The Punitive Society. Lectures at the Collège de France 1972-1973

by Foucault, Michel (2015)

Key Passage

At the same time that the bourgeoisie is establishing the civil code that is to govern the contract between owners, it defines a Penal Code whose function will be, on the face of things, to sanction violations of the contract, but more profoundly, to reach back as far as possible to this source of immorality that calls into question the worker’s body and its relationship to wealth, profit, and the law, and to constitute, no longer a contract, but a habit: to the owner’s contract will have to correspond the worker’s good habits.Now, at the time this plan is emerging so clearly, we can see the difficulty: on the one hand, we have a productive apparatus that incurs a number of risks arising from those in contact with it, and, on the other, with the worker’s body, we have productive forces subject to dangers coming from the worker himself. To protect this productive apparatus and enable it to develop, the bourgeoisie provides itself with a strong State. Now, at the same time that this need to protect the apparatus of production appears, in order for it to function, for theformation and growth of profit, the bourgeoisie needs competition between the workers, the free labor market, the possibility of drawing at will from this free breeding-ground of the labor force. It needs the purchase and the use it makes of this labor-power, which it wants to protect however, to be subject to the law of free competition. On the one hand, the legislative deregulation of workers is needed,† the worker must be at the point of  destitution to keep wages as low as possible; on the other hand, property must not be prey to the needs of the worker on the brink of poverty. This is the problem posed to the penal system: a solution is required such that the conditions of use of labor-power are freed from every hindrance and the materiality of the apparatus of production and the vigor of the forces of production are protected. (p.173)

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The Punitive Society

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