by incorporating individual lives into
such multiplicities, “masses,” that it manages to “economize” their usage in a way that,
amongst other savings, obviates the need for ideological representations. The latter weigh
in, if at all, only after the event, when the job is already done, having no influence over its
course, a course already mapped out by second nature, with little chance of deviation and
none of renegotiation.

At first sight, such a situation seems hopeless. If there is at best still some room left for a
change in consciousness, it comes only after the fact, hence too late for the problem to be
discussed and negotiated. Does this mean that the new figure of power – a horizontal
power, close to the ground, insidious, which never has to admit its true nature because it
has the advantage of appearing self-evident and spontaneous – wipes out any possibility of
resistance? No, but only on condition that our understanding of resistance is completely
revised. This revision would dismiss the idea of a global resistance, planned and initiated
from the start from a center; and because it is based on a clear understanding of the
situation, draws its efficacy from its ability to develop a coherent discourse of justification.
Snared in the “mesh“ of the new power, which catches it so to speak at source in its
everyday existence, the productive subject can rely only on mobile points of scattered
resistance that are initially blind and uncoordinated. The instability of the conjuncture
associated with the ambiguity of second nature, which is a mixture of order and disorder,
opens an indefinable space for such points of resistance. Rather than adopt a project of
permanent rupture corresponding to the formula “class against class” – a striking example
being the ideological theme of the revolutionary moment of truth, all the more striking
because it is divorced from reality – the productive subject finds a way to oppose the system
that captures him from birth and constitutes the key to his subjection, a subjection that
makes him a split subject. He does so by engaging in partial struggles, most often
improvised, making the most of those occasions when the underlying ambiguities and
contradictions of the system, whose trace cannot be completely erased, come to the fore.
There is no recourse against biopower, at least in the beginning, save in forms of bio-
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resistance that, without illusions and with the energy of despair, exploit its weaknesses as
much as possible. They do so postponing the synthesis, the provisional reunification of
these dispersed initiatives even if it means taking up the problem from scratch when the
opportunity arises. Therefore, the productive subject is left with plural strategies, whose
threads he is in no hurry to gather into general programmes. The latter are necessarily
misleading if they claim to definitively resolve the question with which they are confronted,
a question whose clear and rational perception emerges only gradually without promises or
guarantees. The best thing for the worker, when pressured to be always more productive, is
to follow the very path taken by the capitalist to establish the system of exploitation from
which he hopes to extract the maximum profit. Namely, he must proceed by trial and error,
step by step, so as to establish little by little, against the technologies of power that have
taken control of his very existence, technologies of resistance that strive where possible to
loosen this grip. It is therefore in the very process of production, where the employer
deploys various figures of authority, that the subjugated worker comes to fight and oppose
the authority which has succeeded in penetrating the innermost recesses of his being. This
struggle and this opposition, however, have no chance of success if they are waged
individually. That is why they have to be taken in charge by workers’ associations, mainly by
what are today called unions, that organize their protests down to the last detail and
subordinate them to more and more collaborative and coördinated planning in such a way
as to rid them of the unfinished character to which they are condemned as long as they
remain spontaneous.

The New Power and Forms of Authority Developed Within the

Labor Process Itself
From the above we can see why Foucault was particularly interested in the passages of
Capital which highlight figures of authority that are closely bound up with the labor process
and represent the advent of the new form of power. It is possible in particular to re-read the
few pages concerning coöperation of the eleventh chapter (Chapter 13 of Joseph Roy’s
translation) of the fourth section of the first book of Capital where some specific modalities
of the integration of power relations with the labor process are examined: a trick the
capitalist employs, like a magician, to overcome the opposition between freedom and
necessity to his advantage.

