Deleuze, Marx and the Politicisationof Philosophy

Simon Choat Queen Mary, University of London

Abstract

Against those who wish to marginalise Deleuze’s political relevance,this paper argues that his work – including and especially that producedbefore his collaborations with Guattari – is not only fundamentallypolitical but also profoundly engaged with Marx. The paper beginsby focusing on different possible strategies for contesting the claimthat Deleuze is apolitical, attempting to debunk this claim by brieflyconsidering Deleuze’s work with Guattari. The bulk of the paper isconcerned with a close examination of the appearance of Marx in bothNietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition, establishingthat the ‘pre-Guattari’ Deleuze was fully engaged with both politics andMarx and demonstrating that the concepts and arguments of the Marxistpolitics of the Deleuze–Guattari books can be traced back to Deleuze’sown work. It is argued that an analysis of Deleuze’s work on Marx issignificant not only for deepening our understanding of Marx, but alsofor understanding the possibilities for Deleuzian politics.

Keywords: Deleuze, Marx, Nietzsche, philosophy, politics, socialmachines, capitalism

In some ways Deleuze’s unfinished book on the Grandeur de Marx – thebook that shortly before his death he announced he was working on(Deleuze 1995a: 51) – leaves us with a frustrating gap in our knowledgeof 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 tothink of Grandeur de Marx not as some kind of missing key, but ratheras an unnecessary distraction: speculation about the content of the lostbook brings with it the risk of drawing attention away from the presenceof Marx in Deleuze’s published writings. Rather than using the book onMarx as a touchstone by which Deleuze’s Marxist credentials can besafely guaranteed, it may be better to focus on what we know Deleuze

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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 isthose jointly authored with Félix Guattari, particularly the two volumesof Capitalism and Schizophrenia, that are most obviously influenced byand comment most often upon Marx. The problem with relying on thejoint works is that it leaves open the suspicion that Deleuze was not aMarxist at all, and that the Marxism was all Guattari’s: a special caseof the claim that Deleuze was not a political thinker at all, the politicsbeing all Guattari’s.

Against this suspicion, I shall argue that the interest in Marx comesjust as much from Deleuze as from Guattari. Much fascinating workhas been done by commentators who have taken Deleuze and Guattari’sMarxism seriously, substantially advancing our knowledge of Marx aswell as of Deleuze and Guattari.1 But rather than looking at the bookswritten with Guattari, I want primarily to examine the references toMarx in Deleuze’s solo writings, focusing on Nietzsche and Philosophyand Difference and Repetition. Doing so can help demonstrate that evenbefore he began collaborating with Guattari, Deleuze’s work was bothdeeply politicised and engaged with Marx. Indeed, these two things arein some senses inseparable: Deleuze’s philosophy was deeply politicisedbecause it followed in the footsteps of Marx, the thinker who more thanany other politicised philosophy. If we want a political Deleuze or aDeleuzian politics then a good place to start would be by recognisingthe place of Marx in Deleuze’s work. This recognition must, however,be made against those who claim that Deleuze’s own work is notpolitical.

I. Deleuze and Marx

There have been numerous strategies for rejecting Deleuze as a politicalthinker: deferring the political moment until the Deleuze–Guattaribooks, dismissing his political formulations, explicitly denying thepolitical relevance of his work, or simply ignoring his political pro-nouncements in favour of something else.2 Perhaps the strongestallegation that Deleuze is not a political thinker comes from SlavojŽižek, who claims simply that there are no politics in Deleuze’s ownwork: ‘It is crucial to note that not a single one of Deleuze’s own textsis in any way directly political; Deleuze “in himself” is a highly elitistauthor, indifferent toward politics.’ Any direct political moments are,according to Žižek, only found in those books co-authored by Guattari,whom Žižek names as a ‘bad influence’ on Deleuze (Žižek 2004: 20).

