Marxist critique of Foucault: Foucault as pseudo-Marxist

Caleb “I’m gonna start by making a little thumbnail sketch of Foucault’s philosophy. This will necessarily be an oversimplification, but if you can’t be arsed to actually read his books, this will be a serviceable summary. You’ll at least get the gist of it, although I’ll have to gloss over a lot of the specifics. Then I’ll say what I think his problem is.

Foucault’s philosophy, it seems to me, has two main pillars: Nietzsche and Marx. Foucauldian philosophy is a combination of Nietzsche’s perspectivism and will to power with Marx’s materialism and focus on institutions.

The first pillar is Nietzsche, whose perspective sees everything in terms of power and dominance and explains everyone’s actions by assuming a fundamental drive to impose one’s will on the rest of reality. Everything is about power. Even an inanimate object exists only by taking up space, from which other solid objects are excluded. For Nietzsche, the will to power is the brute existent that shows up whenever you dig deeply enough into anything. In one of his essays, he says:

My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on.

So everything is about power.

Nietzsche’s perspectivism is also deeply influential on Foucault. Nietzsche rejects the notion of a “true world” because he’s writing in the wake of Kant, who sees external reality as noumenal and beyond the reach of one’s phenomenal consciousness. The “true world” if there is one is unknowable. For Nietzsche, any “truth” that we come to believe is merely the successful imposition of one’s will on the world. Scientific truth, for example, is only accepted as true because of its ability to predict, explain, and control things. We believe in science because it gives us power and lets us make technology. A lot of the more idealistic scientists would vehemently disagree with this and claim that science reveals truth about reality independent of us. Nietzsche, of course, disagrees.

So perspectivism and the will to power come from Nietzsche, but what of Marx? Marx’s influence on Foucault comes across, broadly, on two fronts: the emphasis on institutions, and materialism. The focus on institutions has, as its motivation, a sympathy with the oppressed, or at least, what Marx imagined the proletariat to be like. I am tempted to say something snide about the starry-eyed bourgeois intellectuals’ naive ideas about the working class, but that ground is well-trodden. The second front on which the Marxist influence comes through in materialism. By materialism, we do not mean ontological materialism as philosophers commonly understand it, i.e. that everything is made of matter. Rather, Marx’s materialism is the idea that everything about human society can be boiled down to economic factors; all other aspects of human life, such as ideology, religion, culture, art, and so on, are epiphenomenal or parasitic on economics. A legitimate explanation of any aspect of the human condition is always economic at the bottom, although it can have a non-economic superstructure. For example, the Marxist notion of “ideology” says that capitalism produces a superstructure of ideas in order to perpetuate itself. It’s a “superstructure” in that it is built on a strictly economic basis.

Foucauldian thought combines these two. The Marxist influence loses its modernist foundation; Marxism does, after all, assume the existence and intelligibility of objective reality. Foucault rejects that in favor of Nietzsche’s perspectivism: we believe things only because they are useful to us, and not for any reason of reality or truth. It’s not that Foucault doesn’t believe that reality exists, per se; it would be more accurate to say that Foucault simply isn’t concerned with reality. He does not deny that truth or reality exist. It’s better to say that he is truth-agnostic. His version of Marxist materialism boils down all truth (what Foucault would call “knowledge production”) to power relations. Biology works the way it does, not because there is some objectively existing category of “life” or “organism”, but only because it is convenient for our institutions to categorize life and organisms in a particular way. The universities, governments, and other institutions that control scientific research, for Foucault, are merely constructing an ideological superstructure to maintain their power.

There is a difference in how Foucault and Marx view power. For Marx, power is like a weight pressing down on the proletariat. The lower classes are literally oppressed by the institutions that keep them down. For Foucault, power is more malleable, soft, permeating. It’s like the old saw about the fish that spends its whole life in water and is thus unaware of what water is. We spend our lives ensconced in institutional power, and we’re epistemically blinded because the categories we use to make sense of the world are constructed by institutions to maintain the status quo. In fact, we ourselves are constituted by this grille of power. You have the perspective and personality and inclinations that you do because a set of institutional relations resulted in your subjectivity being built in a particular way. In fact, Foucault defines the subject as a particular place in a network of institutional power. A subject just is a position from which institutional power can be enforced. There is no such thing as an individual speaking; only power speaks.