The first condition of this integration is provided by the assembly of workers in the same
place of work, not only next to but together with each other:

A large number of workers working together, at the same time, in one place (or, if you like, in the
same field of labour, auf dem selben Arbeitsfeld), in order to produce the same sort of commodity
under the command of the same capitalist, constitutes the starting point of capitalist production.
This is true both historically and conceptually. 23

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This assembly in the same “field” where their operations are to be coördinated has a direct
impact on the way the workers set their labor-power in motion:

Even without an alteration in the method of work, the simultaneous employment of a large number
of workers produces a revolution in the objective conditions of the labour process. 24

According to the proverb, “unity is strength,” a power resulting not only from the addition of
associated elements but from their combination, which by synthesising them creates a new
power whose productive potential is increased both quantitatively and qualitatively: 25

Just as the offensive power of a squadron of cavalry, or the defensive power of an infantry regiment,
is essentially different from the sum of the offensive or defensive powers of the individual soldiers
taken separately, so the sum total of the mechanical forces exerted by isolated workers differs from
the social force that is developed when many hands co-operate in the same undivided operation,
such as raising a heavy weight, turning a winch or getting an obstacle out of the way. In such cases
the effect of the combined labour could either not be produced at all by isolated individual labour,
or it could be produced only by a great expenditure of time, or on a very dwarf-like scale. Not only
do we have here an increase in the productive power of the individual, by means of co-operation,
but the creation of a new productive power, which is intrinsically a collective one. 26

The combined working day produces a greater quantity of use values than an equal sum of isolated
working days, and consequently diminishes the labour-time necessary for the production of a given
useful effect. Whether the combined working day, in a given case, acquires this increased
productivity because it heightens the mechanical force of labour, or extends its sphere of action over
a greater space, or contracts the field of production relatively to the scale of production, or at the
critical moment sets large masses of labour to work, or excites rivalry between individuals and
raises their animal spirits, or impresses on the similar operations carried on by a number of men the
stamp of continuity and many-sidedness, or performs different operations simultaneously, or
economizes the means of production by use in common, or lends to individual labour the character
of average social labour – whichever of these is the cause of the increase, the special productive
power of the combined working day is, under all circumstances, the social productive power of
labour, or the productive power of social labour. This power arises from co-operation itself. 27

In particular, once it became a part of this collective power individual labor-power changed
its nature, making it calculable according to different parameters. It has ceased to be this or
that power whose character is specifically determined by the bodily existence of its owner.
As explained, it has become labor-power, even social labor-power, measurable according
to unified criteria, enabling the planning, the rationalization of its application in order to
increase its productivity, a notion applied to labor-power in general, termed social labor-
power, before being extended to the particular labor-power of individuals. The main aspect
of this change is constituted by the appearance of, what Marx calls, “the average working
day.” At the end of the nineteenth century Taylor will take up this concept when talking of
“the loyal working day,” the basic unit of his system of rational work organization. Like
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Quetelet’s “average man,” this average working day is an abstraction since it never actually
completely coincides with the concrete activity of any given worker united in the same field
of work, for whom this notion at best functions as a benchmark, a program to fulfill,
presupposing a certain margin of approximation or error. But for the capitalist, this
abstraction is no longer exactly an abstraction inasmuch as he takes it into account in the
calculations according to which he manages his enterprise. In effect, work for him exists
only as the result of the employment of a “collective power,” and is defined as such in his
accounts. Asserting his authority, he strives to translate this power into reality in his
workshops where workers are brought to work together and not separately, each by and/or
for himself.

Let us note in passing that, beyond the transformations that coöperation stamps upon the
productive consumption of labor-power ‒ which thereby becomes a “collective power” – the
characteristic of the new type of society, whose establishment coincides with the industrial
revolution and which Foucault calls “the society of norms,” is the, so to speak, mass 28
assembly and management of its subjects. Thanks to analytic tools such as statistics and
probability calculus – previously unknown to the state administration– it has become
possible to evaluate collective performance not on the scale of isolated cases but of large
numbers, and from there to anticipate the development of this performance and to adjust
its course with the aim of improving productivity. Instead of being carried out on an ad hoc
basis, in a disorganized way, individual actions are in some way anticipated, prepared,
prefigured by the global system within which they occur, thereby influencing their outcome.
One of the aspects of this change is represented by the transformation of agents of
production into productive subjects which fundamentally modifies the conditions in which
their work is done. In terms of work results, productive subjects must now meet
programmed expectations over which they have lost control. The objectives they must
achieve are determinable prior to the process charged with accomplishing them. What is
decisive in this regard is that one has begun to think in terms of possibilities that can be
defined independently of their implementation. In general, “powers” are sought out even
beyond the limits of the field of manufacture or industrial production. These powers have
the status of virtual realities which are imparted in advance with capacities that have only to
be actualized by conforming to the models prescribed to them.

