Foucault rejects any approach to Nazism as an abominable exception to the Western political tradition and instead treats it as a ‘demonic’ synthesis of sovereign and biopolitical techniques of government already operative in Western societies (Foucault, 1988b: 71). The idea of racism permits him to interpret the continuing recourse to and even intensification of state violence in the age of biopower that should apparently diminish along with the decline of the logic of sovereignty. The biopolitical logic of racism not only permits sovereign violence to survive in the climate hostile to it, but fortifies this violence by investing it with a wholly new function, no longer negative and repressive but rather oriented toward the preservation and improvement of the life of some races by annihilating the lives of the others, which pose a threat to it. [Racism] is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die. It is a way of separating out the groups that exist within a population. This will allow power to treat that population as a mixture of races or to treat the species, to subdivide the species it controls, into the subspecies known as races. [Secondly], its role is to allow the establishment of a positive relation of this type: ‘the very fact that you let more die will allow you to live more’. The enemies who have to be done away with are not adversaries in the political sense of the term; they are threats, either external or 11 internal, to the population and for the population. In a normalizing society, race or racism is the precondition that makes killing acceptable. Once the state functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of the state. (Foucault, 2003: 255-256) It is no longer a matter of what Foucault calls ‘traditional racism’ (ibid.: 258) that consists in mere animosity between different groups that plays no positive function in the ordering of a society. Nor is biopolitical racism merely a matter of a façade that conceals the immanent social antagonism by displacing it onto the external enemy defined in racial terms – a quasi-Marxist account of racism that Foucault deems superficial. Instead, it is a matter of the transformation in the technology of power that is more fundamental than any ideological shift: racism is what permits the state to exercise its sovereignty by enfolding it in the biopolitical context, in which killing is only legitimate when it serves to enhance the survival and health of one’s own race. Thus, the indistinction between the biopolitical preoccupation with fostering life and the thanatopolitical drive for annihilation that we observe in Nazism stops being paradoxical and is graspable as an expression of the logic of racism, according to which the life of any race is fostered by its purification from other races, which ‘implies both the systematic genocide of others and the risk of exposing oneself to a total sacrifice’ (Foucault, 1990: 149-150). Yet, while this account of racism is quite plausible in the case of Nazism, to what extent can it be used for understanding Soviet socialism? In the final lectures of ‘Society Must Be Defended’, Foucault goes beyond his above-discussed empirical claims about the reliance of socialist governmentality on the techniques developed during the rise of bio-power in 18th and 19th century 12 Europe. Socialism is now also racist in the much more fundamental sense: ‘Socialism was a racism from the outset, even in the nineteenth century. No matter whether it was Fourier at the beginning of the century or the anarchists at the end of it, you will always find a racist component in socialism.’ (Foucault, 2003: 261) This is the case for two reasons. Firstly, socialism has ‘made no critique of the theme of biopower’ and instead has taken over ‘wholesale’ the fundamental idea of modern biopolitics ‘that the essential function of society or the State is to take control of life, to manage it, to compensate for its aleatory nature, to explore and reduce biological accidents and possibilities’ (ibid.: 261). This means that as soon as a socialist state comes to existence, it is a state ‘which must exercise the right to kill or the right to eliminate, or the right to disqualify’, [hence] ‘racism is fully operational in the way socialist states (of the Soviet Union type) deal with the mentally ill, criminals, political adversaries, and so on’ (ibid.: 262). Secondly, socialism is racist due to its emphasis on class struggle and the physical confrontation with the enemy, racism being the ‘only way in which socialist thought, which is after all very much bound up with the themes of biopower, can rationalize the murder of its enemies. When it is simply a matter of eliminating an adversary in economic terms, or of taking away his privileges, there is no need for racism. Once it is a matter of coming to terms with the thought of a one-on-one encounter with the adversary, and with the need to fight him physically, to risk one’s own life and to try to kill him, there is a need for racism.’ (Ibid.: 262) While in the late 19th century French context racism primarily characterized non-Marxist versions of socialism (Blanquism, anarchism, etc.) rather than strictly Marxist ones (both reformist and revolutionary), in the 20th century it pertains primarily to the Soviet type of socialism, including the Stalinist and post-Stalinist USSR.

Sergei Prozorov