Deleuze, Marx and the Politicisation of Philosophy

Simon Choat
Abstract

Queen Mary, University of London

Against those who wish to marginalise Deleuzes political relevance, this paper argues that his work including and especially that produced before his collaborations with Guattari is not only fundamentally political but also profoundly engaged with Marx. The paper begins by focusing on different possible strategies for contesting the claim that Deleuze is apolitical, attempting to debunk this claim by briey considering Deleuzes work with Guattari. The bulk of the paper is concerned with a close examination of the appearance of Marx in both Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition, establishing that the pre-Guattari Deleuze was fully engaged with both politics and Marx and demonstrating that the concepts and arguments of the Marxist politics of the DeleuzeGuattari books can be traced back to Deleuzes own work. It is argued that an analysis of Deleuzes work on Marx is signicant not only for deepening our understanding of Marx, but also for understanding the possibilities for Deleuzian politics. Keywords: Deleuze, Marx, Nietzsche, philosophy, politics, social machines, capitalism In some ways Deleuzes unnished book on the Grandeur de Marx the book that shortly before his death he announced he was working on (Deleuze 1995a: 51) leaves us with a frustrating gap in our knowledge of his work: there is no text on Marx to compare with those on Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, and so on. On the other hand, it might be better to think of Grandeur de Marx not as some kind of missing key, but rather as an unnecessary distraction: speculation about the content of the lost book brings with it the risk of drawing attention away from the presence of Marx in Deleuzes published writings. Rather than using the book on Marx as a touchstone by which Deleuzes Marxist credentials can be safely guaranteed, it may be better to focus on what we know Deleuze

Deleuze, Marx and the Politicisation of Philosophy

has actually said about Marx. This, however, is not as easy as it sounds, for in fact Deleuze himself wrote little about Marx: of all his works, it is those jointly authored with Flix Guattari, particularly the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, that are most obviously inuenced by and comment most often upon Marx. The problem with relying on the joint works is that it leaves open the suspicion that Deleuze was not a Marxist at all, and that the Marxism was all Guattaris: a special case of the claim that Deleuze was not a political thinker at all, the politics being all Guattaris. Against this suspicion, I shall argue that the interest in Marx comes just as much from Deleuze as from Guattari. Much fascinating work has been done by commentators who have taken Deleuze and Guattaris Marxism seriously, substantially advancing our knowledge of Marx as well as of Deleuze and Guattari.1 But rather than looking at the books written with Guattari, I want primarily to examine the references to Marx in Deleuzes solo writings, focusing on Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition. Doing so can help demonstrate that even before he began collaborating with Guattari, Deleuzes work was both deeply politicised and engaged with Marx. Indeed, these two things are in some senses inseparable: Deleuzes philosophy was deeply politicised because it followed in the footsteps of Marx, the thinker who more than any other politicised philosophy. If we want a political Deleuze or a Deleuzian politics then a good place to start would be by recognising the place of Marx in Deleuzes work. This recognition must, however, be made against those who claim that Deleuzes own work is not political.

I. Deleuze and Marx

There have been numerous strategies for rejecting Deleuze as a political thinker: deferring the political moment until the DeleuzeGuattari books, dismissing his political formulations, explicitly denying the political relevance of his work, or simply ignoring his political pronouncements in favour of something else.2 Perhaps the strongest allegation that Deleuze is not a political thinker comes from Slavoj iek, who claims simply that there are no politics in Deleuzes own work: It is crucial to note that not a single one of Deleuzes own texts is in any way directly political; Deleuze in himself is a highly elitist author, indifferent toward politics. Any direct political moments are, according to iek, only found in those books co-authored by Guattari, whom iek names as a bad inuence on Deleuze (iek 2004: 20).

10 Simon Choat
iek argues that Deleuzes solo texts, while in themselves strictly apolitical, contain the potential for the development of a different materialist, even Marxist, politics. iek contrasts this potential politics both with the supposed idealism of the DeleuzeGuattari books and with what iek sees as the dominant form of Deleuzian politics today, namely a Hardt and Negri-style politics of the Multitude. Hence for iek, while we can nd both Marx and politics in the DeleuzeGuattari books, they are there only as a result of the (bad) inuence of Guattari, soaked in a pernicious idealism and productive of an inane political standpoint; whereas when we read Deleuze in himself we are not dealing with a political thinker at all, let alone a Marxist. Against iek, however, it can be shown that Deleuzes own work is both already politicised and engaged with Marx and that this work anticipates the Marxist politics of the later collaborative work. There are a number of strategies that could be pursued in order to establish this point.3 One way to counter ieks image of an apolitical Deleuze is simply to think about the composition of the DeleuzeGuattari books, their literary construction. A few small clues help undermine the notion that in this partnership Guattari was the Marxist revolutionary and Deleuze the dry, apolitical philosopher subject to bad inuences. Deleuze has presented himself as a lightning rod for Guattaris thoughts, systematising things by bringing together and ordering Guattaris inventive but chaotic ideas (Deleuze 2006: 239). If we accept this image, then it can be seen that the analysis of capitalism in the DeleuzeGuattari books rigorous, methodical and systematic bears all the hallmarks of Deleuzes style: given how profoundly indebted to Marx this analysis is, this suggests that Deleuze as much as Guattari was deeply engaged with Marx. This intuition nds some support in the correspondence between the two authors. During the writing of Anti-Oedipus Guattari wrote to his friend: I have the feeling of always wandering around alone, kind of alone, irresponsibly, while youre sweating over capitalism. How could I possibly help you? (Guattari 2006: 137). These are hardly the words of someone who has imposed his Marxism on a passive or indifferent collaborator. Rather, they suggest that we should take Deleuze at his word when he claimed: I think Flix Guattari and I have remained Marxists, in our two different ways, perhaps, but both of us (Deleuze 1995b: 171). Elizabeth Garo has noted suggestively that it is somewhat peculiar for a philosopher so committed to processes of becoming to claim to remain a Marxist: For a thinker of becoming, remaining cannot be a very stimulating objective but, at most, a slightly disenchanted and

