Edmund Berger :: Synthetic Fabrication - The Myth of the Politics-to-Come @ Vast Abrupt

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Edmund Berger :: Underground Streams. A Micro-History of Hyperstition and Esoteric Resistance (Rizosfera/The Strong of the Future, SF008.eng)

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Edmund Berger :: Unconditional Acceleration and the Question of Praxis: Some Preliminary Thoughts @ Deterritorial Investigation Unit, 27 March 2017

Edmund Berger :: Unconditional Acceleration and the Question of Praxis: Some Preliminary Thoughts @ D.I.U. / Deterritorial Investigation Unit, 27 March 2017

One of the major points of contention concerning unconditional accelerationism (henceforth U/ACC) is a perceived slight or rejection of any ‘positive’ form of political activity or organizing. The complaint can be summed up with the single phrase “U/ACC lacks praxis”. In the common leftist deployment of the phrase, this is exactly correct. Moreover, we could go as far to say that U/ACC rejects praxis, even that it is anti-praxis – yet, at the same time, this is not so straightforward. If we step back take praxis in its most broad sense – the higher form of acting in the world – then U/ACC is hardly anti-praxis; it simply asks that the limits and the inevitable dissolution of things be acknowledged (there is no contradiction between posing this alongside the Xenofeminist mantra “if nature is unjust, change nature”). No, U/ACC manifests an anti-praxis line when a very specific sort is proposed, that is, the political-territorial subordination and navigation of the forces in motion by a mass subject – the politics of striation. For this reason, perhaps it is best to view U/ACC not as anti-praxis, but as anti-collective means of intervention.

The rejection of collective intervention does not, in the first instant, derive from a normative political claim, though it can (and should up to a certain degree, in my opinion). Instead, U/ACC calls attention to the manner through which collective forms of intervention and political stabilization, be they of the left or the the right, are rendered impossible in the long-run through overarching tendencies and forces. Thus, while left-accelerationism (L/ACC) and right-accelerationism (R/ACC) seek to recompose or reterritorialize Leviathan in accordance with each of their own political theologies, U/ACC charts a course outwards: the structures of Oedipus, the Cathedral, Leviathan, what have you, will be ripped apart and decimated by forces rushing up from within and around the system, which in turn mobilize the entirety of the system towards its own dissolution point. Unlike L/ACC and R/ACC, U/ACC is not at the bottom a political theory; it is one of mobilizing materialism.

Consider the classic Marxian formula: M – C – M’. This is, of course, a simple pathway of capital, beginning with money (M), which is translated into the commodity (C) to be sold on the market. If successful sold, the commodity is translated into a greater amount of money than at the beginning (M’) – and it is at this point that the process restarts. M – C – M’ – C…. on and on and on. If this is the ‘general formula of capital’, as Marx describes it, then it is also the general formula of modernity itself. This, in turn, clues us into the abstract force, glimpsed through diagrammation, which can lurks behind modernity rendered as historical totality: positive feedback. M – C – M’, the process looping for what appears as eternity, forever pushing itself to higher and higher heights. The processual relations of capital appear here as far from any sort of homeostasis.

Positive feedback not only marks the evolution of a given system, or a generalized forward direction. It is also indicative of dissolution, of breaking apart, of past forms being undermined and propelled towards catastrophe. While for many the catastrophe might appear as something like communism, Marx as early as the Communist Manifesto was enraptured by the image of capitalist modernity as unfolding through creative destruction. As Marshall Berman describes, Marx’s depiction of “all that is solid melting into air” is a vision of these processes rendered “luminous, incandescent; brilliant images succeed and blend into one another; we are hurtled along with a reckless momentum, a breathless intensity.”i From here it is only a small leap to Lyotard’s depiction in Libidinal Economy of Marx slowly going mad, seduced by the delirious circuitries of exchange of capitalism and committing himself to “microscopic analysis of the aberrations of capitalism… no longer able to detach himself from it.”ii It begins with a general formula, a singular positive feedback code, and compounds itself endlessly, its circuitries deepening and widening, expanding and contracting, an array of falls and upward-propelling factors.

The positive-feedback processes does not end in the modular pathways of the transmutation between money, commodity, and labor. It radiates out across the entirety of social, cultural, political, even ecology strata (it is for this reason that we can describe capitalism as a historical era, even if all these elements were in play long before capitalism itself). The widening of commodity production over here generates trade networks, churning up market expansion over there. Rapid technological development diffusing through a given industry pushes prices down, bringing more into the cycles of production and thus consumption – and technological development radiates into newer, faster, more adaptive technologies. Technocommercialism begins to shake culture, society, and polity, forcing them into fragmentation and new forms. Firm structures and deeply-held beliefs buckle and break under the movement of people, money, and goods. All these forces lock into momentum with one another and act as force multipliers, each looping through the other, pushing it forward, faster, moving the entirety of the system towards… something – and it is this something that control systems, of either the left or the right, would be forced (and will always fail) to contend with.

Yaneer Bar-Yam, founder and head researcher of the New England Complex Systems Institute, describes the bulk of human civilization as capable of being characterized, first and foremost, as a “control hierarchy”, in which (at the ideal level, at least) “all communication, and thus coordination of activities, must occur through the hierarchy.”iiiWorkplace dynamics must be routed through management, just as military affairs pivot on the chain of command. Nations deploy presidents and prime ministers, and businesses bring on CEOs. In spaces where control hierarchies prevail, the controller not only serves to properly manage and direct the channels of communication for coordination (thus presaging directly the concerns of first-order cybernetics); it also plays the role of forging that sense of continuity, the inscription of organic wholeness on the myriad of parts.

Yet it is not so straightforward as simple control hierarchies. Through the passage of time, the prevailing organizational dynamics have shifted not only at the immediate, everyday level (say, on the factory production line or in the corporate boardroom), but at the civilizational level as well. Hunter-gatherer societies often organized in clusters based on direct hierarchy, while the passage from early civilization to the industrial revolution(s) saw this hierarchy move from wider chain-of-command systems to be dynamic entanglements. With each passing iteration, the status of the hierarchical formation itself declines as the relations tend towards the network, or even post-network, formations. This is precisely because, Bar-Yam notes, of a rise in the ‘complexity profile’ being shaped within civilization. As the nonlinear processes driven by cascading positive feedback intensify and rise, organization itself becomes more complex, more heterogeneous, more multiplicitious, and less congenial to control systems. Rising complexity, in the end, trashes the orderly nature of organic wholeness.

The L/ACC critic might stop here and decry the construction of a strawman. “Of course we aren’t for firm hierarchy,” they are probably saying. “We’re interested in flexible forms, in hybridity and multiplicity.” They might add, as their neo-communist cousins are oft to do, that they even reject planning as traditionally conceived: “we support decentralized planning”. Allow me to respond to these oppositions quickly: flexible control, modular hierarchy, and decentralized planning all fall victim to the same forward rush of rising complexity as their more formalized and concrete kin.

