Marxism after Fordism?
How Deleuze applies Marx’s categories to contemporary capitalism
[Painting by
]Marx didn’t write Capital narrowly as a description only fit for 19th Century capitalism.
As Christoph Henning in Philosophy After Marx explains:
Marx provided a highly abstract model of capitalism's general modus operandi. When proceeding methodologically from the abstract to the concrete, description of contemporary circumstances requires the progressive introduction of increasingly substantial specific conditions, namely, those under which a given process plays out in each particular instance.[1]
However, there’s a common idea among those theorizing about contemporary capitalism that Marx’s analysis is not applicable to today’s post-“Fordist” era, wherein the form of work in the “centers” of capitalism, such as the U.S., is no longer predominantly defined by factory production.
In such circles of thought, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s 1990 “Postscript on Societies of Control” is often raised as an alternative text for grounding a theory of contemporary capitalism. It’s even often thought that Deleuze had moved beyond the analysis present in his 1972 Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
However, does Deleuze really break from or operate beyond the general categories of Marx?
“I believe that Félix Guattari and myself have remained Marxists,” said Deleuze about himself and his longtime collaborator in an interview late in his life, “[t]his is because we do not believe in a political philosophy that would not be centered on the analysis of capitalism and its developments.”[2] Famously, before becoming too sick to continue writing, Deleuze had announced plans to write a book on “The Greatness of Marx.”
Compared with Guattari, an activist, Trotskyist and psychoanalyst who worked at the democratically run psychiatric clinic La Borde, Deleuze, the academic philosopher, is typically recognized as the less political of the pair. However, it was Deleuze who, according to Guattari, was “sweating over capitalism” while the two wrote their first co-authored book, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia: “I have the feeling of always wandering around alone, kind of alone, irresponsibly, while you're sweating over capitalism,” Guattari wrote to Deleuze in a letter, “How could I possibly help you?”[3]
To be sure, Deleuze’s rigorous study of capitalism was not for developing an alternative to Marx’s analysis—quite the contrary. As the late Fredric Jameson (RIP—he passed away last week) writes, referring to the sections of Anti-Oedipus most focused on capitalism:
that vast Marx chapter of L'Anti-Oedipe … nonetheless and despite its energy and coherence may be taken as a set of notes on Marxism rather than some new philosophy of the latter, or some ideologically innovative reading.[4]
However, despite a thorough grounding in Marx’s Capital and the affinity for Marx which Deleuze maintained, many read Deleuze as providing some sort of alternative theory of capitalism.
Deleuze’s Postscript does, very briefly, provide a descriptive outline of some of the new characteristics of production and consumption in what has subsequently come to be known as the neoliberal era of capitalism, a “mutation” of capitalism, to use Deleuze’s terms, but the text is directly informed by an understanding of basic laws and categories of Marx’s Capital.
The Postscript represents an application of that understanding to contemporary changes in the international division of labor, the description of which begins in Deleuze’s earlier works with Guattari.
1990: Metaproduction: Businesses, IT, and data harvesting
Describing the latest developments in the division of labor emergent in the late 20th Century, many of the particular descriptions in Deleuze’s Postscript are of course foreign to the more empirical sections of Marx’s Capital.
The term control societies is defined by Deleuze against confinement societies as a distinction between the production found in corporate headquarters versus that found in factories. Deleuze conceives of the business as a form of bureaucratic and marketing-based metaproduction operated by workers equipped with information technology.
