Foucault: biopotere, biopolitica e egemonia

Abstract

The reproduction of capitalist relationships is the real object of Foucault’s genealogies of biopolitics. In the first European industrialization, capitalist power has fought an unbroken social war against proletarian workforce, spreading its hegemony through disciplinary devices. The latest applications of this discipline on proletarian bodies have been counterbalanced by several forms of popular antagonism (labor refusal, irregularity, waste, sexual disorder…), to combat which capitalism has spread its “microfisic powers” in modern society. Hindering bourgeois exploitation, class struggles also forced capitalism to manage workforce as a biopolitical matter. It’s the phase of the hegemonic paradigm (“master's discourse”), overcome in the Seventies by a new neoliberal biopolitical discourse, whose aim is the reproduction of workforce through competition, systematic production of inequality, subjectivisation processes. This new mode of production, government, and reproduction of workforce ultimately leads to a transformation of class struggles, which nowadays appear as unforeseeable forms of resistance to neo-liberal biopolitical government and its compelling and objectivating power.

Keyswords: Foucault; Workforce; Class struggle; Biopolitcs; Hegemony.