In this post I want to return to considering Thomas Lemke's paper, 'Foucault, Governmentality and Critique', which I had previously considered here.
In that post I had briefly shown how Foucault make a critical contribution to our understanding of neo-liberalism by moving beyond the standard knowledge and power dualism of political philosophy.
In this post I want to consider how Foucault moves beyond the duality of state and economy. This duality is taken for granted in that a neo-liberal discourse is concerned to rollback the (bad) state to make room for the (good) deregulated economy. As public policy neo-liberalism is an end of politics discourse that is deeply political since it escalates the rights of the private sector (meaning corporate, not petty bourgeois, capital) over public regulation and public sector or community provision. Economics is a political economy:---what we know from Marx is that the economic relations of exploitaton in the sphere of production are power relations between capital and labour.
The paradox of using the power of the state to roll back the state to make room for a deregulated market is well known.
So how does Foucualt transgress the state economy dualism? Lemke suggests that he extends Marx's political economy by combining a microphysics of power with a macropolitical question of the state. How? By looking at power relations concentrated in the form of the state in terms of the practice of government. The state itself is a tactic of government that makes possible what is within the competence of the state and what is not.
Instead of neo-liberalism being a retreat from government to the deregulated market, it is a transformation of politics involving the restructuring of power relations in society. What is happening under a conservative governance is not a shift to a smaller state. Libertarianism has been sidelined by a big government conservatism.,which increasingly governs through the non-government organizations (ngos) in civil society.
An example of the transformation in governance is the way the churches and welfare organizations have become involved in governing the unemployed through a welfare to work policy. The am is to get more the unemployed, disabled and single mothers off welfare and into work.
So the stark duality between state and economy is no longer a foundation of political philosophy. It is an element or effect of a neo-liberal discourse.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at November 5, 2004 12:35 AM | TrackBack