Foucault and Marx: Ambivalences, Legacies, and Future Struggles

In this editorial for the special collection "Foucault and Marx: Legacies, Ambivalences and Future Struggles," we address a topic that has remained marginalized in Foucault scholarship. Against the common premise of Foucault's anti-Marxism, we recall the positive references, theoretical parallels, and explicit connections to Marx in Foucault's work and argue that Foucault mobilizes Marx against Marxism in a heterodox way. An outcome of the international symposium held from 18 to 19 October 2024 at the University of Vienna, the collection follows four lines of discussion: historical-philological, author-focused, conceptual, and emancipative-political. Its five contributions address destruction, the biopolitics of social reproduction, a "disjunctive conjunction" of Marx and Foucault, capitalist time regimes via Postone, and de Lauretis's queer-feminist reading of Althusser and Foucault.