He contrasts the confinement societies of factory production—wherein the internal forces of a “body of men” are balanced between increasing productivity and diminishing wages—against the metaproduction of businesses in “control societies,” wherein wages are stabilized on the basis of relentless group rivalry.[5] Productive forces are rigidly restricted and controlled by the highly segmentary, compartmentalized, rivalry-based division of labor, “a wonderful motivation that sets individuals against one another and sets itself up in each of them, dividing each within himself.”[6]
Production is directed towards the market and the consumer becomes a product, a source of raw material for market analysis: “Individuals become ‘dividuals,’ and masses become samples, data, markets, or ‘banks.’”[7] Consumption in control societies supports increases in various social capacities, but at the sites of metaproduction, these capacities are only for individualistic and largely unproductive means: “to introduce a deeper level of modulation into wages . . . an inexorable rivalry presented as healthy competition.”[8]
The relation between the Postscript and the theory of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, as well as Capital, is most clear in Deleuze’s conception of control societies’ international composition, as Deleuze writes in the Postscript, while “factories give way to businesses,” they are “often transferred to remote parts of the Third World, even in the case of complex operations like textile plants, steelworks, and oil refineries,” and the business on the other end often only “buys finished products or assembles them from parts.”[9]
1980: A bureaucratic function within variable capital
In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari describe capitalist technocracy and bureaucracy as “an apparatus of regulation whose principal organ is the State,” the function of which is to regulate the flows of capital.[10]
However, in their 1980 A Thousand Plateaus, the second of their two-volume text Capitalism and Schizophrenia, there are already elements of the concept of metaproduction as a function among variable capital at the international scale.
Deleuze and Guattari describe capitalist technocracy as operating by a segmentary division of labor along with the “international division of labor” of which it is a part, in each case with “all kinds of compartmentalizations and partial processes” that involve “gaps and displacements” and “corresponding ‘dysfunctions.’” For Deleuze and Guattari, this all reflects an increased degree with regard to segmentarity: “Hierarchy is not simply pyramidal; the boss’s office is as much at the end of the hall as on top of the tower. In short, we would say that modern life has not done away with segmentarity but has on the contrary made it exceptionally rigid.”[11]
They also make clear that whatever status this bureaucratic development within the division of labor seems to bear, it remains—as it does in the case of state capitalism—within the category of variable capital: “as long as the working class defines itself by an acquired status, or even by a theoretically conquered State, it appears only as ‘capital,’ a part of capital (variable capital), and does not leave the plan(e) of capital. At best, the plane becomes bureaucratic.”[12]
In short, the new composition among variable capital in its earliest developments demonstrates an increase in fragmentation and domination by capital, just as the development of large-scale industry did following and in relation to that of manufacture.
The process Deleuze describes in the Postscript where “factories give way to businesses” and are “often transferred to remote parts of the Third World” is no doubt understood according to the dynamics of capitalism which Deleuze and Guattari describe in Anti-Oedipus through a reading of Marx’s Capital.
1972: Integration of the “Third World” and scientific arrangement of lack
In Capital, Marx explains that as the means of production become more productive, their products become less valuable,[13] the result of which is a tendency for the rate of profit to fall (TRPF).
However, for Marx, the TRPF has “simply the character of a tendency” because it is accompanied by contradictory effects of the same cause.[14] In Capital: Vol. 3, Marx explains that the question left unanswered by the Political Economists on the topic of the TRPF is why it is not yet more substantial or rapid. Towards answering this question, he elaborates on several counteracting tendencies—banking, finance capital, increased exploitation of labor, and diminution of the cost of constant capital.[15]
With the rise of machine production and the reduction in the number and value of workers required for production in factories, there arises “an extension of work” which constitutes the creation of world market relations with new demands for labor in transport and construction of infrastructure, such as canals, docks and bridges, and with the creation of the world market by largescale industry, “a greater mass of foreign raw materials, ingredients and half-finished articles are used as means of production in the home industries.”[16]
Following Marx, Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus explain that banks function to help counteract the falling rate of profit by financing the movement of capital from the center to the periphery, and “the increasing exploitation of the peripheral proletariat in relation to that of the center” amounts to “ensur[ing] a rise in the rate of surplus value.”[17]
These kinds of dynamics enable displacement of the immanent limits of capitalist growth, only to be confronted again at a greater scale.[18] In effect, these dynamics perpetuate the capitalist system, enabling still further increased exploitation, independently of and even alongside increases in standard of living.[19]
It is in the context of these dynamics as they relate to the Crash of ’29 that Deleuze and Guattari conceive of not only the rise of fascism but also capital’s scientific advance in marketing and integration of the “Third World:”
Wage increases and improvements in the standard of living are realities, but realities that derive from a given supplementary axiom that capitalism is always capable of adding to its axiomatic in terms of an enlargement of its limits . . . exploitation grows constantly harsher, lack is arranged in the most scientific of ways, final solutions of the ‘Jewish problem’ variety are prepared down to the last detail, and the Third World is organized as an integral part of capitalism.[20]
This integration and advancement in the composition of capital which emerges in the wake of the Crash—the integration of the Third World and the scientific advance of marketing which Deleuze and Guattari describe in their 1972 Anti-Oedipus—is central to what we now understand as concepts of neoliberal-era capitalism in Deleuze and Guattari’s 1980 A Thousand Plateaus as well as Deleuze’s 1990 “Postscript on Control Societies.”
