ABSTRACT
Foucault’s relationship with the Marxist tradition and Marx more specifically is quite problematic. The ‘refusal to work’ among the marginal strata of society reached a peak in the generalization of anti-institutional and anti-authoritarian struggles of the 1970s due to the increasing questioning of the Fordist factory, struggles described in neo-Marxists’ writings as well as, indirectly, in the emergence of Foucault’s very relevant concept of illegalismes in Discipline and Punish. After the fall of the various 1960s and 1970s movements, public problems – unemployment, the lack of collective rights, the repression of labour and political opposition – became again redefined as ‘private troubles’. But, how much they were one or the other was of course a dependent variable of a power struggle defined in terms of ‘class’ and ‘race’. If capitalist society is essentially marked by class struggle, the idea of subordination seems to constitute its original and dominant principle, a necessary premise to the goal of production.