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Žižek argues that Deleuze’s solo texts, while in themselves strictlyapolitical, contain the potential for the development of a differentmaterialist, even Marxist, politics. Žižek contrasts this potential politicsboth with the supposed idealism of the Deleuze–Guattari books andwith what Žižek sees as the dominant form of Deleuzian politics today,namely a Hardt and Negri-style politics of the Multitude. Hence forŽižek, while we can find both Marx and politics in the Deleuze–Guattaribooks, they are there only as a result of the (bad) influence of Guattari,soaked in a pernicious idealism and productive of an inane politicalstandpoint; whereas when we read Deleuze ‘in himself’ we are notdealing with a political thinker at all, let alone a Marxist. Against Žižek,however, it can be shown that Deleuze’s own work is both alreadypoliticised and engaged with Marx – and that this work anticipates theMarxist politics of the later collaborative work. There are a number ofstrategies that could be pursued in order to establish this point.3

One way to counter Žižek’s image of an apolitical Deleuze is simplyto think about the composition of the Deleuze–Guattari books, theirliterary construction. A few small clues help undermine the notionthat in this partnership Guattari was the Marxist revolutionary andDeleuze the dry, apolitical philosopher subject to bad influences. Deleuzehas presented himself as a ‘lightning rod’ for Guattari’s thoughts,systematising things by bringing together and ordering Guattari’sinventive but chaotic ideas (Deleuze 2006: 239). If we accept this image,then it can be seen that the analysis of capitalism in the Deleuze–Guattaribooks – rigorous, methodical and systematic – bears all the hallmarks ofDeleuze’s style: given how profoundly indebted to Marx this analysis is,this suggests that Deleuze as much as Guattari was deeply engaged withMarx. This intuition finds some support in the correspondence betweenthe two authors. During the writing of Anti-Oedipus Guattari wrote tohis friend: ‘I have the feeling of always wandering around alone, kind ofalone, irresponsibly, while you’re sweating over capitalism. How couldI possibly help you?’ (Guattari 2006: 137). These are hardly the wordsof someone who has imposed his Marxism on a passive or indifferentcollaborator. Rather, they suggest that we should take Deleuze at hisword when he claimed: ‘I think Félix Guattari and I have remainedMarxists, in our two different ways, perhaps, but both of us’ (Deleuze1995b: 171).

Elizabeth Garo has noted suggestively that it is somewhat peculiarfor a philosopher so committed to processes of becoming to claim to‘remain’ a Marxist: ‘For a thinker of becoming, remaining cannot bea very stimulating objective but, at most, a slightly disenchanted and

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necessarily sceptical stance’ (Garo 2008a: 609). But – aside from the factthat we should not put too much weight on the casual use of a particularword in what was an interview – ‘remaining’ does not necessarily implystatic adherence or loyalty. The very fact that it is possible to remainMarxist in ‘two different ways’ implies that this is not a questionof stubborn or sheepish attachment to a given dogma, but rather ofan active interpretation of the Marxist heritage: a dynamic process inwhich neither he who remains nor Marxism itself stay the same – lessa question of remaining Marxist than of becoming-Marxist. Evidencethat Deleuze’s claim to have remained a Marxist indicates a renewedcommitment to Marxism is also provided by the historical context: itwas a way of distancing himself from the violent reaction against Marxthat took place in France after 1968, when the nouveaux philosophescompeted with each other to renounce Marx and Marxism. To remaina Marxist when those around you are denouncing Marxism as thephilosophy of the gulag is a profoundly political act – as Garo herselfrecognises (Garo 2008b: 66; 2008a: 614).

There are other reasons, however, why picking over the details ofhow Capitalism and Schizophrenia was written is unsatisfactory as aresponse to Žižek’s charges. For a start, although it may tell us alittle about Deleuze and Guattari’s respective contributions, it risksmisrepresenting their work, implying a clear division of labour betweentwo isolated contributors. This was not the case at all; as Deleuzesaid of their relationship: ‘we do not work together, we work betweenthe two’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2002: 17). Hence, rather than focusingon the Deleuze–Guattari books, it may be more productive to turn toDeleuze’s own work, establishing a continuity between this early workand the later collaborative texts. For while the co-authored books maybe the most obviously political, the themes, concepts and argumentsof those books emerged out of Deleuze’s solo work.4 The rejectionof dialectical notions of negation and contradiction, the Nietzscheanaffirmation of active over reactive forces, the ontology of pure difference,the understanding of being in terms of multiplicity, the imperative tohighlight the virtual conditions of all actually existent beings – all theseideas came from Deleuze, so it is senseless to claim that the later,‘political’ work with Guattari is somehow a break with or regressionfrom the supposedly apolitical work that preceded it. Rather thanpointing to broad themes, however, it is possible instead to look forMarx in Deleuze’s early work: this search can show that the specificallyMarxist politics of the later books can also be traced back to Deleuze,who was writing on Marx long before he met Guattari, in addition

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to demonstrating that to ‘remain Marxist’ was not merely an act ofresistance when surrounded by apostates but also a creative use of Marx.Perhaps the two most prominent appearances by Marx in Deleuze’spre-Guattari work occur in Nietzsche and Philosophy and Differenceand Repetition.