In a society of norms everything is programmed or can be programmed. The behavior of

each individual compelled to take his place in a process that is molded in such a way loses
the character of individual actions possessing an intrinsic value. It is listed, catalogued,
formatted according to functional criteria that are not up for discussion and impose
themselves by claiming to be self-evident. In such a collective way of life which is, as we
already observed in relation to industrial production, metaphysics in action, one could say,
in fact, that essence precedes existence. The order established following this type of
procedure is binding but exerts its constraints more smoothly, insidiously, precisely because
it takes the subjects to which it is applied at the very source, anticipating their behavior,
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preparing and leading them towards their goal by incorporating itself into their conduct.
When their behavior does not comply with set objectives they are penalized with rejection,
sidelined without any need for formal sanction. In this respect, we can speak of conditioning
by a norm which no longer depends on obedience to external commands, for like what we
previously called “second nature,” it has become completely immanent to the processes it
affects as it completes them. In this way, the new politics of “populations” of which Foucault
speaks is propagated, a politics that is simultaneously and inseparably an economics since,
in the last instance, it is at the level of the economy that the new challenges of power are
defined, from which new figures of subjection follow.

These remarks allow us to better grasp the scope and limits of the concept of “the
disciplinary society,” on which Foucault from the outset based his explanation of the nature
of the new type of power established during the second half of the 18th century within the
specific framework of liberal society. The usage of this concept, introduced by Foucault in
1975 in Discipline and Punish, encounters a basic problem. Does describing a certain type of
a society as “disciplinary” mean attributing to it an organizing principle, “discipline,” that
applies equally to all its aspects and consequently determines it in its very being, more
precisely in its “disciplinary being?” This issue is raised by Stéphane Legrand in his article, “Le
marxisme oublié de Foucault,” which warns against the essentialist and reductive
syncretism of the notion of discipline under which Foucault sometimes seems to subsume
mutually heterogeneous forms of subjection, reducing these to a single process for which
“discipline” always provides the model: “One wonders, how is it that this same schema can
be used to produce training, military prowess, productivity at work, hospital treatment?” 29
In the same spirit, we could question the relevance of the concept of “norm” when it lays
claim to an explanatory value in itself. However, it is clear that when Foucault talks about
the “society of norms” – if this formula means anything and can be taken seriously – it is not
in reference to the ideal model of a society of the norm but to a reality of a completely
different order, to a complex and differentiated game of norms, a notion that is at any rate
better to employ only in the plural. Otherwise one risks attributing to different norms,
coexisting at a given moment and potentially confronting each other in the same historical
social formation, a single purpose relating to the specific power of a norm in itself,
considered both as an essence and as a cause. When, in Discipline and Punish, Foucault talks
about “discipline” in the singular (as he does when he gives this title to the third part of the
book) he takes precisely this risk and even appears to make matters worse when he
presents the panoptic schema not as a particular example but as a sort of model that,
starting from the specific case of the prison, can be universally applied, to other disciplinary
institutions like the army, school, workshop, hospital, etc…The notion of discipline, like that
of “norm,” can only serve as an effective analytic tool if it ceases to be reduced to the
abstract presupposition of a convergence of its forms of application and is instead directed
towards the interaction of these forms in a context where their content is exposed to
perpetual renegotiation. Analogously, if one presents the intervention of norms in the social

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order by reducing it to a program of “rationalization” formulated with reference to the
principle of a reason entirely constituted a priori in itself, one erases at once the historical
and thus conjunctural character of this intervention. 30

This general objection is not the only one that we can make to the notion of the “disciplinary
society.” If the society of norms was nothing but a society of discipline, this would mean
that the only point of application for its mechanisms would be behavior, and more
specifically individual bodily behaviors whose reform is precisely their objective. However,
what characterizes the society of norms is precisely that it does not treat individuals as such
but as elements forming larger groups, the type formed by populations. Thanks to this
move, it is capable of “governing” them in the very specific meaning that Foucault imparts to
this notion, that is, to use a formula we have already encountered, “structuring the field of
their possible action.” When Marx speaks of the “field of labor (Arbeitsfeld),” where the
capitalist organizes the production of surplus value under his command, he aims precisely
at something of this kind. Within such a “field,” the workers have ceased to exist as
individuals and become productive subjects, totally immersed in the “collective power,” that
is in a collective body outside of which they no longer have a reality of their own.

