What is the connection between Foucault's work and his politics?

Question

I recently read a book* that says Foucault's work (along with that of Rorty, Derrida and Lyotard) is a response to the 'crisis of socialism' of the 50s. I'm pretty sure that Foucault was on the left side of the political spectrum. But, Foucault mocked Marxism, rejected the Stalinism of the French Communist Party, and was ambivalent towards his status as a hero amongst Maoists, right? Where in his work does he advocate socialism as a way to deal with biopolitics and governmentality?

* The book was "Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault" by Stephen Hicks, who I think is an Objectivist.

Answer 1

For those of us who spend our academic and vocational energy searching for a set

of political principles and foundations capable of increasing democratic participation and

redressing social and economic inequalities, the experience of reading Michel Foucault can

be felt as something akin to an existential crisis.Foucault illuminated the

complicity of social sciences with mechanisms of (rather than the possible structural

reasons for) social control and discipline more concretely and imaginatively than any

thinker I had previously read.I still object to Foucault’s overdone devaluation of

large political organizations, his flippancy about the role states can play in guaranteeing

(rather than depriving) freedoms and the insufficient capacity of his philosophical ethos

to engender social movements broad enough to substantially reduce human misery.And while this might be an appropriate stimulus to one’s

sense of agency against structuralist dogmatism – refusing to take on more general

economic structures may mean opting out of a political realm those in which those in

control of most disciplinary mechanisms are still quite active.