Compare and contrast Karl Marx's and Michel Foucault's analysis of the concept power.

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       Compare and contrast Karl Marx’s and Michel Foucault’s analysis of the concept power.

Karl Marx was a materialist philosopher who believed that all ideas came out of life, and its conditions not from any divine being or force, like the idealist philosophers believed(Hands,2000.P:11)  This led him to present an analysis of power. According to Marx there was an underlying structure that determined social reality, and that must be grasped if social reality was to be understood. In his view the underlying structure was an economic one and its foundation is: natural resources, means of production and means of distribution. This underlying structure is “tantamount to the ‘sum total of the relations of production. Furthermore, everything else in society must be built upon that foundation. The ‘superstructure’ is a ‘reflex or a ‘sublimate’ of that underlying structure.”(Harman,1997.P:43) It is essentially an ideological reflection of the forces at work in the socio-economic foundation. For example, a political constitution is just a legalizing of the privileges of the social class that owns the economic foundation of society. The police are heavily armed hired toughs who administer the ‘rights’ of the ruling class. So called morality is the defence of these advantages. The same with most art, literature, poetry, religion and what passes for science. To elaborate on these points in greater detail one must explore Marx’s teleological view of history.

        

        Marx argued that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”(Marx. Cited in Cannadine, 2000.P:1.)  History was driven forward by continuous ‘social warfare’.  Power is something that is seized upon by group(s) who establish themselves as dominant in society, and set up the state in terms of their own ideas, values and self-interests. The laws and principles that develop with government are presumably set up to protect ‘truth’, equality and justice, but in reality these are illusions put forward in order to justify and maintain the dominant group’s power and control.  However because this warfare is continuous one group can be overthrown by another, which then set about rewriting history, the law, rights and values in order to maintain their dominance. So for Marx, then, power is economically determined.  That is to say the dominant class, in society, are the ones who hold power and thus it flows from the top down and its function is to maintain the dominance of those who own the means of production by suppressing other groups in society. The dominant class suppress other groups by exercising power in two separate ways. They sometimes use overt forms of violence that is carried out by the police or the military as in the case of the miner’s strike, for example, but they maintain dominance more successfully through ideology. Art, literature, poetry, religion and science et al, makes other groups believe existing relations of exploitation and oppression, are natural and inevitable. An example of this at work would be the rise of the `Consumer Society' and the ideological shift in describing people as ‘individual consumers’ rather than ‘collective produces’ which breaks down any sense of class solidarity. This form of power according to Freire (1993, P:58) is

....necrophilic. Based on a mechanistic, static, naturalistic, spatialized view of  consciousness, it transforms (people) into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, leads women and men to adjust the world, and inhabits their creative power.

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        Marx described those who could not see that they were oppressed as suffering from ‘false consciousness’.  Ideology’s  function is to ‘mystify’ the real conditions of existence, and how they might be changed, and conceals the interests it has in preventing change. In this sense Marxism can be seen as a form of structuralism, because it claims to discover the permanent hidden structure of society and thus can be perceived as ‘Synchronic’. However because of its obsession with history it is also ‘Diachronic’. In Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman' "willy's belief in competition, which turns the law of society ...

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