Dialectical methodology, power and capital: Dialectical methods, Foucault's encounter with Marxism, and techniques of class domination into the global era (Michel Foucault)

Interpretations and reconstructions of Marx's thought have suffered from problems in keeping its various dimensions—the dialectical method, historical materialism, political-economics, and the communist program—in a proper logical relationship to each other. As a result, Marxian oriented intellectual approaches suffer from both internal weaknesses and external criticisms, many of which turn out to be misplaced. If Marx's dialectical methodology is examined in terms of its assumptions, its language and concepts, and its methods of research procedure, a better foundation for evaluating the arguments put forth by both supporters and detractors can be established. Currently, critics often point to the work of Michel Foucault as containing the elements necessary to supplant Marxist orientations in radical intellectual work. However, this interpretation is belied by both a reading of Foucault through the analytical lens of a reconstructed dialectical methodology, and by his own words on the subject. Placing Foucault's work within the paradigm of the dialectical method allows one to analyze the techniques of power in modern society that are “productive” as a supplement to classical Marxian models of “repressive” power. Such a synthesis allows for an examination of power expressed as techniques of maintaining class domination—repression of proletarians and the production of docile and useful subjects. The practices are examined first historically, with focus on the discursive underpinnings of the legitimation of ruling class domination and its use of violence. Next, analysis is updated as current policies practiced in international political-economy in the era of globalization are scrutinized. These include the following: uses of violence and drug running in peripheral societies by state agencies from core hegemons; the international institutional structure geared toward appropriation of wealth; and, domestically in the United States, the parallel processes of proletarianization of the population, and the militarization and criminalization of civil life. These latter issues concern the functions of the “war on drugs”, increasing paramilitary agents policing public streets, and massive increase in the prison-industrial complex, and its racist outcomes. An examination of courts as mechanisms for filtering proletarians into state control and how this produces individuals as subjects closes out the research. Provisional models and conclusions are offered.