Now published in Critical Review. Here's the abstract:
Foucault distanced himself from Marxism even though he worked in an environment—left French theory of the 1960s and 1970s—where Marxism was the dominant frame of reference. By viewing Foucault in the context of French Marxist theoretical debates of his day, we can connect his criticisms of Marxism to his discussions of the status of intellectuals. Foucault viewed standard Marxist approaches to the role of intellectuals as a problem of power and knowledge applicable to the Communist party. Marxist party intellectuals, in his view, had developed rigid and universal theories and had used them to prescribe action, which prevented work on the sorts of problems that he uncovered—even though these problems were central to the development of capitalism.
The paper is an attempt to cut a path through some (mostly 1970s) texts to get a handle on what Foucault is doing with his inconsistent references to Marx and Marxism. There's a complex tangle of issues here, many related to the vicissitudes of the reception of Marx, and I hope that others will be able to add to our understanding of them and the period.
A huge thanks to Shterna Friedman, whose editorial work resulted in a much better article. Also, my paper is going to be part of a special issue of Critical Review on Foucault - the other papers should be appearing relatively soon.
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