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necessarily sceptical stance (Garo 2008a: 609). But aside from the fact that we should not put too much weight on the casual use of a particular word in what was an interview remaining does not necessarily imply static adherence or loyalty. The very fact that it is possible to remain Marxist in two different ways implies that this is not a question of stubborn or sheepish attachment to a given dogma, but rather of an active interpretation of the Marxist heritage: a dynamic process in which neither he who remains nor Marxism itself stay the same less a question of remaining Marxist than of becoming-Marxist. Evidence that Deleuzes claim to have remained a Marxist indicates a renewed commitment to Marxism is also provided by the historical context: it was a way of distancing himself from the violent reaction against Marx that took place in France after 1968, when the nouveaux philosophes competed with each other to renounce Marx and Marxism. To remain a Marxist when those around you are denouncing Marxism as the philosophy of the gulag is a profoundly political act as Garo herself recognises (Garo 2008b: 66; 2008a: 614). There are other reasons, however, why picking over the details of how Capitalism and Schizophrenia was written is unsatisfactory as a response to ieks charges. For a start, although it may tell us a little about Deleuze and Guattaris respective contributions, it risks misrepresenting their work, implying a clear division of labour between two isolated contributors. This was not the case at all; as Deleuze said of their relationship: we do not work together, we work between the two (Deleuze and Parnet 2002: 17). Hence, rather than focusing on the DeleuzeGuattari books, it may be more productive to turn to Deleuzes own work, establishing a continuity between this early work and the later collaborative texts. For while the co-authored books may be the most obviously political, the themes, concepts and arguments of those books emerged out of Deleuzes solo work.4 The rejection of dialectical notions of negation and contradiction, the Nietzschean afrmation of active over reactive forces, the ontology of pure difference, the understanding of being in terms of multiplicity, the imperative to highlight the virtual conditions of all actually existent beings all these ideas came from Deleuze, so it is senseless to claim that the later, political work with Guattari is somehow a break with or regression from the supposedly apolitical work that preceded it. Rather than pointing to broad themes, however, it is possible instead to look for Marx in Deleuzes early work: this search can show that the specically Marxist politics of the later books can also be traced back to Deleuze, who was writing on Marx long before he met Guattari, in addition

12 Simon Choat
to demonstrating that to remain Marxist was not merely an act of resistance when surrounded by apostates but also a creative use of Marx. Perhaps the two most prominent appearances by Marx in Deleuzes pre-Guattari work occur in Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition.

II. Marx and Nietzsche

Nietzsche and Philosophy gives the lie to the claim that Deleuze is an apolitical thinker: this is a highly politicised Nietzsche, in at least two senses. First, Deleuzes theoretical reconstruction of Nietzsche presents him as a political thinker worth reading: a novel claim at a time when Nietzsche was dismissed by many as at best an individualist forerunner of existentialism unconcerned with broader social and political issues and at worst a proto-fascist whose politics should be unequivocally rejected. Second, Deleuzes book itself had wider political consequences, playing a vital role in facilitating the introduction of Nietzsche into political thought in postwar France. It is worth considering the manner in which Deleuze politicises Nietzsche before examining the role that Marx plays here. Deleuze argues that, like Kant, Nietzsche offers a critical philosophy. But Nietzsche goes much further than Kant. While the latter undertakes a critique of the forms and claims of knowledge, truth and morality, he does not criticise knowledge, truth and morality themselves: they remain outside critique, acting as transcendent standards that are used to measure, judge and ultimately denounce life. Kants critique is thus fundamentally compromised and is effectively a form of nihilism, depreciating and denying that which exists in the name of another, superior world. Nietzsche, in contrast, replaces the question of truth or falsity with the problem of forces and power: no longer an attempt to establish the essence of truth in order to judge life, philosophy now pursues an interpretation of the forces that give sense to things and an evaluation of the will to power that gives values to things (Deleuze 1983: 54). Rather than seeking to determine the essential nature of a thing, essence itself must be recognised as the result of the forces and powers that take hold of a thing. What Nietzsche seeks, according to Deleuze, is a thought that would afrm life instead of a knowledge that is opposed to life (Deleuze 1983: 101). This does not mean that we simply indulge in a celebration of everything that exists. Genealogy is at once interpretation and evaluation: forces can be active or reactive and the will to power can be afrmative or negative. As afrmation of life, thought must reject all ressentiment and