II. Marx and Nietzsche

Nietzsche and Philosophy gives the lie to the claim that Deleuze is anapolitical thinker: this is a highly politicised Nietzsche, in at least twosenses. First, Deleuze’s theoretical reconstruction of Nietzsche presentshim as a political thinker worth reading: a novel claim at a time whenNietzsche was dismissed by many as at best an individualist forerunnerof existentialism unconcerned with broader social and political issuesand at worst a proto-fascist whose politics should be unequivocallyrejected. Second, Deleuze’s book itself had wider political consequences,playing a vital role in facilitating the introduction of Nietzsche intopolitical thought in postwar France. It is worth considering themanner in which Deleuze politicises Nietzsche before examining therole that Marx plays here. Deleuze argues that, like Kant, Nietzscheoffers a critical philosophy. But Nietzsche goes much further thanKant. While the latter undertakes a critique of the forms and claimsof knowledge, truth and morality, he does not criticise knowledge,truth and morality themselves: they remain outside critique, acting astranscendent standards that are used to measure, judge and ultimatelydenounce life. Kant’s critique is thus fundamentally compromised andis effectively a form of nihilism, depreciating and denying that whichexists in the name of another, superior world. Nietzsche, in contrast,replaces the question of truth or falsity with the problem of forces andpower: no longer an attempt to establish the essence of truth in order tojudge life, philosophy now pursues an interpretation of the forces thatgive sense to things and an evaluation of the will to power that givesvalues to things (Deleuze 1983: 54). Rather than seeking to determinethe essential nature of a thing, ‘essence’ itself must be recognised asthe result of the forces and powers that take hold of a thing. WhatNietzsche seeks, according to Deleuze, is a ‘thought that would affirmlife instead of a knowledge that is opposed to life’ (Deleuze 1983: 101).This does not mean that we simply indulge in a celebration of everythingthat exists. Genealogy is at once interpretation and evaluation: forcescan be active or reactive and the will to power can be affirmative ornegative. As affirmation of life, thought must reject all ressentiment and

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take a genuinely critical stance that can explain and subvert reactionand negation. Philosophy’s role is therefore not to establish timelessprinciples but, in Nietzsche’s phrase, to be ‘untimely’: to remain vigilantin upsetting existing values and institutions.

Deleuze’s Nietzsche is political because he reveals that apparentlystable and immutable values and institutions are products of strugglebetween competing forces and powers, and in doing so he underminesthe established order and points to the possibility of a different world.This politicised philosophy is sharply contrasted by Deleuze with thepiety of Hegelian dialectics, which effectively acts as a functionary ofthe Church and the State by sanctioning the present order. Whereasdialectics can only recognise what is already established, Nietzsche seeksto create the new. It is in his discussions of the relation of Nietzscheto dialectics that Deleuze introduces Marx. Nietzsche and Marx areplaced in a provisional alliance with the claim that they both foundtheir ‘habitual targets’ in ‘the Hegelian movement, the different Hegelianfactions’ (Deleuze 1983: 8). As it stands, this claim does not necessarilyimply approval of Marx’s project by Deleuze: the claim is not that Marxtargets Hegel as well as the Hegelian factions, nor that Marx’s critique ofHegelianism is identical to or even compatible with Nietzsche’s critique.It does, however, suggest that it might be interesting to pursue therelation between Nietzsche and Marx – and this suspicion is rewardedby further examination of Nietzsche and Philosophy, as Marx makes anumber of cameo appearances. Deleuze clearly recognises that Marx’srelation to Hegel is more complicated than is Nietzsche’s. At one pointhe draws a parallel not between the attitude of Nietzsche and Marxtowards Hegelianism but between their attitudes towards Kant andHegel respectively: ‘Nietzsche stands critique on its feet, just as Marxdoes 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 Marxwas trying to stand dialectics on its feet Nietzsche rejected dialecticalthinking altogether. This comparison neatly captures Marx’s place inNietzsche and Philosophy: intriguing hints about possible connectionsare quickly complicated or undermined, leading to what can look likea dead end, yet with the possibility of further links never entirelyforeclosed. Marx is posed a series of challenging questions by Deleuze,either directly or implicitly. Is Marx trying to save the dialectic fromsliding into nihilism or does he join Nietzsche in defeating it? Is Marx,like Nietzsche, interested in inventing new possibilities of life, or is heengaged in a nihilist subordination of life to transcendent values, driven

