Foucault's New Domains by Mike Gane Terry Johnson

Author:Mike Gane, Terry Johnson [Mike Gane, Terry Johnson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415086615
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 1993-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

II The separation of the social and the economic

The insurance technique, by eliminating the question of individual responsibility from social dramas, effectively makes possible the introduction of a mechanism for their resolution in conformity with the solidarist definition of the State which requires it to act on the forms of the social bond and not on the structures of society. For the moral demand of justice it substitutes the principle of a social compensation for essentially aleatory harms. To pressure exercised on the State for a reorganisation of society it counterposes the principle of a promotion of the social, of an increase of the chances of each through the reduction of the risks of all. But is acting only on the form of the social bond any more than a surface solution which leaves intact the fundamental causes of the social question, that is, the natural antagonism between workers and capitalists and the oft-denounced subjection of the former to the latter? To what extent then was social right genuinely able to act on the oppressive situation that the working class had complained about since the beginning of the nineteenth century?

The hypocritical nature of the contractual form—the one-sided terms of exchange it offers between an individual with capital and another who lives only by his labour-power—is usually held responsible for the situation of the subjection of the working class. And it is the famous Le Chapelier law of 1792 that is held responsible for installing this pitiless regime of the contract. It is seen as the very expression of bourgeois hypocrisy, advancing modern mechanisms of exploitation under the cover of grand speeches on the Rights of Man.

At the very least there is an historical error here concerning the conditions under which this law was conceived. The Le Chapelier Law was not passed surrepticiously, hiding behind grand humanitarian declarations of the Revolution, but immediately in the wake of the abolition of privileges on the night of August 4th. From that moment the order of masters, and so the power of corporations to authorise or prohibit work, is disrupted. Inventors then claimed the right to set up in production on the basis of their industrial discovery, while unqualified workers, the very ones rejected by the corporations, claim the right to work. It is true that in response to employers’ demands the law was directed at worker combinations, but it was equally directed at corporative powers in response to the demands of workers, of those much-discussed ‘workers sans qualité’, in the expression of the period, who wanted to open a stall and to work freely. Workers’ combinations and corporatist monopolies go together therefore like two dangers which entail and nourish each other. In the proliferating arguments and confrontations between workers and bosses the State is appealed to and the Le Chapelier Law seeks first of all to respond to these incessant entreaties. It does so by referring the problem of work to a forced tête-à-tête between bosses and employees. This was not at all

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