Control systems always rely on a high degree of legibility, the ability to observe a given territory (physical or otherwise) down to its minutia and classify and categorize the elements within it in order to properly enable generalized management and specific intervention.iv Any and all forms of planning require legibility and the capability to tabulate and command every potential variable – yet this becomes its very Achilles’ heel. Consider Andrew Pickering’s description of the conclusions gleamed by the cybernetician Ross Ashby’s research into homeostats: “The only route to stabilisation is to cut down variety – to reduce the number of configurations an assemblage can take on, by reducing the number of participants and the multiplicity of their interconnections.”v The reason that this is immediately is because the control system, regardless of its inflexibility or flexibility or how centralized or decentralized its planning is, operates in a manner akin to that of the homeostat: the movement of a spectrum of variables in play towards a zone of equilibrium in order to promote generalized stability through the system. Pickering at length:

Ashby was interested in the length of time it would take combinations of homeostats to achieve collective equilibrium. He thought of them as models of the brain, so the question for him was whether one could build a brain that would adapt to the world in a reasonable length of time. Both calculations and his machines showed that four fully interconnected homeostats, each capable of taking on twenty-five different inner states, could come into equilibrium in a couple of seconds. But if one extrapolated that an assemblage of one hundred fully interconnected homeostats the combinatories were such that chance on an equilibrium arrangement would entail search-times orders of magnitudes greater than the age of the universe. Even if 99 of them found a way to settle down, chances are that the 100th would set them spinning again.

This is the point to focus on. It takes time to run through homeostat-like processes of reconfiguration, putting possibilities to others who are doing the same back, proposing and counter-posing, vetoing and counter-vetoing. And the length of time it takes to stabilise such an arrangement increases astronomically with the number of participants and the density of their connections, meaning the number of others with which entities interacts directly. Finding stability can easily become a practical impossibility.vi

To properly operate in the real, some sort of sociopolitical island of stability, L/ACC or R/ACC praxis would be contingent upon the expunging of variables upon variables to push the complexity profile downwards, to make it more manageable (which is something that R/ACC tends to admit more than L/ACC). But to do this would not only mean restricting flows of people, goods, and money, as the populists of the left and right both are rushing over one another to do. It would also require roadblocks thrown up in the path of technological development, and the suppressing of the capability of making and using tools to operate in the world. The promotion of a collective cognitive project would, ironically, be forced to suppress cognitive activity on the molecular scale.

In the end this scenario does not seem very likely. Multitudes of positive feedback processes have long since become deeply entrenched, and the system as a whole is undeniably veering far from order. The lingering populisms have rebooted themselves merely as a cynical effort to stave off the dissolution, and from certain angles are more symptomatic than truly reactionary. The complexity profile is rising and will continue, and as it does the capability for collective intervention will become all but impossible. From the perspective of sites of collective intervention both existing (nations, corporations, etc.) and envisioned (variants of post-capitalist planning), these runaway processes cannot but look like entropic decay. From the perspective of power, perhaps the forces rushing upwards are not to be visualized as all that is solid melting into air, but the crushing of all that is stable and standing into disparate granules.

Contra any gamble for collectively scalable politics of bootstrapping and navigation, Bar-Yam suggests that in the face of mounting complexity, organizational design is forced to tend towards “progressively smaller branching ratios (fewer individuals supervised by a single individual)”.vii As mutational development speeds up and legibility fades, size becomes a liability. James Scott has shown that detachment of large managerial forces from the chaotic ‘on-the-ground’ environs is a recipe for disaster. Similarly, Kevin Carson has illustrated the way that the Hayekian knowledge problem (which posits that in complex, evolutionary systems, knowledge distributes in a way that undermines any attempt at planning) not only applies to state-centric command economies, but to the organizational black box of the modern corporation.viiiAs such problems intensify, any possibility for navigation falls downward, to smaller and more dynamic firms, greater marketization (technocommercialism begetting technocommercialism), and ultimately individual actors themselves.

It is at this point where one might happen on something that looks like U/ACC praxis. If one’s goal is the dissolution of the state and/or rule by multinational monopoly capitalism, then why recourse to the very systems and mechanisms that seek to stabilize these forms and shore them up against the forces that undermine them? This question is at the core of Deleuze and Guattari’s insight in the ‘accelerationist fragment’ that to “withdraw from the world market”, as opposed to going deeper into the throes of it, is a “curious revival of the fascist ‘economic solution’”.ix The intellectual complicity of the broad left with this ‘economic solution’ is also why Nick Land – in a moment of incredible anti-fascist theorizing – charged that

re-Hegelianized western Marxism degenerates from the critique of political economy into a state-sympathizing monotheology of economics, siding with fascism against deregulation. The left subsidies into conservatism, asphyxiating its vestigial capacity for hot speculative mutation in the morass of a cold depressive guilt-culture.x

To accelerate the process, and to throw oneself into those flows, leaves behind the (already impossible) specter of collective intervention. This grander anti-praxis opens, in turn, the space for examining forms of praxis that break from the baggage of the past. We could count agorism and exit as forms impeccable to furthering the process, and cypherpoliticsxiand related configurations arise on the far end of the development, as the arc bends towards molecularization of economic and social relations. It is in these horizons that conversation and application must unfold.

No more reterritorializing reactions. No more retroprogressivism.

iMarshall Berman All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity Penguin Books, 1988, pg. 91

iiJean-Francois Lyotard Libidinal Economy Athlone Press, 1993, pg. 97

iiiYaneer Bar-Yam “Complexity Rising: From Human Beings to Human Civilization, a Complexity Profile” New England Complex Systems Institute http://www.necsi.edu/research/multiscale/EOLSSComplexityRising.pdf pg. 9

ivOn legibility, see James C. Scott Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed Yale University Press, 1999

vAndrew Pickering “Islands of Stability: Engaging Emergence from Cellular Automata to the Occupy Movement” University of Exeter, 2013, pg. 10 https://www.academia.edu/20618708/Islands_of_Stability_Engaging_Emergence_from_Cellular_Automata_to_the_Occupy_Movement

viIbid, pg. 6

viiBar Yam “Complexity Rising” pg.

viiiSee Kevin Carson Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective BookCurge, 2008, pgs. 205-223

ixGilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia University of Minnesota Press, 1983 pg. 239

xNick Land “Meltdown” Swarm 1 http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm

xiUnion of Researchers for a Collective Commons “Cypherpolitical Enterprises: Programmatic Assessments” P2P Foundation, March 15th, 2017 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/cypherpolitical-enterprises-programmatic-assessments/2017/03/15

Pics/Artwork :: Zoorex

Edmund Berger :: Uncertain Futures. An Assessment of the Conditions of the Present @ Zero Books

Uncertain Futures: An Assessment of the Conditions of the Present provides a detailed look into the economic and political conditions of our present moment from a Marxist perspective. Key aspects of Marxist economic theory are illustrated in clear ways in order to provide an easy introduction to Marxist thought and their applicability. 
The book also examines the sluggish recovery from the Great Recession, in the context of the long-term feasibility of sustaining the capitalist system by placing it into a historical framework. It considers the necessity of social democratic reforms while calling for an anarchic re-invigoration of the politics of everyday life. Read more @Zero Books

