On the Aftermath of The Prison and the Factory: From genealogy to abolition?
| Author | Dario Melossi |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474520918818 |
| Published date | 01 December 2020 |
| Date | 01 December 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Book Review Symposium: The Prison and the Factory (40th Anniversary Edition) |
Punishment & Society
On the Aftermath of The
2020, Vol. 22(5) 745–750
! The Author(s) 2020
Prison and the Factory:
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474520918818
From genealogy to
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abolition?
Dario Melossi
University of Bologna, Italy
At the American Society of Criminology’s Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, on 16
November 2017, thanks to my good friend and colleague Mona Lynch, I had the
pleasure to discuss the 40-year anniversary edition of mine and Pavarini’s The
Prison and the Factory (Melossi and Pavarini, 1977) in an Author-Meets-Critics
panel with a younger generation of scholars. They were going to comment on
whether the volume had still something to say to a 21st century audience! Each
one of the discussants asked a rather different set of questions—that you have just
read above!—so the way in which I am going now to respond to such questions will
consist in trying to isolate, for each of them, what, in my opinion, is the central
element in their comments.
The Prison and the Factory between Marx and Foucault
According to the first discussant, Johann Koehler, the central question seems to
have to do with the relationship of The Prison and the Factory to the Marxist
tradition on the one hand (including in this especially Rusche and Kirchheimer’s
Punishment and Social Structure (1939)), and Michel Foucault’s Discipline and
Punish (1975) on the other. Significantly, he premises his essay with a quote by
Foucault, taken from Didier Eribon’s biography, where Foucault, finally losing
patience with a young militant who had asked him to speak about Marx in a study
group, had a sort of temper tantrum, “Don’t talk to me about Marx anymore! I
never want to hear anything about that man again. Ask someone whose job it is.
Someone paid to do it. Ask the Marxist functionaries. Me, I’ve had enough of
Marx” (Foucault, cited in Eribon, 1989: 266). On the other hand, the recent pub-
lication of the lectures on The Punitive Society (Foucault, 1973) that many see as
preparatory to Discipline and Punish has again put forth the idea of a possible
vicinity of Foucault to Marx-inspired narratives of the time, such as E.P.
Thompson or Louis Althusser (Althusser, 1970; Elden, 2015; Hay et al., 1975;
Melossi, 2018; Thompson, 1975).
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Punishment & Society 22(5)
Bernard Harcourt’s (2013: 283–289) warning against such reading, in the com-
mentary to The Punitive Society, has greater efficacy in emphasizing Foucault’s
unquestionable distaste for a certain scholastic Marxism of Communist Parties’
professional cadres than against Marx’s thinking itself. The kind of catechistic
Marxism, in other words, organized around the rather un-Marxian idea of “the
State,” so important instead to the political Marxism of both Social-Democratic
and Leninist parties. The Marxism of the “architectural metaphor” of structure/
superstructure, the Marxism of the State as the “site of capitalist power,” and
the conspiratorial Marxism where political necessity had also important theoretical
consequences.
As I tried to show in my new Introduction to The Prison and the Factory
(Melossi, 2018), ours was a rather different tradition of Marxist thinking, one
that had developed within the New Left,...
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