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take a genuinely critical stance that can explain and subvert reaction and negation. Philosophys role is therefore not to establish timeless principles but, in Nietzsches phrase, to be untimely: to remain vigilant in upsetting existing values and institutions. Deleuzes Nietzsche is political because he reveals that apparently stable and immutable values and institutions are products of struggle between competing forces and powers, and in doing so he undermines the established order and points to the possibility of a different world. This politicised philosophy is sharply contrasted by Deleuze with the piety of Hegelian dialectics, which effectively acts as a functionary of the Church and the State by sanctioning the present order. Whereas dialectics can only recognise what is already established, Nietzsche seeks to create the new. It is in his discussions of the relation of Nietzsche to dialectics that Deleuze introduces Marx. Nietzsche and Marx are placed in a provisional alliance with the claim that they both found their habitual targets in the Hegelian movement, the different Hegelian factions (Deleuze 1983: 8). As it stands, this claim does not necessarily imply approval of Marxs project by Deleuze: the claim is not that Marx targets Hegel as well as the Hegelian factions, nor that Marxs critique of Hegelianism is identical to or even compatible with Nietzsches critique. It does, however, suggest that it might be interesting to pursue the relation between Nietzsche and Marx and this suspicion is rewarded by further examination of Nietzsche and Philosophy, as Marx makes a number of cameo appearances. Deleuze clearly recognises that Marxs relation to Hegel is more complicated than is Nietzsches. At one point he draws a parallel not between the attitude of Nietzsche and Marx towards Hegelianism but between their attitudes towards Kant and Hegel respectively: Nietzsche stands critique on its feet, just as Marx does with the dialectic. He goes on to add, however, that this analogy, far from reconciling Marx and Nietzsche, separates them still further (Deleuze 1983: 89). They are separated still further because while Marx was trying to stand dialectics on its feet Nietzsche rejected dialectical thinking altogether. This comparison neatly captures Marxs place in Nietzsche and Philosophy: intriguing hints about possible connections are quickly complicated or undermined, leading to what can look like a dead end, yet with the possibility of further links never entirely foreclosed. Marx is posed a series of challenging questions by Deleuze, either directly or implicitly. Is Marx trying to save the dialectic from sliding into nihilism or does he join Nietzsche in defeating it? Is Marx, like Nietzsche, interested in inventing new possibilities of life, or is he engaged in a nihilist subordination of life to transcendent values, driven

14 Simon Choat
by the spirit of proletarian ressentiment and hoping to return to the working class what is rightfully theirs? Is negation in Marx an active self-destruction, or is he caught up with the concept of contradiction, unable to recognise more subtle, uid forces? That these questions are left largely unanswered in the Nietzsche book should not lead us to conclude that Deleuze has no answers, or that they are posed rhetorically as a way of confronting and condemning Marx. These questions do not suggest a rejection of Marx by Deleuze, or a lack of interest in Marx. Instead they suggest that he was grappling with Marx, and that if he was reluctant to endorse him fully then this reluctance did not come from an elite indifference towards politics but, on the contrary, from a fear that Marxs political position was not radical enough: that compared to Nietzsche, Marx did not go far enough. That Deleuze had such fears is hardly surprising, and can be explained (at least in part) by the intellectual and political context within which he wrote. Given the somewhat dismissive attitude toward Nietzsche in France in the immediate postwar period, Deleuze could come to him relatively fresh. Marx, on the other hand, laboured under a joint burden: stied by a sclerotic Stalinism within the PCF, and anaesthetised through ofcial sanction within the academy. In both realms, Marx was also eventually aligned with a Hegelian humanism. Within academic circles, various factors led thinkers like Sartre and Goldmann to forge a humanist Marxism. (These factors included but were not limited to: the lectures and writings by Kojve and Hyppolite; the interest sparked by the release of Marxs early writings; and the translation into French of Marxists like Lukcs, Korsch and Marcuse.) This trend was then mirrored in the PCF as its leading theorist Roger Garaudy sought an alternative to Stalinism for the Kruschev era. Given all this, it would not have been surprising if, in his attempt to generate a new, post-humanist and non-Hegelian philosophy of difference, Deleuze had rejected Marx completely. Deleuzes contemporaries dealt with the situation in different ways. Michel Foucault made a conscious and conspicuous effort to distance himself from Marx and Marxism (even while simultaneously continuing to draw upon Marxs conceptual innovations). Jacques Derrida was more or less silent on Marx until Specters of Marx was published in 1993, at a time when reference to Marx could act as a useful codeword for resistance to a newly triumphant neo-liberal hegemony. Jean-Franois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard effectively abandoned Marxism altogether. For Deleuze to continue to speak favourably of Marx in such an environment is in itself highly signicant.