As I finished Edmund’s new book Uncertain Futures: An Assessment of the Conditions of the Present (Get it: here) I realized why I’ve followed his blog Deterritorial Investigations Unit for the past few years: keen intelligence, an encyclopedic breadth of vision encompassing an ethical commitment to the real movement of change, and a loquacious and gracious scholarly acumen and sense of excellence stylistically and in regards of other thinkers place within our cultural history. Critical, observant, detailed – a thinker whose historical sense is not overburdened by a false historicism, but peers into that dark mirror of our near future as if his diagnosis and cure of our ailing civilization were neither a swan song to its demise, nor a belabored undermining of its forward movement into ruin and decay, but rather as a physician of time – a creature from the far flung future seeking to retroactively elide the toxic effects of our dark modernism.... ....Whether you side with the Ogres or the socialists is your choice. Either way we will know you as you are in the near future. Read Edmund Berger’s book, get to know this political economic history in a series of doses that will help you understand what choices are available. You may or may not agree with his socialist agenda, but you can still understand what brought him to his conclusions and why. That in itself is genius. Extract from https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2017/01/17/edmund-berger-uncertain-futures-a-review/ ~ S.C. Hickman, Social Ecologies blog

Put two economists in the same room and you will understand why Congress never works. Put a book together with economists’ views on neoliberalism and socialism, and you get a bickering collection of angles and aspects, all of which can be disputed. Uncertain Futures is a title that captures this ethos well. It consists of three chapters, roughly past present and future. The future is of the one of most interest, and is therefore the most disappointing. Berger is very cautious, maybe because he himself has just demonstrated the potential of instant criticism, or maybe because he is uncertain himself. Or both. But his final recommendation is to create support networks around the world. Put the 99% in touch, with co-operatives, unions and movements. This will raise the profile of socialism as viable, and provide a concrete answer to the precarity that neoliberalism has entrenched. Sounds like a very long term plan. The race to the bottom should now be obvious to everyone. Fascism, an inherent if not necessary component of capitalism, has been dramatically rising in numerous democracies. It absolutely must, as the 99% looks for a savior from their absurd position and condition. Yet the fear it plays on helps cement the status quo, because fascists are dictators protecting their gains. Berger says “Fascism is nothing less than the intensification of every regressive sentiment to be found in the whole of society, mobilized and put on the march by elements in the ruling class.” And “To reform capitalism at this stage is a revolutionary act.” That’s how far we’ve fallen. ~ David Wineberg, Amazon/The Straight Dope (Medium)

Edmund Berger is an independent writer, researcher, and activist living in Louisville, Kentucky. His primary focuses are on the evolution of technology and its impact on changing modes of capitalist production, the role of warfare in the economy, and the history of the avant-gardes as critiques and responses to paradigms of power. He blogs intermittently at Deterritorial Investigations Unit and Synthetic Zero.

Craig Hickman :: Edmund berger: Uncertain Futures a Review @ Alien Ecologies

Craig Hickman @ Alien Ecologies (HERE)

Edmund Berger: Uncertain Futures a Review 

As I finished Edmund’s new book Uncertain Futures: An Assessment of the Conditions of the Present (Get it: here) I realized why I’ve followed his blog Deterritorial Investigations Unit for the past few years: keen intelligence, an encyclopedic breadth of vision encompassing an ethical commitment to the real movement of change, and a loquacious and gracious scholarly acumen and sense of excellence stylistically and in regards of other thinkers place within our cultural history. Critical, observant, detailed – a thinker whose historical sense is not overburdened by a false historicism, but peers into that dark mirror of our near future as if his diagnosis and cure of our ailing civilization were neither a swan song to its demise, nor a belabored undermining of its forward movement into ruin and decay, but rather as a physician of time – a creature from the far flung future seeking to retroactively elide the toxic effects of our dark modernism.

His work does not waste time but compresses and condenses it into a series of pointed time vectors that rely less on a full tilt encyclopedic knowledge of the terrain, but rather an elucidation of its horizons and secret pathways into the near term transitions of a political economy either going South or discovering its breakthrough into a future that is already there in the pockets of silence everywhere. In the first chapter he’ll  “elucidate some key parts of Marx’s theory (as well as relevant non-Marxist perspectives) in an easy and readable manner, and illustrate how it applies to contemporary economic history from the Great Depression to the Great Recession. The second chapter is to turn to the so-called “Washington Consensus” itself, to look at how it unfolded from its humble beginnings in 1930s Europe to its application in the United States between the 1980s and today. Just as the first chapter will stress how the future of capitalism as we currently know is it is extremely fragile, the second argues quite similarly that the Washington Consensus, itself welded to capitalism’s evolution, is splintering apart. Finally, the third chapter will consider the relationship between the current socio-economic situation and various important concepts: fascism, social democracy, socialism, reform, and revolution. (UF, p. 2)

After a lengthy introduction to Marxian theory and practice from a Western economic perspective, not delving into the Russian or Chinese appropriation of it, Edmund will show how in the Great Depression the Keynesian solution emerged and what it meant:

The Keynesian solution is to increase the possibilities of demand through welfare, job growth programs, and other forms of government stimulus enabled through deficit spending. Only through successful government intervention, Keynes argued, could the capitalist economy reach something that looked like an equilibrium based on full employment. (UR, p. 12)

Keynesian theory was forged in the context of economic crisis, most specifically the British unemployment crisis of the 1920s. Adversarial to socialism and Marxism in particular, Keynes worked closely with the British government in developing jobs programs – but it would be in the wake of the Great Depression that his theories would find their highest application, becoming the de facto economic paradigm of choice for both the US and Europe governments. It appeared to be wildly successful: for the US economy, the Keynesian era saw the highest peak in the rate of profit in the modern history of capitalism (1963), the lowest unemployment rate (1969), and the longest bout of income equality (between roughly 1960 and 1970). (UF, p. 12)

And, yet, by the end of the sixties something happened to turn it sour. Keynesianism ran headlong into a crisis, one that would open the floodgates for the neoliberal system that we are currently moored within. Inflation rose considerably, and would transform into a decade-long stagflation that threatened the longevity of the capitalist project itself. The rate of profit declined, having yet to truly recover. Government expenditures threw the dollar into crisis, and the inflexibility of production, particularly in the face of foreign competition, sent shockwaves through the global market. Importantly, this crisis saw no decline in demand and real evidence of a ‘general glut’ of commodities. Does this mean that the underconsumption theories are incorrect, or that the Keynesian approach is not applicable (from the perspective of the capitalist?) (UF, p. 12)

It’s from this that Edmund will provide an in-depth critique and framework for understanding the beast of political economy that emerged out of this failure of Bretton Woods Crisis and the late Nixon Era: or, what would eventually congeal into the deleterious Age of Neoliberalism. Like many others Edmund approaches the use of this term “Neoliberal” with a skeptical eye. For a long while now this term has been a part of the secular Left’s arsenal of shibboleths, an overused appellation and icon of the “free market” theories of Reganomics and Thatcherian political economies of the Reactionary Turn, etc. Problem is that it has now been taxed and appropriated to every sundry idea, concept, notion to a point of saturation in which no one can see the forest for the trees. The singular effectiveness of such a term that supposedly compresses in some iconic way the political economy of globalization after the Bretton Woods monetary crisis has lost its valiancy, the coin being rubbed smooth of its iconic graphs. What we’re left with is more of a secular mythology of political economics than some actual entity underlying the history of this beast. Edmund will approach it this way:

