The work aims to problematize Michel Foucault’s contribution to theories of power. Foucault’s work contributed substantially to a new field of critical theory, the so-called “biopolitical studies”, a field within which authors in different and sometimes antagonistic ways use and redefine Foucault’s different concepts, such as biopower, discipline, subjectivization, governmentality etc., with the aim to understand different cultural phenomena which define the sphere of politics and economy. The aim of the work is to critically intervene both in this field of “biopolitical studies” and in Foucault’s own conceptual apparatus, within the contemporary context defined by climate change, financialization of economy, deindustrialization, and different global phenomena of violence (tied to the economy of extraction, rise of populism, resource wars etc.). Most important question text raises is whether Foucault’s conceptual apparatus, developed around the idea of “the productivity of power”, can explain these phenomena and the ways in which culture, as a form of social activity, grasp destruction and violence of contemporary capitalism. I will maintain that this is impossible without a fundamental rethinking of this conceptual apparatus by putting it into dialogue with the work of Karl Marx, an author with whom Foucault’s work was often connected to, especially in the last decades. The main contribution of this work is a different reading of these authors for which I reserve the name “heterodox”, with the aim to bring out different meeting points which had been repressed or ignored in the secondary literature: different forms and scale of violence and destruction. Starting from “historical materialism”, a terrain which regardless of all differences Marx and Foucault share, this paper will focus on contemporary cultural and representative practices which reflect and shape different ways in which capitalism takes a hold of life, forms subjects but also exposes certain populations to death (necropolitics).