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That the tentative attempts in Nietzsche and Philosophy to link Nietzsche and Marx are more than idle speculation is conrmed in an interview from 1968 in which Deleuze maintains that both Marx and Nietzsche offer a radical and total critique of society: not a reactive, negative critique but one that is the prelude to an equally radical moment of creation: a great destruction of the known, for the creation of the unknown (Deleuze 2004a: 136) essentially what Deleuze himself calls for. Nietzsche and Philosophy can tell us not simply that Deleuze was engaged with Marx before he collaborated with Guattari, however, but also something about the kind of Marx that Deleuze was interested in. Indirectly, we can make comparisons with the manner in which he reads Nietzsche. Deleuze uses Nietzsche rather than merely interpreting him, producing a specically Deleuzian Nietzsche in whom it is almost impossible to discern where Deleuze ends and Nietzsche begins. This is not a playful eclecticism in which Deleuze chooses and combines elements of Nietzsches work more or less at random, but a systematic reconstruction of Nietzsches philosophy. This approach mirrors Deleuzes readings of other thinkers, and we might anticipate that he will read Marx in a similar way: reconstructing a Marx who is recognisably Deleuzian but who is nonetheless drawn from the heart of Marxs work. Clearly this Marx will be one separated from the dialectical method: it cannot be a Marx for whom historical change is driven by societys contradictions. Equally, a Deleuzian Marx must avoid offering an idealist judgement of life using transcendent standards, yet without on the other hand capitulating to a relativism that uncritically accepts things as they are: he must instead undertake an immanent critique that challenges the established order. This is the Marx that we nd in Anti-Oedipus, where Deleuze and Guattari pursue the allusive connections between Marx and Nietzsche that are found in Nietzsche and Philosophy. Marx is arguably the key inuence upon Anti-Oedipus, though it is a Marx transformed by being ltered through numerous other thinkers, including Nietzsche. Perhaps the most obvious example of this double reading of Marx with Nietzsche is found in the books adaptation of Marxs universal history: this is not a Hegelianised, totalising history in which capitalism is the inevitable culmination of a necessary process of historical development, but rather a kind of Nietzschean genealogy of capital: universal history is the history of contingencies, and not the history of necessity. Ruptures and limits, and not continuity (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 140). By using universal history, Deleuze and Guattari claim, it is possible to retrospectively understand all history in the light of capitalism

16 Simon Choat
(Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 140). Yet rather than being an imposition upon Marx, or a simple hybridisation of Marx and Nietzsche, this conceptualisation of universal history comes directly from Marxs work itself, or at least a part of it. In the Grundrisse Marx argues that bourgeois society provides the key to understanding all previous societies. He uses a well-known analogy to make his point: Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape. The intimations of higher development among the subordinate animal species, however, can be understood only after the higher development is already known (Marx 1973: 105). Rather than an attempt to naturalise historical development, this passage should be read as Deleuze and Guattari read it: as a rejection of teleology and recognition of the uncertainty and irregularity of historical development. Human anatomy can help us understand apes not because apes are destined to become humans but because humans have developed from apes; likewise, bourgeois social relations can illuminate previous social forms not because they were predestined but because bourgeois society has developed out of social formations that have now vanished and yet whose traces are still carried within capitalism. Bourgeois political economists were able to formulate the category of labour in general a category that could then be used to analyse previous social forms because under capitalism labour has in reality become generalised, as deskilled labourers separated from the means of production (or deterritorialised, to used Deleuze and Guattaris language) move regularly from one type of work to the next. This creation of a propertyless labour force was not the result of a preconceived plan but of entirely contingent circumstances, as a peasantry that had been forced from its land for quite different and varied reasons was then incorporated into a production process that required them as a precondition: the emergent capitalist class thus made use of events in which they had played no part whatsoever (Marx 1976: 875). The history of capitalism according to Marx is a history of rupture and contingency, not necessity. Just as they modify Marxs universal history, so do Deleuze and Guattari modify his analysis of capitalism. Where Marx seeks to expose the contradictions upon which capitalism depends yet which will ultimately be its undoing, Deleuze and Guattari instead analyse capitalism in terms of its deterritorialising and reterritorialising tendencies. In doing so they maintain Marxs focus on the tensions within capitalism between, for example, its subversion of all traditional political institutions and forms of authority and its simultaneous need for such institutions and forms to enforce the established order yet

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without understanding them in terms of contradictions that will ultimately be superseded and resolved. If Deleuze does not understand capitalism in terms of resolvable contradictions, then nor does he posit an outside to capitalism that could act as both a transcendent standard of judgement and a point of potential resistance (be it unalienated labour, pure use value, or an immediate transparency of social relations under communism). This does not mean, however, that he resorts to either a celebration of or a resigned submission to capitalism. Just as Nietzsche and Philosophy calls for an afrmation of active forces over reactive forces, so the central imperative of Anti-Oedipus is to push further the deterritorialisations of capital, against its efforts to reterritorialise. It has been suggested that this argument aligns Deleuze with a Hayekian liberalism: if the state is that which reterritorialises the decoded ows of the market, then Deleuzes call to deterritorialise effectively becomes a call for the deregulation of the market against the restrictions of the state.5 The reverse is true, however: it is precisely Deleuzes argument that distances him from Hayekian liberalism and makes a mockery of attempts to portray Deleuze as the ideologist of late capitalism (to use ieks phrase) (iek 2004: 183). Following Marx, for Deleuze and Guattari the reterritorialisations of the state are not opposed to the deterritorialisations of the market, as a reactive limit on a boundless natural energy: the state is a necessary model of realisation for the axiomatic that capitalism requires. The call to push deterritorialisation further, far from being an exultation of the market, is in fact what provides Deleuzes analysis of capitalism with a critical perspective. It offers recognition that the deterritorialising tendencies of capitalism offer the potential to lead somewhere different and unexpected, and it demands that this deterritorialisation be pursued against capitalisms simultaneous tendency to reterritorialise in order to further and protect private accumulation. This position is inspired in part by Nietzsche, echoing the distinction between active and reactive forces in Nietzsche and Philosophy. But it is also a strictly Marxist position: like Marx, Deleuze recognises both the possibilities and the dangers immanent within capitalism. In Anti-Oedipus we thus have the Marx that was promised in Nietzsche and Philosophy: a reconstructed, non-dialectical Marx who proposes a radical, immanent critique of the present in the name of something yet to come. This is not to say that the Marx of Anti-Oedipus had already been worked out by Deleuze in Nietzsche and Philosophy and needed only further elucidation or application. Rather, in the same way that Deleuzes collaborative work with Guattari develops concepts

18 Simon Choat
that had already been created by Deleuze alone, so too does that work develop Deleuzes Marx. Something similar can be said of Deleuzes rst great work of philosophy, Difference and Repetition.

