The biopolitics is a theoretical paradigm proposed and themed by the French philosopher Foucault. Developed by Agamben, Hart, Negri and Esposito, it has been widely discussed in academic circles at home and abroad. Especially in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, the biopolitics has once again become a hot topic based around the relation between policies and people in the process of epidemic prevention and control. In the study of biopolitics, in addition to its basic contents and social effects, we should pay particular attention to the discourse of reflecting on biopolitics from the perspective of historical materialism, and have a methodological sense of historical materialism in theory.
Population, which the biopolitics is concerned with, is a concept as a whole without social attributes. Under historical materialism, the analysis means to reveal the social and historical attributes of objects. Without indicating the social and historical attributes, it is impossible to discuss this issue in specific social relations. Why do people think that the capitalist societies around the 17th and 18th centuries had this kind of social governance with the characteristics of biopolitics? Why does it have the attribute of taking responsibility for population? Foucault did not directly indicate the root cause.
Based on historical materialism, the 17th and 18th century is an age when capitalist mode of production thrived. According to Marx, one of the basic conditions of capitalist mode of production is labor force (wage labor), and the existence of labor force determines the effective operation of capitalist mode of production. Under such social and historical attributes, population becomes a real object of concern. Population matters because of its role in modern society as a whole of labor, instead of for its own sake. This is a result of the transformation of labor form in the historical process of human society, and also the unique social requirement since the birth of capitalist mode of production. If the social analysis of biopolitics is not made based on this dimension, it will only demonstrate a new form at the level of social governance, while failing to grasp the root causes behind it.
At the same time, if social analysis only focuses on population, rather than the situation of social individuals or classes in the whole population, the analysis will cover up the difference of human existence, the antagonism of classes, and further the real existence of people in the era of capitalism. Marx clearly pointed out the abstractness of the concept of population in the critique of political economy, and the discussion on population in biopolitics has not gone beyond Marx's critique. If we do not examine the internal structure and composition of population, or the relations between population and economy and politics in the specific society, we will not discover social problems that have been covered up. The life of workers, as well as the working class as important part of the population, cannot demonstrate the extreme distortion and alienation of life and population described by Marx if only understood from the perspective of biopolitics. There will be real social analyses once we are thinking about life and population at the level of social relations, rather than talking about them in an abstract and non-attributive manner.
Therefore, in my opinion, advancing the study of biopolitics from the perspective of historical materialism and the critique of political economy can help us better understand modern society. This is not only a critique of biopolitics, but also an affirmation of biopolitics in a certain sense, i.e. to become a more positive theory of social analysis.
Issued on March 24, 2022
Lin Qing, associate professor of School of Marxism, Fudan University