Foucault, Marx, and the Political Technologies of the Accumulation of Capital

Despite the efforts to revise Foucault’s early lecture courses at the Collège de France towards an anti-Marxist interpretation, these lectures constitute an indelible sign of the French philosopher’s fruitful intervention in the field of Marxist analysis of exploitation. I focus on the lectures of 1972–1973 and 1973–1974. As I attempt to show, Foucault’s analytics of power relations, developed in these lectures, helps us understand the embeddedness of political technologies in the process of capital accumulation. My reading concentrates particularly on the role of violence (and different mechanisms and institutions of violence and coercion) not only as a “prelude to the history of capital” (Marx), but as its constant fellow-traveler. As Foucault shows, “apparatuses and techniques of confinement” are means to “accumulate men” for the ends of capitalist production and, in this sense, they are not only indispensable for the reproduction of capital but function also as “levers” of its accumulation.