III. Marx and Social Ideas

Like Nietzsche and Philosophy, Difference and Repetition is a fundamentally political text. Nietzsche and Philosophy sought to champion the creation of new values over the recognition of established values: Difference and Repetition maintains this critical distinction, and takes as its central target the dogmatic image of thought, whose contours had been sketched out in the Nietzsche book. The dogmatic image of thought operates through recognition, and in so doing rediscovers the State, rediscovers the Church and rediscovers all the current values that it subtly presented in the pure form of an eternally blessed unspecied eternal object (Deleuze 2004b: 172). It is politically conservative, even reactionary, endorsing established values rather than promising new ones. Deleuzes critique of representation and the dogmatic image of thought in Difference and Repetition thus has political consequences: it aims to expose and undermine forms of thought that reinforce the status quo. But this is not a primarily epistemological or ontological critique that also happens to produce political effects: to a great extent it is motivated in the rst place by political considerations. In the concluding chapter of the book, Deleuze states abruptly that if the truth be told, none of this would amount to much were it not for the moral presuppositions and practical implications of such a distortion (Deleuze 2004b: 337). He is referring here specically to the dialectic, in particular Hegel. But Hegelian dialectics is only the most pernicious form of orthodox thinking; the warning can be extended to give it wider signicance and cover the distortions of the dogmatic image of thought in general: the critique of representation amounts to little if it does not combat the presuppositions and practical implications of those distortions. The presuppositions are not merely moral but profoundly political: it is presupposed that the established values of Church and State, the values that maintain the present political order, must be protected. If there is any doubt about the political signicance of the practical implications that Deleuze refers to, a few lines later he provides a pertinent example: it is the bourgeoisie that uses the weapon of contradiction to defend itself, while the (proletarian) revolution proceeds by the power of afrmation (Deleuze 2004b: 337). Deleuzes battle against the concepts of contradiction, opposition, analogy, and so on his struggle to show that these categories, though

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they may be indispensable, are only effects of a more fundamental difference is therefore profoundly political. Thus while it is acceptable even necessary to question and challenge the political consequences of Deleuzes metaphysics (as Badiou [2000] does), it would be profoundly misguided to argue that Deleuze is merely apolitical (as iek does). Where does Marx t in this time? Deleuzes reference to the proletariat may once again suggest an ambiguous attitude: employing Marxian phraseology while simultaneously implicitly rejecting Marxs reliance on the concept of contradiction. Yet we have already seen that in Deleuzes work rejection of apparently fundamental Marxian tenets (like the notion of societal contradictions) is perfectly compatible with continued use of Marx. The broad arguments of Difference and Repetition can be seen to reect the Deleuzian analysis of capitalism that has already been outlined: capitalism both generates and curbs difference, at once subverting what Deleuze calls the qualitative order of resemblances (destroying all traditional representational codes) and reinforcing what he terms the quantitative order of equivalences (reducing every relation to one of exchange) (Deleuze 2004b: 1).6 More than this, it can be said that although there are not many more references to Marx in Difference and Repetition than in Nietzsche and Philosophy, Marxs presence is stronger in the second book: rather than allusive suggestions and unanswered questions there is a concrete use of Marx. His main appearance comes in the fourth chapter on Ideas and the Synthesis of Difference. Deleuze posits that, following Marx, we can say that there are social Ideas. What this means is that we can think of society as a structure or multiplicity: a system of differential elements with no prior identity, determined by reciprocal relations and incarnated in actual relationships. In the case of capitalist society, and following Marx, we can say that virtual relations of production are incarnated in actual relationships between wage-labourers and capitalists. These relations which are here class relations are not characterised by some pre-existing identity but are reciprocally determined. In this way, it is possible to claim that the economic conditions of a society determine all other aspects of that society not because actual economic relationships are the essence of society considered as a totality, but because those actual relationships, and all social relationships, are the incarnation of economic relations as differential virtualities that may be actualised in different ways. So we have something like the priority of the economic as found in Marx, without the economic essentialism as found in certain forms of Marxism.

