''Marx, in the first volume of Capital, specifically in “The Working Day,” spends a notable amount of time examining the body of the worker, especially management of workers’ time in order to maximize their physical aptitude and productivity. He also makes similar assertions in the manuscripts of 1844 regarding the “servile asceticism” of the worker. Foucault, as well as others like Didier Deleule and François Guery, see the production of particular kinds of bodies as essential to the functionality of industrial capitalism.

Foucault, in various lectures in The Punitive Society, begins to identify normalizing power as a crucial mechanism to prevent what he calls labor “dissipation”, which, speaking broadly, is anything that is considered a non-productive bodily expenditure. In the age of industrial production, the establishment of complex systems of theft became less and less of an issue. Instead, there is an investment in the body itself. This investment constitutes a shift from the strictly moral to the moralized norm. It is no longer those who steal from the workshop that become the target of disciplinary power, but those who engage in a different kind of theft, namely, those who steal their own labor-power by not maintaining their physicality in order to maximize production when their labor is purchased. Foucault sees the accumulation of bodies to be as important to the owners of the means of production as the accumulation of capital. Docile bodies are productive bodies. I think an analysis of that relationship would need to start here. It is precisely at the level of production where the function of the docile body becomes rather clear.''

Conway