…the return of finance capital, which gained new traction with the ushering in of the post-Bretton Woods floating exchange rates by President Nixon. Thus what we have come to call “neoliberalism” can be said to start at this point, in the decline of the Fordist system; indeed, one of neoliberalism’s most stalwart proponents, Chicago School economist Milton Friedman, had sent confidential memorandums to President Nixon urging him to abandon the Bretton Woods arrangement, noting that it would be a boom for finance capitalism. It is by no accident that it was across this decade that what I call the “neoliberal-New Right opportunity structure” arose to take advantage of the crisis in order to implement a neoliberal policy regime. (UF, p. 21)

This sense of New Right “opportunity structure,” and “policy regime” are the effectuations of critical gaze, understanding these in the sense a transformation in wealth accumulation and distribution in which the “overall shift from a Keynesian demand-side policy regime to a neoliberal supply-side regime added a tendency towards wage stagnation in this dynamic transformation” (UF, p. 22). Which as we all know shaped the new world of high finance and unbridled de-regulated speculation, along with the piracy of the older welfare state initiatives into a privatization of debt and the displacement of equality into the inequality of income where the surplus from labour shifts the pay of the “top 10% of income earners taking a greater and greater share of the total US income and nearly rivaling that of the bottom 90%” (UF, p. 22).

The rest of the book outlines a careful diagnosis of this Neoliberal Era along with a possible path forward. At the chapter two Edmund offers without apology a his vision of this past and a possible movement out: “finally, in a time in which everyday life enters into an unprecedented era of degradation, distraction, boredom, anxiety, and fear… in the moment that the oppressed and exploited share a recognition of their existential condition, and take steps to strike back against it… socialism realizes itself whether or not the word ‘socialism’ is used, whether or not a word of ‘socialist theory’ is uttered, and whether or not an exogenous factor seeks to embolden the oppressed and exploited. Socialism is alive in both the movement and the outcome, and yet it is not a historical inevitability. It must actively be worked for, which is why to believe in the spontaneous emergence of socialism, in any organized sense, is to fall victim to mystical idealism.” (UF, p. 78)

As if joining that tribe of writers and pamphleteers from an earlier era when socialism was first emerging: Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and so many others. A world in which as Jack Lond in The Iron Heel says:

In the face of the facts that modern man lives more wretchedly than the cave-man, and that his producing power is a thousand times greater than that of the cave-man, no other conclusion is possible than that the capitalist class has mismanaged . . . criminally and selfishly mismanaged. … Let us not destroy those wonderful machines that produce efficiently and cheaply. Let us control them. Let us profit by their efficiency and cheapness. Let us run them for ourselves. That, gentlemen, is socialism. . . .

Utopian? Sure it is. And, yet, pragmatically assured of reality, too. Rather than an economy of surplus, wherein the capitalist accrues from the worker (labour) that last inch of blood, sweat, and tears of its life in what Marx once defined as: “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.”2

This was the age of the Wobblies. The IWW (or “Wobblies,” as they came to be called, for reasons not really clear) aimed at organizing all workers in any industry into “One Big Union,” undivided by sex, race, or skills. They argued against making contracts with the employer, because this had so often prevented workers from striking on their own, or in sympathy with other strikers, and thus turned union people into strikebreakers. Negotiations by leaders for contracts replaced continuous struggle by the rank and file, the Wobblies believed.3

Remember that it was under Reagan that the backbone of the Unions would at last crumble with the verdict against the Airline Controllers Union. After that as if the writing on the wall the Unions one after another have slowly crumbled against the state and corporate machines. The Muckrackers of that era would help bring down monopoly capitalism, but since 1981 and the rise of neoliberalism under Reganomics, and the de-regulations of the Clinton era we’ve seen the rise of Global Monopoly Capitalism. As Barry C. Lynn describes it “in the generation since 1981, when we all but stopped enforcing our antimonopoly laws, a very small number of people have consolidated control over just about every activity in the United States… Even as we were reassured on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis that America was the greatest “free market” economy in the world, a tiny elite engineered the most phenomenal roll-up of political economic power in our history”.4

So ultimately as Edmund reminds us there “is no guarantee that any of this comes to the end that we desire. But faced with the reality of the present the two stark choices emerge once before us again: socialism or barbarism. Both are implicit in the dynamic movements that frame our moment in history. While both can be differed and postponed, both are capable of being brought to realization through the actions of people. Given the choice, one cannot refuse, in clear conscience, to partake in the movement to cut barbarism out at its roots. All that is left, when the words of theory pale in comparison to the reality that it seeks to describe, is this movement. (UF, p. 79)

For Edmund there is no third way or path forward, there is the definitive choice of choosing one’s battle lines: socialism or barbarism. I remember reading Hungarian Marxist philosopher István Mészáros’s Socialism or Barbarism a few years back in which he reckons that the 21st century will coincide with the third stage of capitalism which he characterizes as the barbarous global competition for domination between a plurality of free-market capitalist systems. In it he’d offer a view onto American capitalism predicting several eminent ramifications to this struggle: imperialist driven territorial expansion in the Middle East, the continuation and increase of NATO aggression, increased infrastructure weakening with major degradation in the quality of life for the lower class, and eventually a proxy war with China via U.S.’s defense treaties with Japan. (see Wiki) He’d describe his Marxist form of socialism:

What is of primary importance is that under all conceivable varieties of the capital system surplus labor must be appropriated by a separate body superimposed on, and structurally dominating, labor. Here, as you can see, the fundamental category is surplus labor, and not surplus value, as people often erroneously assume. … In order to do away with the labor theory of value, you have to do away with the extraction and allocation of surplus labor by an external body of any sort, be that political or economic. … In other words, we can only speak about socialism when the people are in control of their own activity and of the allocation of its fruits to their own ends.5

The only way to do this is to end the Corporate Fascism that isolates, delimits, and extracts the surplus profits while posing as the authority figure of promise and hope, all the while presenting the face of the kindly parent on the vast technological communications and entertainment index while slipping off the mask and revealing the Trollish Ogre to the laughing commodity kings behind the scenes. Barbarism indeed!

Whether you side with the Ogres or the socialists is your choice. Either way we will know you as you are in the near future. Read Edmund Berger’s book, get to know this political economic history in a series of doses that will help you understand what choices are available. You may or may not agree with his socialist agenda, but you can still understand what brought him to his conclusions and why. That in itself is genius.