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Deleuze acknowledges that this reworking of Marx is not entirely original: Althusser and his collaborators had already read Marx in similar terms, and Deleuze quotes Althusser approvingly throughout Difference and Repetition. For Althusser, Marxs great theoretical contribution was to rethink the concepts of structure and structural causality (Althusser and Balibar 1970: 186): the Marxist conception of society is not a Whole in which the elements are expressions of an inner essence, but a complex and differentially articulated structure in which the elements are reciprocally determined. Deleuzes rereading of Marx thus looks very much like that of Althusser yet Deleuze goes a step further. Althusser introduces the concept of overdetermination in order to combat Hegelian Marxisms: instead of reducing the complexity of a society to a simple, central contradiction (as Althusser claims Hegel has done), overdetermination allows us to think society precisely as a structure in which differential elements are codetermined. But as Deleuze points out: It is still the case that for Althusser it is contradiction which is overdetermined and differential, and the totality . . . remains legitimately grounded in a principal contradiction (Deleuze 2004b: 87). Thus, for Deleuze, Althusser remains too tied to the dialectic (which, after all, is for Althusser the crucial gift that Hegel gives to Marx [Althusser 1972: 174]). In addition, and relatedly, the Deleuzian language of virtuality allows us to avoid the risk of reintroducing a simple determinism such as comes with the Althusserian determination in the last instance by the economy: the movement from the virtual to the actual is creative and always leaves other potentials unactualised. So Deleuzes critique of certain forms of Marxism is thus also in part an escape from Althusserianism. Of course Althusser himself later sought to break away from Althusserianism: in particular, the turn towards aleatory materialism in the 1980s can be characterised as an attempt to offer a more open philosophy that is less beholden to dialectical thinking and provides greater sensitivity to the contingent singularity of events. Yet this move by Althusser comes long after Deleuzes radical reading of Marx in Difference and Repetition. Indeed, while there were clearly numerous factors both theoretical and political that led Althusser to reformulate his philosophical approach, it is not fanciful to speculate that in doing so he may have been inuenced by Deleuze: certainly he cites Deleuze positively in his later work (Althusser 2006: 189). We have seen that Deleuzes Nietzschean Marx resurfaces in AntiOedipus; similarly, the presentation in Difference and Repetition of the Marxist conception of society is developed in A Thousand Plateaus. Rather than referring to social Ideas, in A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze

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and Guattari refer to social machines. There are virtual abstract machines that can be actualised in a variety of social assemblages. Deleuze and Guattari refer to machinic assemblages: concrete assemblages effectuate or actualise abstract machines and [a]bstract machines operate within concrete assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 510). There remains a common purpose, however, behind the two terminologies of social Ideas and social machines: namely, to theorise social forms without reference to any kind of organic totality or any transcendent imposition of unity. In one sense Deleuze and Guattari do this in conscious opposition to Marx: We dene social formations by machinic processes and not by modes of production (these on the contrary depend on the processes) (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 435). But this reects a transformation rather than a rejection of Marx. The concept of a social machine enables Deleuze and Guattari to rethink Marxs concept of a mode of production in various ways. A machine is made up of uid connections: it selects, connects and combines different elements, interrupting and arranging ows ows of people, of wealth, beliefs, desire, and so on. The Deleuzian machine is therefore more dynamic than either simply the Marxian mode of production or the Althusserian structure: a machine is a process rather than a static combination of determined elements. The terminology of machines also allows Deleuze and Guattari to overcome certain traditional binaries. It identies different elements and levels of analysis without depending on a simplistic basesuperstructure model whereby one needs to dive beneath the surface to nd the hidden, determining instance, the inner essence that drives the whole. As Jean-Jacques Lecercle has said of the concept of assemblage (as actualised machine): It makes it possible to go beyond the separation between material infrastructure and ideal superstructure, by demonstrating the imbrication of the material and the ideal (Lecercle 2006: 200). Deleuze himself claims: There is no base or superstructure in an assemblage (Deleuze and Parnet 2002: 71). Related to this deconstruction of the relation between a supposedly material base and a supposedly ideal superstructure is the machines imbrication of labour and desire: in a machine, there is no division between that which is objective, political and real and that which is subjective, libidinal and fantastic or ideological. This is, however, not a repudiation of Marxs concept of the mode of production but rather a development of it: an attempt to push Marx in an even more materialist direction. Some commentators have argued that Deleuze and Guattaris theory of machinic assemblages distances them from the Marxist tradition. This argument has perhaps been best articulated by Manuel DeLanda.

22 Simon Choat
DeLanda must be considered one of the foremost commentators upon Deleuze better, in fact, simply to call him Deleuzian than a commentator upon Deleuze, precisely because the value of his work lies in the fact that he does not merely comment on Deleuze but attempts to reconstruct Deleuzes philosophy, not unlike the way in which Deleuze himself approaches other thinkers. But there is in DeLandas work a curious blind spot when it comes to Marx, or rather a strange hostility. Although DeLandas best work is a Deleuzian study of the philosophy of science (DeLanda 2002), he cannot be counted among those who obliterate Deleuzes politics by ignoring it, for elsewhere he has offered lucid and thoughtful accounts of the implications of Deleuzes work for social and political thought. Marx, however, is eliminated from these accounts: else occasionally explicitly condemned as the kind of anachronistic thinker Deleuze tried to escape from, but more often simply ignored. From Deleuzes work on abstract machines and social assemblages DeLanda develops what he calls assemblage theory, the value of which he claims is that it can account for entities without having to suppose either that there is an organic totality whose parts are seamlessly fused together or that the whole is nothing more than the aggregate of its parts. In contrast to these awed approaches, assemblage theory is an approach in which every social entity is shown to emerge from the interactions among entities operating at a smaller scale (DeLanda 2006: 118). This does not mean simply recognising that societies are made up of relations between individuals. The problem with existing theories, DeLanda argues, is that they treat scale as absolute so that, for instance, individual persons are considered micro while whole societies are macro. In contrast, assemblage theory relativises scale: both individuals and societies have both micro- and macro-levels, depending on how you view them (DeLanda 2008: 166). Given this, to continue to talk of entities like society as a whole or the capitalist system is misguided or spurious, because it erases the very distinctions of scale that assemblage theory reveals: a society or the capitalist system are not wholes of which other entities are component parts, but can themselves be component parts (if considered in a global or even planetary context, for example). In his discussions of assemblage theory DeLanda largely passes over Marxs work in silence, pausing only to accuse Marx (amongst others) of a macro-reductionism within which only the social structure really exists, with individuals relegated to the status of epiphenomenonal effects of the social structure (DeLanda 2006: 5). If Deleuze and Guattari continue to talk of capitalism then according to DeLanda this only