Let us bring this digression to an end and return to the analysis of new modes of the labor
process, in so far as they rest upon the consumption of a collective power, thus enabling the
increase of its productivity. Thanks to the unification of individual powers into a collective
power, the capitalist is now in a position to exert strict control not only over the results of
the labor process, hence over its product as dead labor (Werk, travail, work), but also over its
course as the application of living labor (Arbeit, travail, labor). The change in scale thus
provokes a modification in the nature of labor. In the beginning the exploitation/extortion of
surplus value applies to the individual worker, forced to work not for himself but for
another. As exploitation becomes integrated with and “massifes” the operation of the labor
process, it comes to apply to the collective worker who performs labor in common, social
labor whose organization it now takes in charge:

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 We also saw that, at first, the command of capital over labour ( das Kommando des Kapitals über
die Arbeit) was only a formal result of the fact that the worker, instead of working for himself,
works for, and consequently under, the capitalist. Through the co-operation of numerous wage-
labourers, the command of capital develops into a requirement for carrying on the labour process
itself, into a real condition of production. That a capitalist should command in the field of
production is now as indispensable as that a general should command on the field of battle. All
directly social or communal labour on a large scale requires, to a greater or lesser degree, a directing
authority, in order to secure the harmonious co-operation of the activities of individuals, and to
perform the general functions that have their origin in the motion of the total productive organism,
as distinguished from the motion of its separate organs. A single violin player is his own conductor:
an orchestra requires a separate one. The work of directing, supervision and mediation becomes one
of the functions of capital, from the moment that the labour under capital’s control becomes co-
operative. As a specific function of capital, the directing function acquires its own special
characteristics. 31

Marx here makes two comparisons in order to explain how the capitalist “directs” the
exploitation of labor-power; on the one hand, with the army general, and on the other, with
the conductor of an orchestra. These comparisons become even more interesting once
further parallels have been drawn between them. The orchestra represents modalities of
coöperation conforming primarily to technical objectives; and the army modalities of
coöperation involving a vertical, hierarchical structure which organizes joint action by
transmitting orders and checking that they are followed in practice, that is obeyed. In line
with these two models, a system of authority combining several functions is established:
directing, supervision and mediation, as enumerated by Marx in this passage. Direction is
the very first form of authority which consists in giving impetus to a movement by
prescribing it an unified orientation from which it must not deviate. It establishes the
principle of simplification, reducing diversity to homogeneity. The very first task the
conductor must ensure instrumentalists respect is that they play together, and not each for
himself according to whim. Under the command of its general, communicated through its
“daily orders,” an army must march “as one man,” leaving no space for deviant behavior and
eliminating in advance rebels or protesters who have no choice but to exit a game in which
they no longer belong. However, this direct form of authority, which is exercised far and
wide, is not enough: left to itself it risks remaining a dead letter. That is why it must be
circulated and in a way cashed in, distributed. Besides a higher authority that in the last
instance gives the orders, this presupposes mediating bodies that supervise their
application in detail, checking that the smallest individual acts conform to common rules
and respect the norms. For this reason, instead of being uniformly communicated from
center to periphery, authority expands through the countless channels of a complex
organization, thus becoming sufficiently flexible to adapt itself to all aspects of productive
activity without exception: in other words, it diversifies. However, to avoid diversification
turning into dispersion, flexibility into a factor of disorder, it is necessary, moreover, that the
multiplicity of mediating bodies, which concretely enact authority in such a way that it
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penetrates the most minute details of the labor process, are not left to themselves but are
kept to the overall perspective they must obey and from which they must not be detached.
Thus, they are reduced to the status of “mediations” chained to one another. Once again,
the hierarchical model of the army is foregrounded. Its aides de camp, officers, N.C.O.s,
martinets and minions of all kinds ensure that power, instead of residing only at the head, is
present at all points of the organization, even the most minute, where it is reproduced,
“represented” to the extent that it is assigned a place within the system in which it
participates and on which it depends. In such an organization, there is not, on the one side,
power, and on the other, opposite it, those it dominates, but a complex network whose
proliferating intermediary links occupy positions that are at the same time those of
dominant and dominated. Here obeying and commanding are no longer alternative
functions but combine to the point where they can no longer be distinguished from one
another, which means that those occupying these places obey by commanding. In this way,
the operations of direction-supervision-mediation, which enable the organization of the
labor process to produce the maximum relative surplus value, are based on this
organization, which becomes thoroughly entangled in the “meshes of power” from which it
can no longer escape. Foucault took up this idea in summary fashion in his Discipline and
Punish:

