Foucault and Agamben miss the relationship between the State and capitalism. And, there’s no brightline for good/bad State action

One of the reasons that political thinkers turned to Foucault after the fall of the Soviet Union and the death of actually existing socialism is that his emphasis on power breaks from Marxism’s myopic focus on the economy to the exclusion of all other domains. Power works through religion, education, politics, and every possible field, in addition to the economy. The turn to an analysis of power looks at economy in terms of the role that it plays in subjecting people to coercive control, just as the state or the religious institution does. While the shift in focus from economy to power broadens the site of inquiry, it does nothing to further penetrate into how capitalism and the state work in relation to each other. This remains a blind spot that the theory of biopower inherits from Marxism, although it inverts the relation.

The turn from economy to power leaves Foucault and the other theorists of biopower especially ill-equipped to analyze the structures of the capitalist social order. Capitalism does not rule through its deployment of power but through inserting itself into subjects’ desire, which is a term that Foucault explicitly rejects. (11) By focusing on power, Foucault misses what drives subjects to commit themselves to capitalist society. It is not the power that capitalism has over them but the way that it entices their desire. Capitalism doesn’t issue threats or commands but rather entices with the promise of an unlimited satisfaction that the commodity will provide. One invests oneself in capitalism for the promise of a future satisfaction that will never come. The impossibility of the future that capitalism holds out before us doesn’t detract from its appeal but augments it. We strive for what we cannot attain and never cease striving because the fail is the fuel for our desire. While the capitalist economy occasionally imposes its power on people, this is an entirely secondary operation. It rules through the logic of desire, not the discourse of power. As long as Foucault and Agamben analyze the working of power, they will miss what keeps capitalism going, including the relationship that develops between capitalism and the state.

What Foucault and his inheritors have in common with Marxism is the belief that the state is always an oppressive force. What characterizes Foucault’s thought – along with that of other theorists of biopower such as Agamben and Roberto Esposito – is that he doesn’t distinguish between capitalism and the state. Foucault and the other theorists of biopower do not often mention capitalism because they do not see it as distinct from the power of the state. In contrast to Marx, these figures do not see the state as simply the expression of capital’s self-interest. Instead, they make no distinction at all. Both are expressions of power, and power is the enemy. The inability to theorize capital’s dominance in an epoch when it manifests itself everywhere is the primary weakness of the theory of biopower. If Marxism reduces the state to capital, the theory of biopower does the reverse, which is an even more grievous error because the primary danger today is danger to the state not of the state.

While Agamben worries a great deal about the expansion of state power, he remains relatively silent about the role that capitalist logic plays in people’s subjugation. There is no sense that capitalism, not state power, represents the fundamental threat confronting humanity today. There is no insistence that the project of emancipation must, first and foremost, take on the forces of capital in order to confront this threat. In fact, Agamben’s interventions during the Covid-19 disaster bespeak his absolute resistance to any expression of state power even if it might act as a brake on capitalist accumulation. As he sees it, any exercise of power by the state in the name of preserving life has the effect of reducing persons to the status of bare life, of extending the regime of biosecurity through the announcement of a state of exception. Authorities take advantage of any occasion – something like a pandemic, for instance – to increase control over life. This is the only danger that they recognize.