Deleuze, Marx and the Politicisation of Philosophy

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attests to the fact that the Marxist tradition was like their Oedipus the little territory they did not dare to challenge (DeLanda 2008: 174). This is a problematic argument, in at least two (related) ways. First, Deleuzes dependence on Marx is far more than a residual terminological afliation: as we have seen, in his own writings and those produced with Guattari, a critical engagement with Marx is an important part of the development of Deleuzes (and Guattaris) analyses of social forms. Second, Deleuzes work itself demonstrates that we do not need to read Marx as a theorist who prioritises the social structure at the expense of its components: any society is an actualisation of virtual relations, and thus a dynamic solution to the problem of how to order relations of production rather than a static structure that determines and xes the relations within it. A major problem with DeLandas presentation of assemblage theory is his insistence on interpreting it in terms of scale. What Deleuze and Guattari call micropolitics that is, the central project of A Thousand Plateaus has nothing to do with scale.7 They are unequivocal on this point: the molar and the molecular are distinguished not by size, scale, or dimension but by the nature of the system of reference envisioned (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 217). Micropolitics therefore does not entail a rejection of a concept like capitalist society for being too generalised or too large, unable to account for scale; it entails a different kind of analysis of capitalism. Micropolitics means analysing different kinds of line: molar lines of rigid segmentarity, molecular lines of supple segmentarity, and lines of ight (that which escapes and provides new connections and the possibility of change). A micropolitical analysis of capitalism is an analysis that recognises that capitalism is traversed by deterritorialising lines of ight indeed that these lines of ight are its very conditions of operation: in order to function capitalism must necessarily release and encourage ows that may lead in unexpected directions which it cannot control (Deleuze 1997: 189). This insight is taken in large part from Marxs analysis of capitalism as a mode of production that must constantly revolutionise the instruments and relations of production and that hence, in Deleuzian language, is always creating new ows and lines of ight. Far from being predicated upon a rejection of Marx, the micropolitics of social assemblages is deeply indebted to his work.

IV. Conclusions
Analysis of the place of Marx in Deleuzes early works achieves a number of things. First and foremost, it validates and reinforces

24 Simon Choat
Deleuzes self-description as a Marxist. This aids understanding of his later work with Guattari. The point is not to attempt merely to reverse the orthodox view of the DeleuzeGuattari books, so that the Marxist politics therein becomes all Deleuzes, to the neglect of Guattaris contribution. Rather, by recognising that both Deleuze and Guattari were Marxists when they came to work with each other, we are better able to trace the lineage of their arguments and concepts: it is not only with reference to Deleuzes broader conceptual innovations that we can sketch a line between his early and his later, collaborative work, but also with reference to his specic use of Marx. In addition to throwing new light on the joint works, recognition of Deleuzes Marxism alters our understanding of his solo work, bringing out passages or insights that have been ignored. The image of Deleuze that arises from both Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition is not at all that of an apolitical elitist yet to show an interest in Marx, but of a politically committed thinker involved in contemporary debates within Marxism and making the rst steps towards a reformulation of Marxs ideas, unafraid to deal with him even though he was still associated with trends that Deleuze must have found repellent and that many of Deleuzes contemporaries had abandoned Marx altogether. There has in recent years been an effort by some commentators to align Deleuze with a liberal-democratic, even Rawlsian, politics.8 This effort is not in itself illegitimate, and may even yield signicant insights. Nor is it wholly incompatible with recognition of the important place of Marx in Deleuzes work. But there is a risk that if Deleuze is aligned with the liberal tradition in this way even if as a critical interlocutor then what makes his work interesting in the rst place may be smoothed away, to the extent even that Deleuze may effectively become depoliticised: assimilated into mainstream thought and practice and into an academic exercise in the history of thought, his work loses his political impact. It might be argued that, on the contrary, to align Deleuze too closely with Marx is to depoliticise him. There has, after all, been a long-standing accusation made against Marx that he is depoliticising, in that he supposedly effects an economistic reduction or effacement of the political. But Deleuze and Guattari know that this is not true: what they show throughout both volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia is that far from reducing the political to the economic, Marx demonstrates that it is capitalism itself that performs this reduction, as it functions directly through an axiomatic, without the need for political codes or beliefs. Simultaneously, they show that Marx politicises realms that had been previously thought to be apolitical: it

