Deleuze (& Guattari) actualization of Marx

A brief — and ever-updating — essay

A known accusation commonly attributed to Marxism as a whole is the accusation of economic determinism. That is, Marxism would understand economics as the primary and inescapable motor of all other social relations one is involved with within society. If we comprehend power relations as a kind of social relation, for example, then marxists would find the root cause of them in purely economic relations according to this critical position: being a proletariat or a member of the bourgeoisie would define the individual locus regarding the cultural, social, political and every other type of societal hierarchies. 

While a rebuttal to this claim could be attempted, it's not what I will try to do here since there are attempts of this in Marxist writings, including one by Friedrich Engels himself¹. Instead, this essay proposes a discussion on how concepts by authors not identified with the Marxist tradition can actually help us fill in the blanks of it.

First of all, I think it could be useful to narrate how I became familiar with Marxism and how recently I grew more and more driven with doubt regarding its possibilities.

I. Initiation & heresy

The first text by Marx I read was Value, Price and Profit, followed by Wage-Labour and Capital. At the time I was absolutely enchanted. Marx writes in a really engaging manner, a mix of passion and rationality that surpasses texts which are composed of too much of the one or the other: passionate texts spend too much time trying to impress the readers, boasting about how everyone else is wrong while being unable to develop a sound argument; and rational texts have a difficult time in provoking its readers or to make them feel something other than boredom.

But it was in my reading of Capital that it hit me: Marx should without a doubt be taken much more seriously than he is currently outside of academic sites — and consequently I had also the equivalent of that expression multiplied by itself innumerous times: “Marx is right about everything”. This is ironically a position I see being more common than what should be for a methodology that tries to ‘research first and conclude last’. Afterall, Marx and Engels’ objective was to negate the possibility of an overarching theory of history, capable of making irrelevant the actual studying of historical processes and events.

The position which sees all Marx writes as the source of truth is even more ironical, or tragic, if we pay attention to what Engels had to say about those who would equalize their method, historical materialism, with an a priori truth of history. Prefacing his critique with the note that “all history must be studied afresh”, Engels says the following:

But instead of this too many of the younger Germans simply make use of the phrase historical materialism (and everything can be turned into a phrase) only in order to get their own relatively scanty historical knowledge — for economic history is still as yet in its swaddling clothes! — constructed into a neat system as quickly as possible, and they then deem themselves something very tremendous². 

While this could be argued to be proof that Marx and Engels had nothing to do with a ready-made theory of history, it cannot be denied that in some cases Marxism nowadays became a secular religion. The worst example is how those who interpret the “opiate of the masses” phrase as a disapproval of religion in itself³ seem to be the first to cling to the supposed absolute scientific status of Marxist theory. Here I’m thinking of specific Maoist sects, who portray Marx as a messiah, Engels as the first apostle, Lenin and Stalin as the first two prophets, Mao as the third one and figures like Abimael Guzmán as the second coming of the Messiah.

But let us not waste time with the worst. Another example of how Marxism can be seen as a secular religion is the frequency in which Marxist debates transform themselves into a serious and unintentional parody of stereotypical scholastical discussions of the medieval period. The most well documented version of this is the so-called transition debate between Maurice Dobb and Paul Sweezy. Again, the irony plays its part: marxists were discussing how the feudal period transitioned into the capitalist one while using the medieval tactic of quoting the holy book(s) to support their arguments. Instead of focusing on exclusively rebutting the affirmations made by the other part using historical evidence, Dobb and Sweezy turned to Marx’s texts as if to ask the Oracle what was the Truth.

As I was noticing all of this, I already started distancing myself from Marxism at least in a orthodox sense. Even so, I still trusted Marx and his solutions. At that moment, I saw how most of his self-proclaimed followers either had not read him at all or had not understood anything he wrote. So his followers were to blame and not him. It was only after I got minimally familiar with what is usually called post-structuralist philosophy that I perceived some flaws within Marx’s own theoretical construction.

The most relevant reading I did in this respect was (the attempt of reading) Anti-Oedipus.

II. The importance of desire & flows

Although the post-structuralists deal with Marx, citing him explicitly in their texts, it would be difficult to argue that they were marxists since most of the time they cite him in order to supplement his shortcomings or critique his writings directly. Following this, my experience with Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari transformed the way I related to Marx and Marxism.