! You will notice, if you’ve been reading closely, that I lapsed into opaque academic gobbledygook there in that last paragraph. Much of this philosophy is deliberately written in impenetrable diction so that it can only be understood on its own terms. It’s as if it were written in its own language, and that language cannot be translated into yours, so if you wish to understand it, you can only do so by speaking it. It is designed to monopolize one’s thought process, to assert control over the reader’s perspective. But what else do you expect from someone who is obsessed with power?

I said all that to say this: Foucault’s big problem is his myopia. Foucault himself is aware of this, and he frequently tries to forestall this objection by saying something to this effect: “I’m not saying that this is the only way you can see it. I’m just saying this is one way to see it. You can still take other perspectives.” The issue is that, while Foucault pays lip service to the idea that his perspective does not cover everything, he actsas if his perspective were the only one. Pursuant to this, if you object to something Foucault (or one of his followers) says, the response will be something like this: “You are objecting to my analysis as a means of enforcing the status quo. It is not you who speak, but power that speaks through you; you are oppressing me by saying that.” Notice the trick here: if you object to the perspective that says everything is about power, then you will be accused of oppressing your interlocutor. This forces you to defend yourself against that charge, trapping you in a position where you’re stuck arguing about institutional power. It’s an ingenious strategy. It is also, ironically enough, extremely coercive.

! Foucault himself seemed to have sensed this. If you read stuff that he wrote and said during his later years, you’ll find that he retreats from some of his more extreme positions and begins to sound like an old fashioned classical liberal again. Unfortunately, he was unable to complete this transition back to classical liberalism because he died of AIDS. At the risk of being insensitive, I regard this as auspiciously foreshadowing the course of the left write large. ;-)

To summarize: the big problem with Foucault is that he can only see things in terms of institutional power, which means that certain realities are not available to him, regardless of his (apparently disingenuous) insistence to the contrary.


Charles Brown : Nietzsche is the anti-Marx. Marx champions oppressed / economically exploited / ruled classes in history; history is a history of class struggles . Nietzsche champions the oppressor/exploiting ruling classes in history in _The Genealogy of Morals_. Marx rallies the working class to overthrow the ruling bourgeoisie; Nietzsche discourages the slaves from resenting their masters. Foucault is an anti-Marxist pretending to be a Marxist : a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Truth-agnostic is not knew from Kant’s unknowable thing-in-itself. Frederick Engels termed Kant’s agnosticism “shamefaced materialism. “ That would apply to Nietzsche and Foucault.

In the manner of Hegel , Engels validly criticized Kant by holding that the thing-in-itself , ( relative) truth, is knowable through practice ( experimentation and industry).

Foucault wraps old errors in new packages.

Foucault can’t be the “Left” writ large because the Left is Marxism and he’s anti-Marxist/fake-Marxist/phony left .

His “materialism “ is the opposite of Marx’s materialism. Marx’s materialism is the belief in the existence of objective reality which determines scientific truths , not that humans in power determine scientific “truths.”Marxism recognizes that ruling classes determine significantly what subjects of material reality scientific research will be about , although that is not entirely true . For example Galileo made discoveries that his ruling class forced him to renounce ( though of course future generations upheld them). Darwin’s discovery that all life , including humans , are related through common ancestors ( tree of life) was in serious conflict with the Christian power structure’s Adam and Eve human origin myth of creation by God.

As to the supposed forcing me to defend myself from the charge of “oppressing “ my interlocutor, the argument is a circular fallacy . And Foucaultians are wolves in sheep’s clothing : Foucaultians are oppressor/victimizers lying that they are oppressed/ victimized .

Foucault’s theory is not Marxism ; Marxism is not about institutions in general, but class struggle; he’s a fake Marxist . Foucault has a fool’s cult .

Nietzsche is wrong about will to power as some kind of universal motive . He’s really wrong that inanimate objects have wills at all (!) That’s false ; sounds like a form of pantheism.

https://www.prickly-paradigm.com/images/sahlins_paradigm1.pdf