Deleuze, Marx and the Politicisation of Philosophy

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is true that capitalism effaces politics by making political institutions, values, beliefs, practices, etc., secondary or even unnecessary but this effacement of politics is itself a political manoeuvre: it is generated by economic forces that prior to Marx (in the work of the classical political economists) had been considered an apolitical realm of natural and spontaneous order, but which Marx reveals to be pervaded by political relations of power and domination. When they claim that it is Marxs analysis of the encounter between the deterritorialised worker and decoded money that lies at the heart of Capital (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 225), Deleuze and Guattari indicate the importance of Marxs section on primitive accumulation. They do this not simply because this section counters determinist readings of Marx and demonstrates his recognition of capitalisms contingent origins, but also because it is here above all that Marx politicises economics. For Marx as for Deleuze and Guattari, the recognition that the capitalist economy depoliticises must be based upon the simultaneous recognition that the capitalist economy is highly politicised. Furthermore, all this rests upon a politicisation of philosophy. Marx directs philosophys attention to the political struggles and forces that exist as an integral part of apparently apolitical domains, including that of philosophy itself: philosophys function after Marx is no longer to separate the true from the false but to analyse, interrogate and change the material conditions of its own emergence, challenging the existing order in the name of a new world. Deleuzes Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition, far from being apolitical, are in a similar way politically motivated by the need to challenge established values and create a new order. To recognise this is to begin to recognise Deleuzes debt to Marx. A political Deleuze and a politicised Deleuzian philosophy are both possible and welcome but we will get nowhere until we acknowledge the profundity and persistence of Deleuzes Marxism.

Notes
1. See in particular the excellent studies found in Lecercle (2005), Read (2003) and Thoburn (2003). 2. I think that one way (among others) to distinguish between the well-known critiques of Deleuze by Badiou (2000) and Hallward (2006) is to say that whereas the former rejects the political implications of Deleuzes work, the latter denies that Deleuzes work has any real political relevance at all. 3. It is not my aim to offer a thorough critique of all of ieks arguments concerning Deleuze (which are more interesting and sophisticated than many Deleuzians have acknowledged): I am interested only in ieks claim that Deleuze is neither political nor Marxist.

26 Simon Choat
4. This point is well made by Paul Patton (2000: 132). 5. It should be said that the links between Deleuze and Hayek are more often alluded to than actually worked out: see Garo (2008a: 612) and Mengue (2003: 67). 6. Eugene Holland opens his informative account of the relation between Marx and Deleuze (and Guattari) in this way, arguing that the rst page of Deleuzes most important philosophical work, Difference and Repetition, lays the groundwork for his analysis of capitalism (Holland 2009: 147). 7. For further criticism of this sort, see the review of DeLandas A New Philosophy of Society by Read (2008). 8. Patton is perhaps the leading gure here; see Patton (2005, 2007, 2008). See also Tampio (2009) and the review of Pattons Deleuze and the Political by Smith (2003).

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Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet (2002) Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, London: Continuum. Garo, Isabelle (2008a) Deleuze, Marx and Revolution: What it Means to Remain Marxist , in Jacques Bidet and Stathis Kouvelakis (eds), Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism, Leiden: Brill, pp. 60524. Garo, Isabelle (2008b) Molecular Revolutions: The Paradox of Politics in the Work of Gilles Deleuze, trans. John Marks, in Ian Buchanan and Nicholas Thoburn (eds) Deleuze and Politics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 5473. Guattari, Flix (2006) The Anti-Oedipus Papers, ed. Stphane Naduad, trans. Klina Gotman, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Hallward, Peter (2006) Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation, London: Verso. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2000) Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Holland, Eugene (2009) Karl Marx, in Graham Jones and Jon Roffe (eds), Deleuzes Philosophical Lineage, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 14766. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques (2005) Deleuze, Guattari and Marxism, Historical Materialism, 13:3, pp. 3555. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques (2006) A Marxist Philosophy of Language, trans. Gregory Elliott, Leiden: Brill. Marx, Karl (1973) Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, Karl (1976) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mengue, Philippe (2003) Deleuze et la question de la dmocratie, Paris: LHarmattan. Patton, Paul (2000) Deleuze and the Political, London: Routledge. Patton, Paul (2005) Deleuze and Democratic Politics, in Lars Tnder and Lasse Thomassen (eds), Radical Democracy: Politics Between Abundance and Lack, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 5067. Patton, Paul (2007) Utopian Political Philosophy: Deleuze and Rawls, Deleuze Studies, 1:1, pp. 4159. Patton, Paul (2008) Becoming-Democratic, in Ian Buchanan and Nicholas Thoburn (eds), Deleuze and Politics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 17895. Read, Jason (2003) The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Read, Jason (2008) The Full Body: Micro-Politics and Macro-Entities, Deleuze Studies, 2:2, pp. 2208. Smith, Daniel W. (2003) Deleuze and the Liberal Tradition: Normativity, Freedom and Judgement, Economy and Society, 32:2, pp. 299324. Tampio, Nicholas (2009) Assemblages and the Multitude: Deleuze, Hardt, Negri, and the Postmodern Left, European Journal of Political Theory, 8:3, pp. 383400. Thoburn, Nicholas (2003) Deleuze, Marx and Politics, London: Routledge. iek, Slavoj (2004) Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences, New York: Routledge.

DOI: 10.3366/E1750224109000695