---

1. Berger, Edmund.
2. “An hour’s labour lost in a day is a prodigious injury to a commercial State…. There is a very great consumption of luxuries among the labouring poor of this kingdom: particularly among the manufacturing populace, by which they also consume their time, the most fatal of consumptions.” “An Essay on Trade and Commerce, &c.,” p. 47, and 15 3.
3. Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States (p. 330). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
4. Lynn, Barry. Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction. Wiley; 1 edition (December 10, 2009)
5. Mészáros, István 2007. Socialism or Barbarism?: Monthly Review Press (2001)

Edmund Berger :: Deleuze, Guattari and Market Anarchism @ Center for Stateless Society (23.01.2017)

Deleuze, Guattari and Market Anarchism

Edmund Berger  @   Center for Stateless Society January 23rd, 2017

I. Deleuze, Guattari, Accelerationism

There’s been a lot of talk about Deleuze and Guattari around both academic and activist scenes for quite some time. Sometimes they are objects of unfounded derision (decried as “holy fools” by traditionalist socialists like Richard Barbrook), and other times they are the beneficiaries of overtly non-critical praise (see the endless application of their theories to every topic under the sun). They’ve been labeled as secret agents for neoliberal capitalism (as charged by Slavoj Zizek) and as tacticians for revolution in the era of globalization (according to the transnational alter-globalization movement that arose in the 1990s). They’ve been invoked as joyful, hippie celebrants of cosmic emergence (certain points in the recent “new materialism” canon), as forerunners to chaos and complexity theory (Manuel DeLanda), and, perhaps most delightfully, as scribes of a “mad, black communism” that feasts on conspiracy and negativity (Andrew Culp). Before his turn towards neoreaction, Nick Land described Anti-Oedipus, the first volume of their two-part collaboration titled Capitalism and Schizophrenia, as “less a philosophy book than an engineering manual; a package of software implements for hacking into the machinic unconscious, opening invasion channels.”ⁱ
With so many different interpretations, which run the gamut from spot-on to the exceedingly problematic, it might seem like an inescapable cul-de-sac to look to their works for elucidating power dynamics in the world today. Their capture by the academy, that assembly-line of homogeneous thought, only compounds this weariness. It is my contention, nonetheless, that Deleuze and Guattari (henceforth D & G) has much to offer us today, and constitute a radical break (or, in their lingo, a schiz) is the annals of leftist theory that points the way towards a vision of the future that is similar to what Benjamin Tucker described as “anarchistic socialist” – or, in the parlance of today, left-wing market anarchism.
The suggestion that D & G’s political praxis overlaps with that of market anarchism, even one that is vehemently anti-capitalist, is bound to rankle many, and will undoubtedly court charges of “accelerationism”. The consummate political heresy of the last decade, accelerationism – a vague term that been applied in numerous, frequently conflict ways – emerges from a pivotal passage in Anti-Oedipus. In the wake of the failures of the left to overcome capitalism during the revolts of the 1960s, and the turn by the ‘Third Worldists’ towards nationalist capitalism, D & G suggest that the proper “revolutionary path” may indeed be one in which we need “[t]o go further still, 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.”ⁱⁱ
The charge of accelerationism is one that should not be warded off, but embraced, but only with a delicate unpacking. Light readings, lacking in nuance, have attached D & G’s reflections as one-off musing at best, and at worst, an uncritical acceptance of the then-emergent neoliberal capitalism, with its rhetoric of global markets, deregulation, and openness. The identification of accelerationism with the latter should be avoided (as well as the more recent association of accelerationism with state-centric technological development); instead, lets look to the possibility of an accelerationism that is ‘anarchistic-socialistic’ in nature, utilizes markets, and operates in unbridled antagonism to the conditions of the present. To do so, tracing out the positioning of markets against capitalism in D & G’s work should be carried out. What follows a cursory exploration of this, though it is by no means an exhaustive treatment. But first, we must look to D & G’s own stance towards the political itself, as individuals and together.


II. Marxists, Anarchists, Both, or Neither?
Providing a precise set of political coordinates for D & G’s theories, other than a very far-left orientation, is itself a rather difficult task. Like Foucault, Baudrillard, and others lumped together under the problematic sign of ‘post-structuralism’, D & G are often invoked by anarchists, particularly those in insurrectionist, communization, and and post-left currents, but debate over their status as anarchists has persisted over the years.
With ties to the borderline anarchists Autonomia movement in 1970s Italy, Guattari described his project as “autonomous-communist-anarchist”, though neither himself nor Deleuze had much to say on the history of anarchist thought at all. Deleuze’s lecturers made passing reference to Proudhon, though it was undoubtedly the strawman Proudhon of Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy (this is unfortunate, as Proudhon’s own ontology of flux and becoming, as detailed in The Philosophy of Progress, clearly foreshadows Deleuze own). Meanwhile, in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze makes passing reference to Max Stirner; while it is hard to say if he was directly influenced by the egoist, Saul Newman has detailed numerous points of overlap between each of their philosophies.ⁱⁱⁱ
It is not, of course, relation to the history of ideas or the name-drops one makes that dictates proximity to anarchism. Aside from tangential relationships with anarchist and quasi-anarchist groups (Guattari through the Autonomists, Deleuze through the Prisoner Information Group, an anti-prison activist network set up by Foucault), it is clear that the philosophy suggested by D & G is teeming with positions and propositions well familiar to anarchists. Among other things the two reject the state, capitalism, the USSR, fascism, the police, democracy, racism, colonialism, taxes, and even nostalgia, managerialism, and fixed identities.
To what extent can D & G be considered Marxists? It is undeniable that Marx holds an important position in their work – particularly in Anti-Oedipus, which sets its revolutionary praxis up as a combination of Nietzsche and Marx. Two decades prior to his collaboration with Deleuze, Guattari could be found in the thick of the two major intellectual tendencies of post-war France: existentialism and Marxist communism. In the late 1940s he was a prominent figure in the French section of the Fourth International of the International Communist Party, itself a band of militant Trotskyites; throughout the 1950s, he would drift towards a more libertarian communist position, working with other radicals and writing detailed critiques of the Soviet Union’s state structure and organizing against the Stalinists in the mainstream of French communist politics. In 1964, when this left opposition began to identify as Maoist, Guattari broke with them and began to move in the direction of the anarchic sectors of the students movement. 
Deleuze, on the other hard, had avoided these sorts of politics. While having been an enthusiastic reader of Sartre, existentialism didn’t appeal much to him, nor did the orthodox forms of Marxism. Towards the end of his life he did describe himself as a Marxist (“Felix Guattari and I have remained Marxists, in our two different ways, perhaps”),^iv and at the time of his death was preparing to write a monograph on Marx. His late texts such as 1992’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control” were self-described as being Marxist, though it is a very funny kind of Marxism: when notions of resistance briefly raises its head, it isn’t the proletariat seizing factories, but “piracy and the introduction of viruses” into computer networks.^v And while one would expect a self-described Marxist writing a Marxist text to use something akin to a Marxist theory of history, Deleuze’s vision of development doesn’t focus on class struggle, but on technological development. Instead of Marx, his point of reference is Foucault – a figure whose on relationship to Marxism is contested and complicated.^vi
‘A very funny kind of Marxism’ is probably the best way to describe Anti-Oedipus, as the very subtitle of Capitalism and Schizophrenia signals. The book, as Jean-Francois Lyotard would later argue, might try to remain ostensibly Marxist, but it is an undeniably variant – or more properly, mutant – form. For Lyotard, “the book’s silence on class struggle, the saga of the worker and the function of his party” helps craft a post-Marxism (or anti-?) that is scrubbed of the “[b]ad conscience in Marx himself, and worse and worse in the Marxists.”^viiWhat might be the nature of this bad conscience? It is, Lyotard suggests, a feeling of guilt or repulsion for being entranced for elements within the dynamics of market processes – namely, the ability to shake the foundations of the entrenched: “[i]n the figure of Kapital that Deleuze and Guattari propose, we easily recognize what fascinates Marx: the capitalist perversion, the subversion of codes, religions, decency, trades, educations, cuisine, speech…”


