Were Deleuze and Guattari accelerationists?
A political theory based in a misreading of Anti-Oedipus
[Painting by
]Accelerationism is the idea that the acceleration of the accumulation and concentration of capital via capitalism’s ceaseless technological advance and the social and political turmoil it usually brings will lead to capitalism’s eventual demise and thus opportunities for building a post-capitalist society.
Thus, what it often looks like in practice is essentially an ideological siding with that which helps pave the way for capital—for example, neoliberal policies which ease the flow of capital over international borders, while prohibiting that of labor over borders.
Accelerationism is one of the few strange ideas which has managed to find a home on both the right and the left. This is most likely because one of its key sources, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, has himself had the strange role of finding a home on both the right and the left—including in writings of left-oriented philosophers like Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, who thought that Nietzsche offered useful ideas for the left.
The fact that prior to his collaboration with the psychoanalyst Felix Guattari, Deleuze wrote—among a series of books about major figures of philosophy, such as Spinoza, Kant and Bergson—a book about Nietzsche makes me more sympathetic to what I nonetheless see as a misreading of Anti-Oedipus by well-meaning left-oriented accelerationists.
Accelerationists often point to Anti-Oedipus as a key source for their political theory. However, Deleuze and Guattari say almost nothing about the idea in the text. And what they do say should give anyone advocating that idea pause.
For, as close readers of Marx’s Capital, they know the full breadth of conditions which capital’s acceleration brings.
Nietzsche vs. Marx on acceleration
Adherents of the idea of acceleration point not only to Nietzsche but also Marx.
In a fragment in The Will to Power, Nietzsche writes that “the leveling process of European man is the great process which should not be checked: one should even accelerate it.”[1] For Nietzsche, acceleration of modernity would deliver conflicts across Europe in a process by which humans would overcome the problem of nihilism, not by reaching a more equal form of society; quite the contrary, for Nietzsche, equality was the problem—he was staunchly antiegalitarian.
On the other hand, advocates of accelerationism point to a speech Marx delivered in 1848 on free trade as a revolutionizing process:
the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.[2]
Notably, Marx here states that it is in one sense alone that he supports free trade—“this revolutionary sense” in which free trade pushes the antagonism between the working class and the capitalist class toward “the social revolution.” Again, he says this, not in a political theory or political economy text, but in a provocative speech during a time of revolutionary fervor across Europe.
But, taking a step back, we should ask: if it hastens the revolution, and Marx is a revolutionary, why is he hesitant to support free trade more fully? What else does he think about such a process of “hastening”? And does he think we can rely on that process alone?
In Marx’s late, most advanced work Capital—published nearly 20 years after that speech—Marx does describe a revolutionizing process that occurs involving the acceleration of the accumulation and concentration of capital, whereby with the development of machinery across industries, capital extends itself to foreign countries and develops an international division of labor (in India and Australia, for example) where traditional ways of production are radically transformed and exploited for supplying raw materials and half-finished goods for production in the home countries of capital.[3]
And to the point of optimism we saw in his earlier speech, he describes how such concentrations of capital and subsequent intensifications of work leads to the working class struggle to reduce the working day to from one without limit to one of 12 hours, and then, after a relative increase in productivity, to reduce it again from 12 to 10 hours, explaining that workers will again need to reduce the working day.[4]
Of course, his prediction was correct, as it was in the 20th Century reduced to 8 hours, and we know we’re long overdue for another reduction; hence the movement to push for a 4-day workweek.
However, if you read more of Capital, it’s not difficult to understand why Marx would not advocate in every sense for the conditions which give rise to the “hastening” he described in the 1848 speech.
In the contexts of Capital in which Marx elaborates on the acceleration of the accumulation and concentration of capital, he describes the brutal processes of diminution of variable capital—that is, the portion of capital consisting of human labor power versus that of machines, or constant capital—and the subsequent “progressive production of a relative surplus population or industrial reserve army” of the unemployed.[5]
Revolutions in the technical means of production result in variable capital occupying an increasingly small portion of total capital (relative to the machines, etc.). These “periodic changes of the industrial cycle” involve the expulsion of populations of workers from the workforce as well as the increased exploitation of those who remain employed, and “Not only are the workers directly turned out by the machines set free, but so are their future replacements in the rising generation.”[6] Thus, there is also the immiseration and possible deaths of those expelled; “the misery, the sufferings, the possible death of the displaced workers during the transition period when they are banished into the industrial reserve army.”[7] Wages fall as the reserve population grows, and subsequently reproduction rates fall; as the reserve army then shrinks again, wages once again rise.
