Biopolitics and biopolitical economy: essence of concepts

The article is devoted to the concept of biopolitics. An attempt to clarify the productive and economic basis of biopolitics is made (for instance the concept of «biopolitical economy» is formulated and analyzed). On the other hand, a conceptual distinction between biopolitics and biopower is shown. Biopower is a relatively new kind of power, spreading to the vital foundations of human and social life. Biopower is a bright representative of so-called «soft power», which does not imply direct control and exploitation, but acts indirectly, for example, through the artificial design and imposition of new needs, the promotion of new types of goods and services. Medicine became in this sense one of the indirect agents of biopower, which through processes of intensive medicalization begins to include more life situations and problems into field of its jurisdiction. Despite its «softness», biopower doesn’t cease to be power, since the asymmetry between its subjects and objects remains. Politeconomical approach is promising in analysis of biopower because the latter has economic roots and, in fact, arises as extension of power capital and consequence of its expansion into new spheres in search of sources for profit making. Several authors write about «biocapital» as a new form of it. At the same time, in modern society a global transformation is noticeable, which is associated with an increasingly large-scale transit to horizontal modes of interaction based on the network principle and involving broad autonomy, communicative and cooperative equality of its subjects. Power asymmetry is gradually «smoothed out». In this context, it is promising to consider biopolitics not as a simple consequence or expression of biopower, but as a potential qualitatively new way of interaction between people, public groups and institutions about the biological aspects of their life, directly up to the possibility of reasonable management of them. This management should be understood not as direct control but as foresight and planning with the aim of optimization of functioning and development of human biology.