III. Behind the Veil of Capital
As far back as the Communist Manifesto, Marx draws our attention, usually through the use of ecstatic and poet imagery, to the positive aspects of capitalism in that it both destabilizes old formers of power while simultaneously carrying out processes of ‘modernization’. “All fixed, fast-frozen relations”, as the famous passage goes, “with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all newly-formed ones become antiquated before they ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of his life, and his relations with his kind.” It is for this reason that D & G use terms like line of flight, deterritorialization, and decoding to describe capitalist relations: “lines of flight” because it follows a snaking trajectory of desire towards the new; “deterritorialization” because it uproots things from where they are stuck and allows them to circulate; and “decoding” because it breaks down codes, that is, the strictures of tradition, identity, culture, and other imposed value systems.
Does this not, however, fall rather short from the reality of capitalism? Marx was able to somewhat chart a course between being enthralled by the intertwining of economic circulation and exploitation, on one side of things, and the exploitation and violence on the other – though he still fell victim to series of critical inconsistencies that ultimately helped in undermining much of his project, be it confusion between the state and the market (as drawn out by Kevin Carson in Studies in Mutualist Political Economy),^viii his repugnant and Eurocentric support for British imperialism in India, or the ambiguous relationship between capitalist development and liberation in the core of his philosophy of history – discussions surround which helped shape the paths taken following the Bolshevik revolution.^ix
D & G offer an escape from these inconsistencies and ambiguities, but it is an escape route that changes the very nature of the Marxist analysis of capitalism, and with it, the revolutionary goals that this analysis is intended to point towards. What is essential to note is that the elements that are identified as being ‘positive’ in capitalism – lines of flight, deterritorialization, decoding – are also the very things that become associated with liberatory politics. To wage a non-fascist revolt against the world – which is indeed the very goal of a book like Anti-Oedipus – is to revolt against the old in order to break open the possibility for new forms to arise. For Deleuze and Guattari it is desire itself that motors this process, just as it is desire that motivates all attempts at to move along a line of flight, to deterritorialize, and decode. Similarly, forces like deterritorialization and decoding put into play new desires that were not previously there. Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of desire is productive and tends towards excess and circulation, as opposed to the notions of desire rooted lack (as offered in earlier psychoanalytic discourses of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan).
Does this mean that capitalism can be identified as the expression of desire itself, a suggestion that sounds remarkably close to the rambling utterances of the vulgar libertarians and “anarcho”-capitalists? Not exactly. D & G argue for an understanding of capitalism not simply as a system, but as a constantly unfolding process. This process is not merely a reflection of desire filtered through the exchange patterns of the market, but a host of social relations tangled up in immanent relations of power and domination. No matter how flexible power relations may become, they always require some sort of rigid and fixed foundation at their base, some territory in which their codes operate. It would seem then that the elements of explosive creativity exhibited capitalist entrepreneurship and circulation – the market processes themselves, in other words – would stand opposed to this power, yet it does not. This is because, D & G argue, deterritorialization and decoding are only half of the capitalist process, and are conjoined with the reciprocal processes of reterritorialization and recoding. What’s more is that reterritorialization and recoding are presented as ‘stabilization mechanisms’ of sorts for the system itself, without which capitalism itself would cease to be. To quote them at length,
…capitalism constantly counteracts, constantly inhibits this tendency [towards dissolution] while at the same time allowing it it free rein; it continually seeks to avoid reaching its limit while simultaneously tending towards that limit. Capitalism institutes or restores all sorts of residual and artificial, individual, imaginary, or symbolic territorialities, thereby attempting, as best it can, to recode, to rechannel persons who have been defined in terms of abstract quantities. Everything returns or recurs: States, nations, families. This what makes the ideology of capitalism “a motley painting of everything that has ever been believed”… The more the capitalist machine deterritorializes, decoding and axiomatizing flows in order to extract surplus value from them, the more the ancillary apparatuses, such as government bureaucracies and the forces of law and order, do their utmost to reterritorialize, absorbing in the process a larger and larger share of surplus value.^x
That capitalism requires a state to maintain itself is no new revelation (nor is anything in the paragraph above). The best of Marx’s writings laid out, in incredible detail, the way the evolution of the modern state played a fundamental role in the birth of capitalism, while Benjamin Tucker’s excellent analysis showed how state action built up capitalism, as opposed to deterring it. The post-Marxist Regulation of School, which includes figures like Michel Aglietta and Bob Jessop, has conducted numerous studies of the way regulatory systems allow capitalism to ‘reproduce’ its relations. What D & G are describing here dovetails with these various analyses, but they are concerned with a very specific function: the way the state ‘seizes’ or ‘captures’ increasingly larger and larger elements in the forces that are being unleashed as a means of maintaining the entities that profit from this unleashing. While this might sound somewhat esoteric (and counterintuitive, especially in the face of traditional economic discourses), this process is more or less a depiction of networks of power relations being ‘reproduced’ by the constant co-production of capitalism and the state.
D & G take this notion from two primary sources. The first is the study of money that was carried out by Foucault and presented as part of his series of 1970-1971 lectures at the College de France on “the will to know”. In these lectures, Foucault illustrates how ‘fixed money’ – money that imposed by the state, as opposed to the ‘spontaneous currency’ that appears to occur naturally – in ancient Greece operated as a regulatory mechanism for the whole of society. Money in Greek society “prevents excess, pleonexia, having too much… But it also prevents excessive poverty…”^xi Taxation, for Foucault, is an essential aspect of the function of fixed money, and not some aberration to its evolution or something applied later by unscrupulous bureaucrats. Instead, it was created with taxation in mind, as something that could create a taxonomy of classes, help keep class structures stay relatively rigid in their make-up (primarily through debt accrued by the lower classes and the upward flow of tax money to the upper classes), and to facilitate public work projects necessary for the expansive of economic interests beyond their natural scope. Looking the modern era, D & G write that “the Greeks discovered in their own way what the Americans discovered after the New Deal: that heavy taxes are good for business… In a word, money – the circulation of money – is the means of rendering the debt infinite.”^xii
The second source is the position of the neo-Marxist Monthly Review school put, as put forward by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy in their book Monopoly Capital. Controversial in the annals of Marxism for their transgression of many of the central tenets of Marxist orthodoxy (such as the tendency for the rate of profit to fall), Baran and Sweezy were primarily concerned with the increasingly ‘organized capitalism’ that had grown in period running from the 1880s through the 1960s. This stage of capitalist development was marked by high levels of centralization of economic power in small handfuls of firms, the market activity between which could only be best described as monopolistic competition. Such a system becomes intractably top-heavy, Baran and Sweezy argue, making the economy tend towards stagnation by running up too much excess production and by slowing money’s circulation through the economy. Thus the state comes to pick up the slack, absorbing excess production and capital to ‘pump energy’ back into the economy, be it through welfare programs, infrastructure renewal, military spending, or any other ‘productive’ form of taxpayer-funded government enterprise. Sounding a bit like Foucault in his study of money, Baran and Sweezy suggest that
…since large-scale government spending enables the economy to operate much closer to capacity, the net effect on the magnitude of private surplus is both positive and large… To [the ‘big businessman’], government spending means more effective demand, and he senses that he can shift most of the associated taxes onto consumers or backwards onto workers. In addition… the intricacies of the tax system, specially tailored to fit the needs of all sorts of special interests, open up endless opportunities for speculative and windfall gains. All in all, the decisive sector of the American ruling class is well on the way to becoming a convinced believer in the beneficent nature of government spending.^xiii
D & G expand these insights into a more generalized phenomenon, which they dub “capitalist” or “social axiomatics”. A mechanic process essential to the functioning of capitalism, these axiomatics are the means through which anything deterritorialized or decoded is rerouted back into the state-capitalism assemblage. It applies not only to the capture of monetary flows by the state via taxation, or the much earlier capture of exchange and circulation itself by the overcoding of spontaneous currencies with fixed money, but to things like the recuperation and co-optation of oppositional forms into the logic of power, so on and so forth. “There is a tendency within capitalism”, say D &G in A Thousand Plateaus, “to continually more axioms. After the end of World War I, the joint influence of the world depression and the Russian revolution forced capitalism to multiply its axioms, to invent new ones dealing with the working class, unemployment, union organizations, social institutions, the role of the State, the foreign and domestic markets, Keynesian economics, and the New Deal were axiom laboratories. Examples of the creations of new axioms after the Second World War: the Marshall Plan, forms of assistance and lending, transformation in the monetary system.”^xiv
As is plain to see, sitting at the center of these interrelated concepts and models – reterritorialization, recoding, the addition/subtraction of axioms – is the state itself. D & G’s conception of capitalism is like a hydraulic system, where everything, be it capital, goods, people, and even desire, moves in flows that are constantly productive. Yet at the center of this system is the regulator that makes it work: “The state, its police, and its army form a gigantic enterprise of antiproduction, but at the heart of production itself, and conditioning this production.”^xv