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by the spirit of proletarian ressentiment and hoping to return to theworking class what is rightfully theirs? Is negation in Marx an activeself-destruction, or is he caught up with the concept of contradiction,unable to recognise more subtle, fluid forces? That these questions areleft largely unanswered in the Nietzsche book should not lead us toconclude that Deleuze has no answers, or that they are posed rhetoricallyas a way of confronting and condemning Marx. These questions do notsuggest 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 wasreluctant to endorse him fully then this reluctance did not come froman elite indifference towards politics but, on the contrary, from a fearthat Marx’s political position was not radical enough: that compared toNietzsche, 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 whichhe wrote. Given the somewhat dismissive attitude toward Nietzschein France in the immediate postwar period, Deleuze could come tohim relatively fresh. Marx, on the other hand, laboured under a jointburden: stifled by a sclerotic Stalinism within the PCF, and anaesthetisedthrough official sanction within the academy. In both realms, Marx wasalso eventually aligned with a Hegelian humanism. Within academiccircles, various factors led thinkers like Sartre and Goldmann to forgea humanist Marxism. (These factors included but were not limitedto: the lectures and writings by Kojève and Hyppolite; the interestsparked by the release of Marx’s early writings; and the translationinto French of Marxists like Lukács, Korsch and Marcuse.) This trendwas then mirrored in the PCF as its leading theorist Roger Garaudysought an alternative to Stalinism for the Kruschev era. Given all this,it would not have been surprising if, in his attempt to generate anew, post-humanist and non-Hegelian philosophy of difference, Deleuzehad rejected Marx completely. Deleuze’s contemporaries dealt withthe situation in different ways. Michel Foucault made a consciousand conspicuous effort to distance himself from Marx and Marxism(even while simultaneously continuing to draw upon Marx’s conceptualinnovations). Jacques Derrida was more or less silent on Marx untilSpecters of Marx was published in 1993, at a time when referenceto Marx could act as a useful codeword for resistance to a newlytriumphant neo-liberal hegemony. Jean-François Lyotard and JeanBaudrillard effectively abandoned Marxism altogether. For Deleuze tocontinue to speak favourably of Marx in such an environment is in itselfhighly significant.

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That the tentative attempts in Nietzsche and Philosophy to linkNietzsche and Marx are more than idle speculation is confirmed inan interview from 1968 in which Deleuze maintains that both Marxand Nietzsche offer ‘a radical and total critique of society’: not areactive, negative critique but one that is the prelude to an equallyradical moment of creation: ‘a great destruction of the known, forthe creation of the unknown’ (Deleuze 2004a: 136) – essentially whatDeleuze himself calls for. Nietzsche and Philosophy can tell us notsimply that Deleuze was engaged with Marx before he collaboratedwith Guattari, however, but also something about the kind of Marxthat Deleuze was interested in. Indirectly, we can make comparisonswith the manner in which he reads Nietzsche. Deleuze uses Nietzscherather than merely interpreting him, producing a specifically DeleuzianNietzsche in whom it is almost impossible to discern where Deleuzeends and Nietzsche begins. This is not a playful eclecticism in whichDeleuze chooses and combines elements of Nietzsche’s work more or lessat random, but a systematic reconstruction of Nietzsche’s philosophy.This approach mirrors Deleuze’s readings of other thinkers, and wemight anticipate that he will read Marx in a similar way: reconstructinga Marx who is recognisably Deleuzian but who is nonetheless drawnfrom the heart of Marx’s work. Clearly this Marx will be one separatedfrom the dialectical method: it cannot be a Marx for whom historicalchange is driven by society’s contradictions. Equally, a Deleuzian Marxmust avoid offering an idealist judgement of life using transcendentstandards, yet without on the other hand capitulating to a relativismthat uncritically accepts things as they are: he must instead undertake animmanent critique that challenges the established order.