Surveillance thus becomes a decisive economic operator both as an internal part of the production
machinery and as a specific mechanism in the disciplinary power. 32

In a footnote, Foucault cites the end of the passage of Chapter 13 (Chapter 11 of the original
German edition) of the Roy translation of Capital that we have just commented on. 33

In this regard, one can speak of a generalization of authority, which as it extends becomes
immanent to the process of its realization, with which it fully merges. Paradoxically, this
generalization, which in the beginning follows a pattern of homogenization, leads to an
operation of specification or specialization, thus granting relative autonomy to the
mediating instances that we have just been discussing:

If capitalist direction is thus twofold in content, owing to the twofold nature of the process of
production which has to be directed-on the one hand a social labour process for the creation of a
product, and on the other hand capital’s process of valorization - in form it is purely despotic
(despotisch). As co-operation extends its scale, this despotism ( Despotismus) develops the forms
that are peculiar to it. Just as at first the capitalist is relieved from actual labour as soon as his
capital has reached that minimum amount with which capitalist production, properly speaking, first
begins, so now he hands over the work of direct and constant supervision of the individual workers
and groups of workers to a special kind of wage-labourer. An industrial army of workers under the
command of a capitalist requires, like a real army, officers (managers) and N.C.O.s (foremen,
overseers), who command during the labour process in the name of capital. The work of supervision
becomes their established and exclusive function. 34

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In order to adhere to the operation of the labor process, the command of capital follows it
in the double sense of guiding and supervising it, step by step, in such a way that the
pressure that command exerts is permanent and the chances of discrepancy or loss are
kept to a minimum. Consequently, mass production refines the forms of the division of
labor, separating out functions corresponding to activities that are not directly productive
and perform this role of guidance and supervision. The idea of supervision, as Foucault has
shown, notably in the studies devoted to disciplinary procedures, is part and parcel of the
functioning of the society of norms. What specifically does the supervision of activities
mean? It means that activities should not only be controlled afterwards in terms of their
effects or results but supervised at source even before they have begun to take effect. The
system of supervision has primarily a preventive role, acts as a deterrent. It prefigures the
ends it seeks to enforce and is the more effective as it has no need to intervene in the
activities with sanctions or punishment. This is exactly the function assigned to managerial
staff whose authority, precisely because it fulfils a supervisory function, operates in close
contact with the labor process, which it “follows” step by step and even precedes, directing
the latter in a such a way as to leave no margin of deviation or error. Thanks to these
intermediaries, the command of capital spreads throughout the productive body,
throughout the collective power of social labor, taking full control using different channels
whose organizational structure it has mastered. This is the precondition for its spreading
without diluting. On the contrary, it is all the stronger for employing this multiplicity of
channels which refine its distribution.

This distribution, ending up with the diversification of control and supervision tasks, is
eventually accomplished by the separation of manual and intellectual labor, that is labor
which is not satisfied with just “doing” the job or working but in return reflects upon it. This
reflection on the organization of the labor process, which aims to set in motion the new
collective power created by coöperation, is accomplished both at a distance and in close
proximity, on an ad hoc basis and uninterruptedly. Freed from material, that is manual
forms of labor, intellectual labor of different levels of graduation provides itself with the
means to intervene all the time and everywhere. The first to free himself from the process
of production properly speaking – that is the productive consumption of labor power – is the
capitalist or boss. From his office, he pulls all the strings, takes important decisions, defines
company strategy. In his train, little by little, all those he needs to transmit his orders and
make sure they are correctly applied become detached or rather specialized in the
“supervision” of the work of others – messengers, inspectors, security personnel, drill
sergeants of every shape and stripe, to whom he delegates a part of his authority so as to
consolidate its extension.