IV. Against the State
In A Thousand Plateaus, these dynamics get recast as a struggle between state apparatuses and war machines. In Anti-Oedipus, divergent, deterritorialized and decoded flows and forces are treated as having “nomadic” qualities; the “war machine” is the next stage of this analysis, focusing on the more intransigent and conflict-driven aspects of their functions. War machines, in other words, make exactly what their name implies, and the target of this war is the state itself (D & G here were drawing on the anthropological work of Pierre Clastres, which analyzed the way certain indigenous societies made the repelling of the state the very rationale of their social quasi-orders). War machines come in many different forms: your affinity group is a war machine, the agorist is a war machine, street gangs and pirates, even certain kinds of commercial organizations. Not all war machines are positive: they’re capable of being darkly violent, tribalistic, even fascistic. While much could be said about this, it is the specific confluence of the war machine with particular economic functions that concerns us here.
Against the war machine, D & G suggest, is the “apparatus of capture”, which is a function of the state that seizes or appropriates the divergent movement and makes it a part of itself. Such a force fits quickly comfortably along the treatment of reterritorialization, recoding, and axiomatics; indeed, D & G identify the apparatus of capture with the “megamachine”, which was Lewis Mumford’s term for large, stae-organized ‘socio-technical’ system that regiment and discipline the people bound up within it.^xvi Importantly, they draw a further correlation between the megamachine and certain economic and political phenomena and mechanisms: the apparatus of capture “functions in three modes…: rent, profit, and taxation.” This schema, D & G tell us, is a recasting of Marx’s famous “trinity formula”, which he used to the describe the way the relations of capital become social relations. What makes D & G’s treatment different from Marx’s is twofold: first, because it positions the state, not the pure economic logic of capitalism, at the center of things; and second, because it is no longer a question of how capitalism becomes a social relation, but how things outside of the purview of the state become enmeshed in these various power relations. “It is not the State that presupposes a mode of production”, they write, “quite the opposite, it is the State that makes production a ‘mode.’”^xvii
Of taxation we’ve already said quite a bit, so it is rent and profit that must be addressed. While taxation is obviously correlated to state function, for many the suggestion that rent and profit – two fundamental aspects of the capitalist market economy – arise from the functions of the state might appear as absolutely erroneous. But consider the little-acknowledged understanding, even in conventional economic discourses, that the more open the systems of exchange and circulation are, the more the capacity to maintain rates of profit accumulation in the long-term falls. With the capacity to enter freely, or to subtract entire sets of relations, from market systems, the ability for certain actors to assume an inordinate share of the market becomes untenable – which is precisely why reliance on state-granted and enforced monopolies becomes necessary for entrenched power structures to shore themselves up against this deterritorializing tide.
The same could be said for rent, which is contingent, in the capitalist system at least, on private property rights backed by the state and rendered in the form of standardized titles. Perhaps the relationship between rent and the state is even more obvious than that of the state and property, given the undeniable role of the state in partitioning older property systems, and setting them into a circulation beneficial to economic, social, and political elites. The assault on rent that would occur in the void of the state was summed up best by Robert Anton Wilson: “Of course, since Austrian ideas exist as factors in human behavior, I will admit that people, hoodwinked by these ideas, will continue to pay rent even in freedom, for a while at least. But I think that, after a time, observing that their Tuckerite neighbors are not submitting to this imposture, they would come to their senses and cease paying tribute to the self-elected ‘owners’… I myself would not pay rent one day beyond the point at which the police… are at hand to collect it via ‘argument per blunt instrument’.”^xviii
So who or what are the war machines that are captured in these three mechanisms of capture, tax, rent, and profit? D & G spend a significant amount of time discussing figures that would be dismissed in the annals of Marxism as ‘petty-bourgeois’: artisans, craftsmen, stone masons, metallurgists, merchants, etc. The existence of these figure does not, of course, remove from the picture of the exploitation of the peasant – and later proletarian – classes, but for D & G it is their nomadic and autonomous nature, “since their existence did not entirely depend on a surplus accumulated by a local State apparatus”, that makes them attractive for prefiguring new political ways of thinking and acting that escape from and attack the state. Referencing the historical development of metallurgy, D & G emphasize the way that the state’s drive to monopolize economies and maintain the status quo of power linked the capture of these actors to the exploitation of the lower classes: “State overcoding keeps the metallurgists, both craft and mercantile, within strict bounds, under powerful bureaucratic control, with monopolistic foreign trade in the service of the ruling class, so that the peasants themselves benefit little from the State innovations.”^xix
A more contemporary example of these dynamics in action would be the way 1) tinkerers and hackers produced paradigm-shifting innovations in information-communication technology; 2) the subsequent capture of these innovations under the state’s enforcement of IP laws and their service to large, top-heavy multinational corporations; and 3) the way further innovations from these developments are obstructed. Thus we can suggest a direct continuity between the reflections on artisans, craftsmen and metallurgists in A Thousand Plateaus to the musings on piracy and hacking in “Postscript on the Societies of Control” alluded to earlier.
So what we ultimately have, stepping back looking over these various tracings, is a contested space, a space of conflict, on one side of which is the state, capitalism, and the multi-scaled ecology of power that runs through these formations. On the other: autonomous movement, dynamic exchange and circulation, creative ecologies driven by desire. The former makes the latter the raw materials for itself, makes desire, creativity, the impulse to flee and transgress traditional territories, borders, and limits (is to destabilize not the most fundamental desire there is?), something that upholds more imperceptible forms of domination by way its various mechanisms and apparatuses. The most egregious of these is the way in which these ecologies force so many would-be breaks to simply fold inwards, and return to supporting the systems they supposedly contest. Liberation from capitalism is often synonymous with the retreat to social democratic variants of the same, which is no break from capitalism, but the strengthening of it by calling on the full forces of the state to flex its power. When we leave the question of blood-and-soil identity and aesthetic accouterments to the side, how different can we honestly saw these basic mechanics of the social democratic state are from the fascist state? With this in mind, let us return to the notorious accelerationist passage in Anti-Oedipus, which hopefully by this point take on a new appearance:
[W]hich 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 further still, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. 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.
Is this not a vision of militant, leftist (or even post-leftist) articulation of how systems of exchange and circulation, operating on a global level, can undermine dominant ecologies of power, and that crude brutalism they inexorably tend towards – fascism? It is not a secret ode to neoliberal globalization, or the breakthrough of the capitalist world market; following their vision of the state and capitalism as forces bound up together as a common, modular, and reactive assemblage, ‘neoliberalization’ and all that comes with it (the slippering sloganeering of ‘privatization’, ‘deregulation’, ‘austerity’, ‘structural adjustment’, etc.) is nothing more than the next unfolding of the processes of adding and subtracting axioms. A positive left-wing anarchist accelerationism would have to position the horizon of their political activity beyond axiomatics, in a future space that breaks apart these ecologies. This is a future where desire operates at the “molecular” level, not at the level of some abstract collectivity.
It would be utterly incorrect to say that the entirety of D & G’s praxis is about some ‘free-market communism’, as it has been described by Eugene Holland.^xx It would be equally incorrect , however, to pretend that the relationship between markets and liberation does not matter in the great scheme of their work (as so many leftist commentators, be they academic or not, have done). Any market anarchist elements that are gleamed must be married to their wider gamut of concerns – futurity, globality, the unleashing of desires to their fullest extent, the dissolution of all externals and internal dynamics of power, on and on. As the late Mark Fisher described, the accelerationism of D & G was “about accelerating certain tendencies which capitalism itself has to keep at bay… when those tendencies are accelerated, we go beyond those standard forms of subjectivities, life, and work that capitalism depends upon.”^xxi