The process results too in divisions between employed and unemployed, whereby those employed become compelled to work more or more intensely by “the pressure of the unemployed:” “the pressure of the unemployed compels those who are employed to furnish more labour, and therefore makes the supply of labour to a certain extent independent of the supply of workers.”[8]
And as soon as the workers learn how all this works, they begin to organize, via trade unions and other organizations, to develop cooperation between employed and unemployed “in order to obviate or weaken the ruinous effects of this natural law of capitalist production on their class,” while in response “capital and its sycophant, political economy, cry out at the infringement of the ‘eternal’ and so to speak ‘sacred’ law of supply and demand. Every combination between employed and unemployed disturbs the ‘pure’ action of this law.”[9]
On the other hand, whenever the reserve army is insufficient, and thus the domination of capital over labor is insufficient, for the law of supply and demand, the capitalist class combines with some populist sidekick—or as Marx describes them, capital’s “platitudinous Sancho Panza”—ready to use “forcible means” to establish the dominance of capital over labor.
as soon as (in the colonies, e.g.) adverse circumstances prevent the creation of an industrial reserve army and with it the absolute dependence of the working class upon the capitalist class, capital, along with its platitudinous Sancho Panza, rebels against the ‘sacred’ law of supply and demand, and tries to make up for its inadequacies by forcible means.[10]
“We haven't seen anything yet”
So, what do Deleuze and Guattari say about the idea of the acceleration of capital?
Despite accelerationists pointing consistently to Anti-Oedipus as a key source for their political theory, Deleuze and Guattari say almost nothing at all about the idea in the text. And what they do say, should actually give anyone advocating that idea pause.
They hypothetically raise the question of the acceleration of capital as a solution, as a potential avenue out of the capitalist situation, before immediately replying: “in this matter, the truth is that we haven't seen anything yet.”
So what is the solution? Which is the revolutionary path? Psychoanalysis is of little help, entertaining as it does the most intimate of relations with money, and recording—while refusing to recognize it—an entire system of economic-monetary dependences at the heart of the desire of every subject it treats. Psychoanalysis constitutes for its part a gigantic enterprise of absorption of surplus value. But which is the revolutionary path? Is there one?—To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist “economic solution”? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market […] Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to "accelerate the process," as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven't seen anything yet.[11]
First, it’s important to note that they do not give an affirmative answer to the question. At the very least, we find that they don’t advocate for accelerating the process; they do not, like Nietzsche say, “one should even accelerate it.”
Quite the contrary, it seems to me that their response—though admittedly in a rather vague fashion—is a referent to the bad outcomes which the acceleration of capital has shown us thus far, i.e. as Marx details in Capital, and thus an implied warning that the further acceleration of capital will yield increasingly dire results.
While they don’t go on in that passage to entertain the question of acceleration any further, they do in other places within the text repeat the notion that “we haven't seen anything yet.”
As they write in another passage: “[t]his tendency is being carried further and further, to the point that capitalism with all its flows may dispatch itself straight to the moon: we really haven’t seen anything yet!”[12]
In other words, ‘you haven’t seen anything yet’ because, as Marx’s analysis shows, acceleration usually involves the intensification of exploitation, and the processes by which capitalism reaches its compositional limits has no determinate end point.[13]
Their point is not that we should fatalistically await capitalism’s collapse, nor is it that we should try to ‘“accelerate the process”’ towards some presumed end point.
It is in the context of the dynamics of capitalism as formulated by Marx that Deleuze and Guattari understand not only the Crash of 1929 but also the rise of fascism—one iteration of what Marx referred to as capitalism’s Sancho Panza, if you will:
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.[14]
If we consider the periodic moments wherein a population is expelled from the workforce, effecting as Marx says, not only those expelled but also the rising generation, we might see what Deleuze and Guattari mean by “you haven't seen anything yet” when they contemplate the Nietchzean idea of promoting acceleration. The acceleration of capital for Deleuze and Guattari is what led to the rise of fascism.
As I’ll write about in a future post, what they do advocate for is some form of collaboration between analysts, artists, and revolutionaries; hence, like Marx, the solution is cooperation, organizing.
Notes
[1]. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, in Strong, Tracy (1988). Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration. Berkeley: University of California Press. p. 211.
[2]. Karl Marx, “On the Question of Free Trade,” David McLellan, ed. (2000). Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Oxford University Press. p. 296.
[3]. Marx, Capital: Vol. One (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 579-80.
[4]. Ibid, 542.
[5]. Ibid, 781-94.
[6]. Ibid, 792.
[7]. Ibid, 793.
[8]. Ibid.
[9]. Ibid, 793-4
[10]. Ibid, 794.
[11]. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (New York: Penguin, 2009), 239.
[12]. Ibid, 34.
[13]. Ibid, 321.
[14]. Ibid, 373.