In this respect, we can talk about an economy of power which is simultaneously a

conservation of power. Authority is managed like a material power, thereby reinforcing its
effectiveness, whose measure in the last instance is the maximum production of profit. Let

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us cite in this connection a final passage from the chapter of Capital on coöperation, which
summarizes its gains:

The worker is the owner of his labour-power until he has finished bargaining for its sale with the
capitalist, and he can sell no more than what he has – i.e. his individual, isolated labour-power. This
relation between capital and labour is in no way altered by the fact that the capitalist, instead of
buying the labour-power of one man, buys that of 100, and enters into separate contracts with 100
unconnected men instead of with one. He can set the 100 men to work, without letting them co-
operate. He pays them the value of 100 independent labour-powers, but he does not pay for the
combined labour-power of the 100. Being independent of each other, the workers are isolated. They
enter into relations with the capitalist, but not with each other. Their co-operation only begins with
the labour process, but by then they have ceased to belong to themselves. On entering the labour
process they are incorporated into capital. As co-operators, as members of a working organism,
they merely form a particular mode of existence of capital. Hence the productive power developed
by the worker socially is the productive power of capital. The socially productive power of labour
develops as a free gift to capital whenever the workers are placed under certain conditions, and it is
capital which places them under these conditions. Because this power costs capital nothing, while
on the other hand it is not developed by the worker until his labour itself belongs to capital, it
appears as a power which capital possesses by its nature – a productive power inherent in capital. 35

This brings us back to the analyses presented at the beginning of this essay. What the
capitalist buys and pays with a wage – under the terms of the labor contract, which is an
exchange between parties free and equal in law – is the possibility of using the labor-power
of each individual producer for a certain time within the spatial limits of his firm. But, in
reality, what he exploits in order to extract a surplus value that he appropriates in full is a
general productive power that is more than the sum of individual labor-powers, and which
consequently he obtains gratis. This general productive power – that, in Marx’s words,
“capital possesses by its nature, a productive power inherent in capital” – is the specific
result of coöperation which inserts individual activities into the collective labor process as it
is performed under the command of capital, corresponding to productivity norms that have
literally seized hold of these activities by placing them under control and supervision. The
authority the capitalist exercises in this context is legitimate, therefore legally unassailable,
for it rests on an exchange based on rules mutually agreed by the contracting parties.
Besides being legitimate this contract is from the point of view of the capitalist also efficient
since its implementation “returns” a surplus value in the form of the production of relative
surplus value that constitutes his own profit. Without any prospect of profit, unless he is a
saint, which is unlikely, he would never embark on any such undertaking. This enterprise
turns him into what we have proposed to call a metaphysician in action, one bringing
together all the conditions required for essence to precede existence not only on paper but
in reality as well. At a push, one could say that capitalist industrial production manufactures
the human essence as a form of productive power in order to exploit it.

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One can appreciate how much these analyses might have interested Foucault and
encouraged him in his efforts to develop a new, non-juridical conception of power. These
analyses make it possible to get at, what he called, the “real functioning” of power, of which
the law is, at best, the ideological reverse, that is, a representation out of step with how it
actually operates. However, one cannot say in the abstract that this ideology is purely and
simply wrong and as such should be rejected as an illusion that it would suffice to dispel.
For, in its own way, it participates in the functioning of power and contributes to its
effectiveness:

Let me offer a general and tactical reason that seems self-evident: power is tolerable only on
condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its
own mechanisms. Would power be accepted if it were entirely cynical? For it, secrecy is not in the
nature of an abuse; it is indispensable to its operation. Not only because power imposes secrecy on
those whom it dominates, but because it is perhaps just as indispensable to the latter: would they
accept it if they did not see it as a mere limit placed on their desire, leaving a measure of freedom
however slight – intact? Power as a pure limit set on freedom is, at least in our society, the general
form of its acceptability. 36

To be productive, power must become integrated into networks that, along with wealth-
producing material goods, produce the bodies which laboriously manufacture these very
goods, conforming to norms that govern their manufacture. The condition for this is that
the action of power is gradual, without drawing attention or being recognized, otherwise its
attempts at penetration run into points of resistance that its advance, once exposed, in turn
provokes. To achieve this goal, that is to remain invisible, power uses decoys, including the
inverted representation of its action provided by juridical discourse. The trick is to
recuperate this representation, which taken in itself corresponds to nothing real, and make
it an element of the technology of power. 37 This operation, which reduces the law to the
level of a pure representation disconnected from any real content, and thus to a negative
representation, does not have a timeless character, but takes place, as Foucault specifies,
“at least in our society.” In other words, it should not be used to characterize power in
general, a concept devoid of any real content. It rather applies to the type of historical
society which has made productivity the heart of its existence and developed forms of
industrial “coöperation” to achieve this end, that is, in different terminology, capitalist
society. In the latter the technologies of power have taken on a particularly refined
appearance, permitting them amongst other feats to turn the language of law to their
advantage as a mask for their real activity which takes place on a plane entirely different to
that of the law and its prohibitions. In other forms of society, such as feudal society, one
might ask whether the law was just a language serving the same type of discourse of
recovery used by the bourgeoisie. Academic Marxism fell headlong into this trap. It took
literally the discourse of power elaborated by bourgeois society which makes power appear

