Viewing the contemporary problems of European socialism through ordoliberal lenses allowed him to suggest there is no "autonomous socialist governmentality." Socialism remains too statist, beholden to ideological dogma, and therefore too utopian to be effective as a contemporary strategy. Socialism in effect has become a model of the total state for Foucault, [not] unlike Nazism, in fact, and this makes its analysis of power problematic, because of "power is not a substance." Alongside revisionists accounts of modern socialism that has had been repurposed since the 1959 Bad Godesburg decisions of the SDP, Foucault thought that such revisionism was no sort of betrayal, but a necessary update providing an entry point into the liberal game of modern politics. Willy Brandt, too, offered a new kind of German realism about modern politics and modern liberalism, and the French left needed to learn from it.--Duncan Kelly (2019( Foucault on Phobie d’État and Neoliberalism." in Foucault, Neoliberalism, and Beyond, (edited by Stephen W." Sawyer and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins), p. 117. [I inserted a 'not' above, but nothing that follows turns on it.--ES]
Kelly's essay on Foucault is very interesting because it clarifies the significance of Kant and Weber to Foucault's 1979 lectures published as Birth of Biopolitics. And I also agree with the claim that according to Foucault the SDP's stance at Bad Godesburg -- which (in the tradition of Bernstein) basically rejected revolution and accepted the ordoliberal social market economy as legitimate (this involved planning for the market, but no more than necessary) -- was no "betrayal." So, Foucault here, as elsewhere in the Birth of Biopolitics, rejects a Marxist historiography and lens. So what follows is a relatively minor disagreement with Professor Kelly.*
I am not convinced, however, that the explanation for Foucault's claim that there is "no autonomous socialist governmentality" is that it is "too statist," as Kelly suggests. To be sure, one may well think this is plausible because one may assume that the term/concept 'governmentality' is introduced in order to distinguish it from a kind of direct exercise of power by way of command and control; and rather to describe government practice, as Wendy Brown argues, as the "power of conducting and compelling populations "at a distance."" (Undoing the Demos, p. 117; recall also this post). If Brown is right then 'governmentality' anticipates what has come to be known as 'governance.' (Since she is primarily interested in 'governance' my disagreement with her is irrelevant to her argument.)
I don't think Brown is correct here. For Foucault also applies 'governmentality' to police states (which have their own kind of governmentality); that is -- and this is central to my disagreement with Kelly -- on Foucault's account statist doctrines do have their own governmentality. Now, to be sure, Foucault means quite a few things when he uses 'governmentality' and sometimes these do involve a process of compulsion at a distance. But these are just one way governmentality is exercised. In 1978 he stipulated that one of his uses of 'governmentality' meant "The ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target: population, as its principal form of knowledge: political economy, and as its essential technical means: apparatuses of security."** There is no mention of 'distance' here. And this, for good reason because the security state is rather invasive.
Let's look at the passage that Kelly quotes:
In any case, socialism offers an economic rationality just as it puts forward an historical rationality. We can also say that it possesses, and has shown that it possesses, rational techniques of intervention, of administrative intervention, in domains like those of health, social insurance, and so on. So, it is possible to recognize the existence of an historical rationality, an economic rationality, and an administrative rationality in socialism, or, at any rate, let’s say that we can argue about the existence of these rationalities in socialism and we cannot eliminate all these forms of rationality with a wave of the hand. But I do not think that there is an autonomous socialist governmentality. There is no governmental rationality of socialism. In actual fact, and history has shown this, socialism can only be implemented connected up to diverse types of governmentality. It has been connected up to liberal governmentality, and then socialism and its forms of rationality function as counterweights, as a corrective, and a palliative to internal dangers. One can, moreover, [reproach it, as do liberals],* with being itself a danger, but it has lived, it has actually functioned, and we have examples of it within and connected up to liberal governmentalities. We have seen it function, and still see it function, within governmentalities that would no doubt fall more under what last year we called the police state, that is to say, a hyper-administrative state in which there is, so to speak, a fusion, a continuity, the constitution of a sort of massive bloc between governmentality and administration. At that point, in the governmentality of a police state, socialism functions as the internal logic of an administrative apparatus. Maybe there are still other governmentalities that socialism is connected up to; it remains to be seen. But in any case, I do not think that for the moment there is an autonomous governmentality of socialism. Foucault-Birth of Biopolitics, Lecture four, 31 January 1979, p. 92 [See also the material from the same lecture I quoted here a few years ago]
I think this passage is really incompatible with the idea that socialism lacks a governmentality in virtue of its statist orientation. If anything, Foucault's claim isn't just that (i) socialism lacks a governmentality of its own, but also (ii) that when socialism is in power it relies on governmentalities it borrows from others (including rather statist orientations), and (iii) socialism does have a administrative rationality. To put the point sharply, for Foucault the Leninist-Stalinist art of government is de facto a police state while relying on bureaucracy (which can follow socialist principles [as Lenin himself suggested]).
Now, there is no doubt -- and the secondary literature is in broad agreement over this -- that Foucault is rather polemical against Marxism in these lectures. (And remember he had first hand experience not just with the French communist party, but with really existing communism in Poland and social democracy in Sweden.) The real scholarly disagreement involves to what degree Foucault was searching for a a non-socialist 'left' governmentality or to what degree he kind of endorsed a neoliberal governmentality in 1979. I will take no position on this disagreement.
If Kelly is incorrect, as I have argued, why then would Foucault claim that socialism lacks its own autonomous art or practice of government? I have a speculative suggestion. True socialism in the Engels-Leninist tradition involves the abolition of the state. And when it arrives, there is no need for a governmentality at all. Governmentality is only required in the transitionary phases (involving the dictatorship of the proletariat or, say, the party's leadership, etc.) when the state is supposed to be made to wither away. But in the transition phase ruling and governing cannot really be done on socialist principles. This is why during the transition it borrows from other intellectual traditions and practices (and so the lack of autonomous governmentality). I can't prove this is what Foucault has in mind, but I think it makes good sense of his position. For, as he goes on to say, "In short, whether or not there is a theory of the state in Marx is for Marxists to decide. As for myself, I would say that what socialism lacks is not so much a theory of the state as a governmental reason, the definition of what a governmental rationality would be in socialism, that is to say, a reasonable and calculable measure of the extent, modes, and objectives of governmental action."
*I don't see any evidence for the claim that in the 1979 lectures, Foucault claims Willy Brandt offers "a new kind of German realism about modern politics and modern liberalism, and the French left needed to learn from it." But perhaps there is evidence elsewhere in the 1970s.
**From The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, p. 102
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