As much as it is a part of the international division of labor, metaproduction is an increased degree of separation from and dependence upon the primary sites of production; it is through the displacement of factories that the function of metaproduction arises. Marketing takes the reign of power over the social field from banking, making the consumer an end product through the scientific production of “lack.”
It is always the case that distribution and consumption are best understood as processes of production, such that Marx writes, under capitalism: “Time for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfilment of social functions, for social intercourse, for the free-play of the vital forces of [the worker’s] body and his mind, even the rest time of Sunday” are “to be devoted to the self-valorization of capital.”[21] However, capital’s influence on reproduction is more pervasive in control societies.
Thus, on the basis of several of the same laws and categories of Capital taken up in the Capitalism and Schizophrenia volumes, the Postscript provides an update to Deleuze and Guattari’s project to the extent that the “mutation of capital” Deleuze describes is a compositional change via capital’s integration of the “Third World” and scientific advancement in the production of “lack”: a bureaucratic function among variable capital at the scale of the international division of labor.
Notes
[1]. Christoph Henning (2015) Philosophy After Marx: 100 Years of Misreadings and the Normative Turn in Political Philosophy, (Chicago: Haymarket Books), 27.
[2]. Deleuze, Gilles (1995) Negotiations, 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Colombia University Press, 171.
[3]. Félix Guattari (2006) The Anti-Oedipus Papers, ed. Stéphane Naduad, trans. Kélina Gotman, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 137.
[4]. “Marxism and dualism in Deleuze” (1997) Fredric Jameson, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 96.3.
[5]. Gilles Deleuze (1995) ‘Postscript on Control Societies’, in Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press, 179.
[6]. Ibid.
[7]. Ibid, 180.
[8]. Ibid, 179.
[9]. Ibid, 181.
[10]. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2009) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, London: Penguin, 251-2.
[11]. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2009) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 210.
[12]. Ibid, 472 [parentheses original].
[13]. Karl Marx (1990) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin, 510, 512.
[14]. Karl Marx (1991) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: Vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach, London: Penguin, 339.
[15]. Ibid, 339–75.
[16]. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 572–3.
[17]. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 230–1.
[18]. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: Vol. 3: 358; Deleuze and Guattari 2009a: 231
[19]. As Henning explains, the mature Marx understood that the rate of exploitation is independent of the standard of living, that the two can increase simultaneously (Philosophy After Marx, 24–5).
[20]. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 373.
[21]. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 375.
Good stuff here, really helping me conceptualize some pressing, present-day problems I want to get better at articulating.
If you were to suggest one book I could read to explain the role of this high-control form of mutated capitalism (neoliberalism) in the rise of conspiratorial thinking in periods of peak mass social distress, what would it be? Preferably something with a lay person's vocabulary. I am thinking of writing a rebuttal to a centrist liberal sycophant masquerading as an "I know better than you, peasants" style popular mainstream journalist.