The book commences with what could be comprehended at first glance as nonsense. Already in the initial page of this work the authors write about bricolage, the solar anus, desiring-production, machines of machines and the psychoanalytic concept of id or das Es not only in a shocking but also in a obscure way⁴. What is really happening in that first page is the sketching of what comes later; the construction of a theoretical apparatus capable of explaining the truly interesting question for Deleuze and Guattari: why do we desire that which hurts us?

In the first chapter the authors describe the three syntheses of the unconscious accompanied by the energy which mobilizes them: the connective synthesis (libido), the disjunctive synthesis (numen), and the conjunctive synthesis (voluptas). According to Deleuze and Guattari, there are three productions referring to each of the syntheses, the production of production, the production of register, and the production of consumption. All of these triads are seen to be equivalent to the M-C-M’ circuit exposed by Marx in the first volume of Capital, which represents nothing more than the transformation of money through the purchase of labor-power into capital⁵.

It’s already clear here, therefore, how the authors attempt to link the production of desire to the production of commodities or social production, as they call it. This focus on desire symbolizes a revolutionary path to critical thought: Marx, when he rarely talks about desire, does so in a causal-logical way, something insufficient if we keep in mind how the creation of psychoanalysis and the discovery of the unconscious transformed our understanding of the human mind — and also its perceived importance in face of more general and structural concerns. 

What was attempted before regarding Marx, psychology, desire, production and so on was merely a sum of Marxism and Freudism without taking into account the impossibility of merely adding one to another. There are methodological problems particular to each of these worldviews and epistemological differences between these programs of research that keep in check any pretensions of simply combining both. What Deleuze and Guattari offer, then, is an equivalence between the two in an explicit rupture with the Freudo-Marxist tradition that was popular in 20th century Europe⁶.

The most purposeful contribution by the two authors regarding this ‘actualization’ of both Marxism and Freudism is the concept of the body without organs (BwO from now on). Introduced as the need for anti-production following the non-stop producing of the connective syntheses, the BwO appears first as the “unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable”⁷. The desire of unproductivity is birthed out of productivity. Right after this, after Deleuze and Guattari affirm not seeing desiring-production and social production as two different things a priori since they share the need of a break in the production for production to actually work, they explain how the BwO assumes control of production and revise its origins to reflect the dominance of the now godly BwO, providing a surface into which all production shall be recorded from that moment onwards:

In fact, it does not restrict itself merely to opposing productive forces in and of themselves. It falls back on (il se rabat sur) all production, constituting a surface over which the forces and agents of production are distributed, thereby appropriating for itself all surplus production and arrogating to itself both the whole and the parts of the process, which now seem to emanate from it as a quasi cause. Forces and agents come to represent a miraculous form of its own power: they appear to be ‘miraculated’ (miracules) by it. In a word, the socius as a full body forms a surface where all production is recorded, whereupon the entire process appears to emanate from this recording surface⁸.

There is here an obvious and explicit analogy between the BwO and capital with regards to the capitalist being. The function of capital in the origins of the capitalist mode of production is to reorganize production, developing the productive forces and therefore advancing the capabilities of labor — the process from formal subsumption to real subsumption as described by Marx⁹. The primal antithesis capital-labor is transformed in the impossibility of existence of labor outside the dominion of capital: without capital, there is no labor. At least this is the surface, inscribed by and registered with money, the BwO of the capitalist that he allows labor to see¹⁰.

But in reality, capital is unproductive. It merely transforms the forces of labor to be their host akin to a parasite. The labor power is not a product of capital per se, it is indeed a consequence of the reorganization of labor. But if capital vanishes, new arrangements could be made to keep production working. If labor vanishes, however, there would be nothing, production would stop indefinitely.

On the ground of the unconscious, the repulsiveness felt by the anti-productive BwO towards the addicted to production desiring-machines mixed by their approximation creates the paranoiac machine, responsible for the primary repression, which is followed by the miraculating machine and the celibate machine¹¹. Here we get to the production of consumption or the conjunctive synthesis, which ends up forming the subject as residue. In the end, desire is first produced, then registered and finally consumed/consummated.

Now we can begin to understand why the BwO as a concept is a potent addition to the critique of capitalism. In each of the steps described in a general vein above, the BwO does not stay the same. He is modified three times in total: in the connective synthesis, he has the role of anti-production; in the disjunctive synthesis, he transforms into a miraculating attraction to the desiring-machines; in the connective synthesis, the BwO that follows the celibate machine becomes an egg.

