The truly interesting dichotomy alive today in the world and politics is the one between liberal capitalism and the many forms of resistance, conscious or otherwise, to liberal capitalism. On that latter side you have whatever kinds of nationalism, religions, anarchic libertarian groups, military and fascistic dictatorships, xenophobic and racist mentalities, privileged minorities and privileged majorities… All of these quite different kinds of groups have naturally aligned themselves against global neoliberal capitalism. What we call the postmodern has aligned itself to globalism simply because the Left had no choice but to lend its credibility to liberalized humanism under the aegis of international capitalistic alliances that at least adopt the forms or images of rationalized-pluralistic egalitarian society. Capitalism has learned to be as inclusive and tolerant as possible, because this is good for business; postmodernism is all about direct critique of existing power relations and forms of implicit domination and therefore represents a route into liberal global capitalism for something like philosophical Leftist critique. Of course as Guattari pointed out these critiques are kept to the margins of “world integrated capitalism” and never allowed to upset the center. Capitalism may be highly intelligent to read the writing on the wall and adapt itself to forward-looking cultural thought as the human mind pushes for the universal and to purge itself philosophically of errors, but capitalism is also not suicidal – it would not allow such progressivism to upset directly an established regime of profit and control.
Hardt and Negri liberate from Foucault the idea of biopolitics and its conversion into biopower, the human being’s capacity to break open the biopolitical from within, like roots cracking rock. Looking to politicians (Clinton), leadership (Trump) or mass accumulations of capital wealth (Sanders) to solve our problems for us is the height of insanity and arrogance, because already having capitulated to our own ineffectiveness and supposedly de facto division from each other. Liberal capitalism is neither the enemy nor the savior… It is simply the most recent iteration of humanity’s most powerful tool, namely its scope of technology to both set the limits of life as well as set the limits of those limits; to provoke evolutions on both sides of the line.
Human being as “the commons” of life is the site of the most intense battles now. You can get dragged into side skirmishes only at the cost of losing sight of the real war. And the effective players make use of all weapons at their disposal. The weapon itself isn’t good or bad, but how it is used; economics, intellect, production (even the production of the commons of life), the ideals of pluralistic liberal globalism, these are all developments along the cutting edge of life’s great battle for itself.
"To say that power took possession of life in the nineteenth century, or to say that power at least takes life under its care in the nineteenth century, is to say that it has, thanks to the play of technologies of discipline on the one hand and technologies of regulation on the other, succeeded in covering the whole surface that lies between the organic and the biological, between body and population. We are, then, in a power that has taken control of both the body and life or that has, if you like, taken control of life in general – with the body as one pole and the population as the other.” ~ M. Foucault (1976:252-3)
“What we are dealing with in this new technology of power is not exactly society (or at least not the social body, as defined by the jurists), nor is it the individual body. It is a new body, a multiple body, a body with so many heads that, while they might not be infinite in number, cannot necessarily be counted. Biopolitics deals with the population, with the population as a political problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and political, as a biological problem and as power’s problem.” ~M. Foucault (1976:245)
" Biopower, as any kind of power, has to be understood as a strategy and as a relation; it is deployed through technics or technologies.
Biopower is not aimed at prohibiting and punishing, but it rather deals with the production of the real; it aims to produce the totality of social life.
The main aim of biopower, being part of capitalism, is not to repress people, but to make populations productive.
We can better understand the technologies of contemporary biopower by comparing them to the technologies of [bio]power in the industrial society. The diagram of power technologies in the industral society is the panopticon. It was deployed in the so called insitutions of enclosement, such as factories, schools, offices and homes, where bodies and minds were disciplined in space and time.
The Greek term “biomechania” describes effectively the biopolitical dimension of industrial society.
Technologies of biopower in the age of networks are different from those of the industrial era. They are often described by the term society of control, coined by writer William Burroughs and commented upon by Gilles Deleuze [1990].
Society of control technologies aim to make people productive, as we already mentioned, but they do so, not through the tayloristic organization of time and space, but rather through the modulation of subjectivities and behaviors in the open, fluid fields of networks.
In the networked society, people become productive when they are able to operate autonomously, flexibly and creatively. Control functions through the modulation of these conditions. "
…"Contemporary capitalist production is characterized by a series of passages that name different faces of the same shift: from the hegemony of industrial labor to that of immaterial labor, from Fordism to post-Fordism, and from the modern to the postmodern.
[Michel Foucault] argues, prison resembles the factory, which resembles the school, which resembles the barracks, which resembles the hospital and so forth. They all share a common form that Foucault links to the disciplinary paradigm. Today, by contrast, we see network everywhere we look.
(142)
The regular rhythms of factory production and its clear divisions of work time and nonwork time tend to decline in the realm of immaterial labor. Think how at the high end of labor market companies like Microsoft try to make the office more like home, offering free meals and exercise programs to keep employees in the office as many of their waking hours as possible. At the low end of the labor market workers have to juggle several job to make ends meet. Such practices always existed, but today, with the passage from Fordism to post-Fordism, the increased flexibility and mobility imposed on workers, and the decline of the stable, long-term employment typical of factory work, this tends to become the norm. At both the high end and low ends or labor market the new paradigm undermines the division between work time and the time of life.
(145)
Material production - the production, for example, or cars, televisions, clothing, and food - creates the means of social life. … Immaterial production, by contrast, including the production of ideas, knowledges, communication, cooperation, and affective relations, tends to create not the means of social life but social life itself.
(146)
The capitalist call workers to the factory, for example, directing them to collaborate and communicate in production and giving them the means to do so. In the paradigm of immaterial production, in contrast, labor itself tends to produce the means of interaction, communication, and cooperation for production directly. Affective labor always directly constructs a relationship. (147) "~Hardt & Negri