Commodity and Power

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Have you guys read Abdul Janmohamed's "Refiguring Values, Power, Knowledge
or Foucault's Disavowal of Marx" in _Whither Marxism?: Global Crises in
International Perspective_ (NY: Routledge, 1995)?

Foucault's inability or unwillingness to ground his analysis of
power/knowledge in analyses of capital (instead of merely alluding to the
linkage between them), JanMohamed argues, stems from Foucault's conflation
of liberalism and marxism, especially Foucault's disavowal of marxist
analysis of commodity. As JanMohamed says, 'commodity is indeed the
capillary point of...political economy' (47), which is the missing link
between power/knowledge and capital.

At the negative end, power, according to Foucault, is not a
"commodity."...Foucault can only use the term "commodity" in the manner he
does if he ignores the Marxian definition and means by "commodity" a
"natural" (i.e. entirely nonsocial) or a totally reified object: that is,
not constituted by and subsequently modified in the process of exchange and
circulation or an object that does not constitute and modify...the subjects
who are the agents of exchange and circulation. To the extent that the
processes of exchange constitute the commodity as a form and simultaneously
constitute both the value of the object exchanged and the agent of
exchange--for labor, and hence the individual agent of labor, too, becomes
a commodity in the circuit of exchange--commodity is exactly a form that
mediates social relations of power, albeit economic power. (JanMohamed
39-40)

Yoshie Furuhashi
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Have you guys read Abdul Janmohamed's "Refiguring Values, Power,
Knowledge or Foucault's Disavowal of Marx" in _Whither Marxism?: Global
Crises in International Perspective_ (NY: Routledge, 1995)?


Foucault's inability or unwillingness to ground his analysis of
power/knowledge in analyses of capital (instead of merely alluding to
the linkage between them), JanMohamed argues, stems from Foucault's
conflation of liberalism and marxism, especially Foucault's disavowal
of marxist analysis of commodity. As JanMohamed says, 'commodity is
indeed the capillary point of...political economy' (47), which is the
missing link between power/knowledge and capital.


<paraindent><param>right,right,left,left</param>At the negative end,
power, according to Foucault, is not a "commodity."...Foucault can only
use the term "commodity" in the manner he does if he ignores the
Marxian definition and means by "commodity" a "natural" (i.e. entirely
nonsocial) or a totally reified object: that is, not constituted by and
subsequently modified in the process of exchange and circulation or an
object that does not constitute and modify...the subjects who are the
agents of exchange and circulation. To the extent that the processes of
exchange constitute the commodity as a form and simultaneously
constitute both the value of the object exchanged and the agent of
exchange--for labor, and hence the individual agent of labor, too,
becomes a commodity in the circuit of exchange--commodity is exactly a
form that mediates social relations of power, albeit economic power.
(JanMohamed 39-40)

</paraindent>

Yoshie Furuhashi

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