Deleuze and Guattari offer a new perspective on the BwO at this point. One that will be aptly the one that is useful to acknowledge capital’s operation and is usually the go-to quote for understanding the BwO:

The body without organs is an egg: it is crisscrossed with axes and thresholds, with latitudes and longitudes and geodesic lines, traversed by gradients marking the transitions and the becomings, the destinations of the subject developing along these particular vectors. Nothing here is representative; rather, it is all life and lived experience: the actual, lived emotion of having breasts does not resemble breasts, it does not represent them, any more than a predestined zone in the egg resembles the organ that it is going to be stimulated to produce within itself. Nothing but bands of intensity, potentials, thresholds, and gradients¹².

Simply put, the BwO now is defined as pure potentiality. The possibilities that appear in its surface are only real when actualized, being before this a surface or locus of infinite flowing intensities. Transferring this notion to our understanding of the capitalist mode of production, a known aspect of it starts to appear more clearly, that is, the capability of capitalism to easily undermine any attempt to overthrow it. 

The equivalence between this conceptualization and how capitalism behaves in reality becomes even fuller if we get familiar with an interview by Deleuze and Guattari titled On Capitalism and Desire. In it, the authors affirm that capitalism establishes a code of hierarchy, a “bureaucratic caste-system”¹³ in their words, and inscribes all of society within it. The distinction frequently made in marxist-leninist circles between an avant-garde, a real proletariat and a lumpenproletariat appears. Echoing Michel Foucault, the authors explain how this distinction comes from the bourgeoisie to destroy and marginalize desire.

If we expand on this, it becomes clear that desire in a capitalist society can only operate and is defined by a capitalist way of desiring. Any attempt to transform capitalism should therefore fall prey to this limitation since the attempts cannot reach an ‘outside’ of capitalism and, in response to them, capitalism adapts to inscribe anti-capitalist flows into itself.

According to Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism bases itself on the decoding and recoding of all flows: “flows of wealth, flows of labor, flows of language, flows of art, etc. It did not create any code, it created a kind of accounting, an axiomatics of decoded flows, as the basis of its economy”¹⁴. More than this, it is capable of not only absorbing all opposition but also of even creating it. If with Marx we had a deeply unsettling characterization of capitalism, all would be solved by the revolution, with Deleuze and Guattari we perceive how worse the true situation is. How can there be revolution when everything is already inside the monstrous totality of capital?

Bibliography

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. “On Capitalism and Desire.” In Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953-1974), edited by David Lapoujade, 262-273. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004.

Engels, Friedrich. Friedrich Engels to C. Schmidt, August 5, 1890. In Marx and Engels Correspondence. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_08_05.htm. 

Engels, Friedrich. Friedrich Engels to Franz Mehring, July 14, 1893. In Marx and Engels Correspondence, translated by Donna Torr. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1893/letters/93_07_14.htm.

Heinrich, Michael. Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2013.

1. In a letter to Franz Mehring, writer of the classical Marx biography, Engels affirms the following: “Otherwise there is only one other point lacking, which, however, Marx and I always failed to stress enough in our writings and in regard to which we are all equally guilty. That is to say, we all laid, and were bound to lay, the main emphasis, in the first place, on the derivation of political, juridical and other ideological notions, and of actions arising through the medium of these notions, from basic economic facts. But in so doing we neglected the formal side — the ways and means by which these notions, etc., come about — for the sake of the content. This has given our adversaries a welcome opportunity for misunderstandings, of which Paul Barth is a striking example.” Friedrich Engels to Franz Mehring, July 14, 1893, in Marx and Engels Correspondence, trans. Donna Torr, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1893/letters/93_07_14.htm.

2. Friedrich Engels to C. Schmidt, August 5, 1890, in Marx and Engels Correspondence, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_08_05.htm. 

3. Marx himself stopped pursuing the youthful atheistic critique of religion as a way to transform society as he matured and discovered, thanks to Engels, political economy. Another point of interest worth mentioning here is how the investigation against religion in Marx’s oeuvre was influenced by his relationship with Bruno Bauer, who did the same but was punished with the prohibition from teaching theology in late 1830s Prussia, as Michael Heinrich discusses in his biography of Marx (Michael Heinrich, Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019), 231).

4. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 2.

5. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 6-22.

6. In particular, Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism from 1933.

7. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 8.

8. Ibid., 10.

9. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2013), 354-362.

10. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 11.

11. Ibid., 17.

12. Ibid., 19.

13. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “On Capitalism and Desire,” In Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953-1974), ed. David Lapoujade (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), 267.

14. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “On Capitalism and Desire,” 270.