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iNick Land “Machinic Desire”. Nick Land, Robin Mackay, and Ray Brassier Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings, 1987-2007 Urbanomic, 2012, in pg. 326

iiGilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Penguin Classics, 2009, pgs. 239-240. The Nietzschean dimensions of this fragment, which is essential to truly grasping the implications of D & G’s discourse, is more than can be tackled in these pages. I refer the interested reader to Obsolete Capitalism Acceleration, Revolution, and Money in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus Rizosfera, 2016 https://www.academia.edu/29794467/Acceleration_Revolution_and_Money_in_Deleuze_and_Guattaris_Anti-OEdipus

iiiSaul Newman “War on the State: Stirner and Deleuze’s Anarchism” Anarchist Studies Issue 9, 2001https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/saul-newman-war-on-the-state-stirner-and-deleuze-s-anarchism

ivGilles Deleuze and Antonio Negri “Control and Becoming: Gilles Deleuze and Antonio Negri” Futur Anterieur Issue 1, Spring, 1990 http://www.uib.no/sites/w3.uib.no/files/attachments/6._deleuze-control_and_becoming.pdf

vGilles Deleuze “Postscript on the Societies of Control” October, Issue 59, 1992 https://cidadeinseguranca.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/deleuze_control.pdf

viFoucault’s mode of analysis and understanding of power is quite different from that of Marx, and in the end would lead away from anything resembling orthodox Marxism. This isn’t to say that Foucault didn’t take bits and pieces from Marx. In his famed study of the rise and diffusion of the “disciplinary society”, Foucault references Marx from time to time and suggests that the rise of capitalism, as diagnosed by Marx, was contingent on the ise of forms of regulating and regimenting people’s bodies in order to make them productive. “In fact, the two processes – the accumulation of men and the accumulation of capital – cannot be separated; it would not have been possible to solve the problem of accumulation of men without the growth of an apparatus of production capable of both sustaining them them and using them; conversely, the techniques that made the cumulative multiplicity of men useful accelerated the accumulation of capital.” Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison Vintage Books, 1995, pg. 221

viiJean-Francois Lyotard “Energumen Capitalism”, in Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader Urbanomic, 2014, pg. 183, 182

viiiKevin Carson Studies in Mutualist Political Economy 2004, pgs. 119 – 128

ixSee the correspondence between Marx and Vera Zasuluchi that occurred in 1881: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/zasulich/index.htm. A concern of this correspondence was the conversations between revolutionary Marxists in Russia about whether or not capitalism – and the sorts of large-scale modernizing processes that industrial capitalism brought with it – was necessary for the establishing communism.

xDeleuze and Guattari Anti-Oedipus, pgs. 34-35

xiMichel Foucault Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the College de France, 1970-1971, and Oedipdal Knowledge Picador, 2014, pg. 142

xiiDeleuze and Guattari Anti-Oedipus, pg. 197. D & G’s treatment of debt itself is fairly complicated, and beyond the scope of this article here. It’s worth saying, however, that as opposed to something arising from exchange and circulation, debt is characterized as an “inscription” made upon the individual by the dominant structures of power as a means of foreclosing the future. For a brief introduction to their theory of debt, see the two-part article at S.C. Hickman’s Social Ecologies blog: “Deleuze and Guattari: Theory of Debt” (https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2015/06/15/deleuze-guattari-theory-of-debt/) and “Deleuze and Guattari: Further Notes on Debt” (https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2015/06/16/deleuze-guattari-further-notes-on-debt/)

xiiiPaul Baran and Paul Sweezy Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order Monthly Review Press, 1966, pgs. 150-152

xivDeleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus, pg. 462

xvDeleuze and Guattari Anti-Oedipus, pg. 235

xviFor a full overview, see Lewis Mumford The Myth of the Machine Vol. 1: Technics and Human Development Harcout 1967; and The Pentagon of Power: The Myth of the Machine Vol. 2 Harcout, 1974. My essay “Orders of Technics: Considerations on Lewis Mumford” at my Deterritorial Investigations blog also summarizes Mumford’s theories, their connection to left-libertarian and market anarchist positions like that of Ralph Borsodi and Kevin Carson, and provides a mild critique: https://deterritorialinvestigations.wordpress.com/2016/12/04/orders-of-technics-considerations-on-lewis-mumford/

xviiDeleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus, pg; 429

xviiiEric Geislinger, Jane Talisman, and Robert Anton Wilson “Illuminating Discord: An Interview with Robert Anton Wilson” New Libertarian Notes September 5^th, 1976https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/various-authors-illuminating-discord-an-interview-with-robert-anton-wilson

xixDeleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus, pg. 450

xxSee Eugene W. Holland Nomad Citizenship: Free Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Under the influence of Deleuze and Guattari and second-order systems theory (to which their theories can be heavily correlated), Holland describes how “combining the terms free market and communism in this way is to deploy selected features of the concept of communism to transform capitalist markets to render them truly free and, at the same time, to deploy select features of the concept of communism to transform communism and free it from a fatal entanglement with the State.” (pg. xvi)

xxiMark Fisher “Touchscreen Capture: How Capitalist Cyberspace Inhibits Accelerationism” International Conference on Radical Futures and Accelerationism, 2016 https://voicerepublic.com/talks/01-mark-fisher-touchscreen-capture-how-capitalist-cyberspace-inhibits-acceleration