It has been said that Foucault's relationship with the Left consists in being the thinker of the "new social movements". Certainly, Foucault's non-economic approach to power "gave voice" to demands and movements whose character is not primarily economic. However, this does not mean that we should accept the monstrously misdirected characterization of these movements as "post-materialist". Foucault's approach is materialistic without being economic, precisely because it demonstrates the political significance of a materiality that is not primarily economic and that is revealed in the struggles of the "new" movements.

However, Foucault's political contribution to the Left is at least equally significant towards a directly anti-capitalist direction. Avoiding economic reductionism allows us to see capitalism not just as a purely economic system but as a system of power. If the economy is indeed dominant, it is not because everywhere and always the economy is decisive (even "in the last analysis"), but because in modernity, from the Industrial Revolution onwards, capitalism is the most powerful system of power. In the era of neoliberalism, that is, of naked capitalism, the primacy of the economy, for the Left, should not be an analytical or ontological principle, but a political situation that must ultimately be overturned.