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Preface To Foucault or Not To Foucault: The Micropolitics of Fear This study began in the Clinton-era 1990s, when the cold war seemed a part of a distant past and the period of its onset could be viewed in a new light, shorn of previous prejudices. The ending of a period of war that had persisted through my entire life ideally made it possible to see how, in the Hollywood of the 1940s and in the country as a whole, the phrase Communist menace had often concealed labor’s concerted attempt to assert itself and the repression that followed. This struggle was waged on the picket line, in the corporate boardroom, in Congress , and, more obliquely but importantly, on the movie screen. Post–9/11 we are again in an undeclared war, the war on terror, where in an even more concerted way than in the previous cold war, we are constantly reminded that this unseen, unknowable menace can strike at any moment. While a certain strand of resistance, labeled biopolitics, fueled by the writings of Michel Foucault, explains that power is diffuse and thus can and must be contested on the micro level, the level of the everyday, a reactionary governmental and busi- xii · · · Preface ness cabal has answered this call with their own biopolitics of fear. Whereas in the cold war your neighbor might be a Communist plotting the takeover of the government, though more likely he or she was a labor organizer “plotting” how to be paid more fairly, today your neighbor might be a terrorist, who, in a more all-consuming new cold war, simply plots annihilation, though again, more likely he or she is simply an immigrant following the flow of wealth from the South to the North, hoping for a slightly better life for his or, more often, her family. The post–World War II period, both in the working- and middleclass struggle against corporatism and in the slightly more oblique representation of that struggle on the screen, in what has subsequently been labeled “film noir,” points to a moment of intense class division where a battle was waged and, for a period, won. Exposing the constructed nature of “the cold war” and its use in rolling back the progressive values and politics of the immediate postwar period in a perilous moment for capitalism (with domestic and international working classes actively contesting the goals of the system) points to the fact that in the same way just beyond the war on terrorism lie the contradictions of an equally perilous moment for global capital. (As I write, two entire continents, Europe and South America, are threatening to bolt from the system of American-led neo-liberalism in light of the no vote on the European Constitution, a vote expressly against global capital, and the left-led bloc in Latin America—Brazil, Argentina , Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela—attempting to form a united trade zone, to say nothing of the looming and far more devastating threat of a China that has chosen to follow its own path to capitalization.) In this era, as Karl Marx wrote in the middle of a European industrialization that left the mass of humanity destitute, our duty is everywhere to engage in “ruthless criticism of the existing order” (Early Writings 207), not merely for the purpose of critique but to make “the world aware of its own consciousness, to show the world why it is struggling” (209). Ultimately, I hope, this study of a time of more open rebellion will contribute in some small way to this purpose. “Our task,” the young Marx wrote, “is not to draw a sharp mental line between past and future but to complete the thought of the past” (209). ...

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