Foucault, Lenin, and Western Marxism

Abstract

This article others a brief historical account of the complex relationship between Michel Foucault and certain theorists in the Western Marxist philosophical tradition. In the context of the history of the “short twentieth century,” Western Marxism is an intellectual trend based on an interpretation of non-Western revolutionary praxis (by Bolsheviks, Maoists, Guevaristas, etc.). Comparative analysis of several schematic portraits - of Lenin’s revolutionary intellectual, of traditional as opposed to organic intellectuals in Gramsci, and of Foucault’s public intellectual - shows that Foucault in a certain instances was not an external enemy of the Western Marxist tradition, but rather its internal critic. Foucault comes across as a revisionist who engaged in a debate with Lenin about the strategy of the revolutionary movement in France of the 1960s and the 70s. Foucault’s criticism of Leninism unexpectedly turns out to be consistent with the basic struggle of post-WWII Western Marxism to find an alternative to the Bolshevik experience of revolution. This deliberate concurrence makes Foucault one of the significant figures in the history of late Western Marxism, but this becomes a real problem for current historians of neo-Marxist thought when coupled with his generally anti-Marxist views. The article discusses two possible solutions to this problem devised by Perry Anderson and Daniel Bensaid. Anderson’s description of the role of Foucault in the fate of Western Marxism is limited to conceptual questions about the relationship between Marxism and (post) structuralism. Bensaid tries to explain how Foucault fits into the Marxist tradition by appealing to social changes, specifically the changing ideology of capitalist society (in the spirit of The New Spirit of Capitalism by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello). Building on Bensaid’s work, the article shows the link between Foucault’s position on public intellectuals and the crisis of the revolutionary movement of the last half-century, in particular by reference to the famous “Iranian episode” in Foucault’s biography.