Why Capitalism is Ending

 

As I wrote in my previous post, Foucault's main error was his failure to fully think through his "doubts" regarding the repressive hypothesis, resulting his faulty contention that "Where there is power, there is resistance" as if resistance must just always automatically appear, as if by magic.  In other words, Foucault has a dogmatic belief in the automatic spontaneity of resistance.  It's not hard to see potential political consequences of this theoretical error: if we are always automatically guaranteed resistance, then it is not necessary to do the work of organizing resistance.  If it is, so to speak, already there - "everywhere" - and so producing it is utterly superfluous, then one might even be led to a kind of suspicion regarding those who are trying to build resistance through too totalizing (rather than local) organization as somehow inauthentic. Thus, quite paradoxically, a theory whose very inspiration was the insight that power is not always repressive and can be productive eventually led people to become suspicious of the some of the very ways in which power can be productive of resistance.