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as a “superstructure” whose orders come down from high. In reality these orders ascend
bottom up, from the depths of the system where value is produced. The truth of power, “at
least in our society,” is economic before being political. 38

According to Foucault, Marx helps us to better understand this, at least in those passages of
his work where he deconstructs the “mechanisms” through which capital exerts its authority
over labor, exploiting labor-power so as to increase its “productivity.” But, for this to happen
the subjects must themselves be made “productive,” thanks to appropriate procedures of
subjection which are part of the establishment of the new economy. These complex
procedures of subjection are related to the establishment of the new form of power which,
by overcoming the alternative between the individual and collective, constantly moves back
and forth between the sphere of the economy and that of politics. As Foucault has
explained in a key passage of Discipline and Punish where he refers in a note to Chapter
11/13 of Capital on coöperation, and to Deleule and Guéry’s Productive Body:

If the economic take-off of the West began with the techniques that made possible the accumulation
of capital, it might perhaps be said that the methods for administering the accumulation of men
made possible a political take-off in relation to the traditional, ritual, costly, violent forms of power,
which soon fell into disuse and were superseded by a subtle, calculated technology of subjection. In
fact, the two processes – the accumulation of men and the accumulation of capital – cannot be
separated; it would not have been possible to solve the problem of the accumulation of men without
the growth of an apparatus of production capable of both sustaining them and using them;
conversely, the techniques that made the cumulative multiplicity of men useful accelerated the
accumulation of capital. At a less general level, the technological mutations of the apparatus of
production, the division of labor and the elaboration of the disciplinary techniques sustained an
ensemble of very close relations (cf. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Chapter XIII and the very interesting
analysis in Guéry and Deleule). Each makes the other possible and necessary; each provides a
model for the other. The disciplinary pyramid constituted the small cell of power within which the
separation, coördination and supervision of tasks was imposed and made efficient; and analytical
partitioning of time, gestures and bodily forces constituted an operational schema that could easily
be transferred from the groups to be subjected to the mechanisms of production; the massive
projection of military methods onto industrial organization was an example of this modelling of the
division of labor following the model laid down by the schemata of power. But, on the other hand,
the technical analysis of the process of production, its “mechanical” breaking-down, were projected
onto the labor force whose task it was to implement it: the constitution of those disciplinary
machines in which the individual forces that they bring together are composed into a whole and
therefore increased is the effect of this projection. Let us say that discipline is the unitary technique
by which the body is reduced as a “political” force at the least cost and maximized as a useful force.
The growth of a capitalist economy gave rise to the specific modality of disciplinary power, whose
general formulas, techniques of submitting forces and bodies, in short, “political anatomy,” could
be operated in the most diverse political regimes, apparatuses or institutions. 39

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This passage confirms, without having to decide between the hypothesis of a Foucault who
is (still) a Marxist and that of Marx who is (already) a Foucauldian, that the encounter
between these two analysts of the modern régime of sociability had already taken place,
resulting in a new conception of power, authority ‚and the subject which can be taken as the
basis for further analyses.

– Translated by Tijana Okić, Patrick King, and Cory Knudson

This text was originally written as a contribution to the collective research project headed by
Macherey, “Savoirs, Textes, Langage,” and first appeared on the group’s website, “La philosophie
au sens large.” It subsequently appeared in a slightly modified form in Macherey’s 2014 collection
of essays, Le Sujet des normes. The present translation is based on the initial version. We thank
the publisher of Le sujet des normes, Éditions Amsterdam, for allowing the release of the
translation.

The translators would also like to thank David Broder for comments on the draft and Sara
Mendes for her help with the diagram.

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