This is the Marx that we find in Anti-Oedipus, where Deleuze andGuattari pursue the allusive connections between Marx and Nietzschethat are found in Nietzsche and Philosophy. Marx is arguably the keyinfluence upon Anti-Oedipus, though it is a Marx transformed by beingfiltered through numerous other thinkers, including Nietzsche. Perhapsthe most obvious example of this double reading of Marx with Nietzscheis found in the book’s adaptation of Marx’s universal history: this is nota Hegelianised, totalising history in which capitalism is the inevitableculmination of a necessary process of historical development, but rathera kind of Nietzschean genealogy of capital: ‘universal history is thehistory of contingencies, and not the history of necessity. Rupturesand 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’

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(Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 140). Yet rather than being an impositionupon Marx, or a simple hybridisation of Marx and Nietzsche, thisconceptualisation of universal history comes directly from Marx’swork itself, or at least a part of it. In the Grundrisse Marx arguesthat bourgeois society provides the key to understanding all previoussocieties. He uses a well-known analogy to make his point: ‘Humananatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape. The intimationsof 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 historicaldevelopment, this passage should be read as Deleuze and Guattariread it: as a rejection of teleology and recognition of the uncertaintyand irregularity of historical development. Human anatomy can helpus understand apes not because apes are destined to become humansbut because humans have developed from apes; likewise, bourgeoissocial relations can illuminate previous social forms not because theywere predestined but because bourgeois society has developed out ofsocial formations that have now vanished and yet whose traces arestill carried within capitalism. Bourgeois political economists were ableto formulate the category of labour in general – a category that couldthen be used to analyse previous social forms – because under capitalismlabour has in reality become generalised, as deskilled labourers separatedfrom the means of production (or deterritorialised, to used Deleuzeand Guattari’s language) move regularly from one type of work to thenext. This creation of a propertyless labour force was not the resultof a preconceived plan but of entirely contingent circumstances, as apeasantry that had been forced from its land for quite different andvaried reasons was then incorporated into a production process thatrequired 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 ruptureand contingency, not necessity.

Just as they modify Marx’s universal history, so do Deleuzeand Guattari modify his analysis of capitalism. Where Marx seeksto expose the contradictions upon which capitalism depends yetwhich will ultimately be its undoing, Deleuze and Guattari insteadanalyse capitalism in terms of its deterritorialising and reterritorialisingtendencies. In doing so they maintain Marx’s focus on the tensionswithin capitalism – between, for example, its subversion of all traditionalpolitical institutions and forms of authority and its simultaneous needfor such institutions and forms to enforce the established order – yet

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without understanding them in terms of contradictions that willultimately be superseded and resolved. If Deleuze does not understandcapitalism in terms of resolvable contradictions, then nor does he positan ‘outside’ to capitalism that could act as both a transcendent standardof judgement and a point of potential resistance (be it unalienatedlabour, pure use value, or an immediate transparency of social relationsunder communism). This does not mean, however, that he resorts toeither a celebration of or a resigned submission to capitalism. Justas Nietzsche and Philosophy calls for an affirmation of active forcesover reactive forces, so the central imperative of Anti-Oedipus is topush further the deterritorialisations of capital, against its efforts toreterritorialise. It has been suggested that this argument aligns Deleuzewith a Hayekian liberalism: if the state is that which reterritorialisesthe decoded flows of the market, then Deleuze’s call to deterritorialiseeffectively becomes a call for the deregulation of the market against therestrictions of the state.5 The reverse is true, however: it is preciselyDeleuze’s argument that distances him from Hayekian liberalism andmakes a mockery of attempts to portray Deleuze as ‘the ideologist oflate capitalism’ (to use Žižek’s phrase) (Žižek 2004: 183). FollowingMarx, for Deleuze and Guattari the reterritorialisations of the state arenot opposed to the deterritorialisations of the market, as a reactivelimit on a boundless natural energy: the state is a necessary modelof realisation for the axiomatic that capitalism requires. The call topush deterritorialisation further, far from being an exultation of themarket, is in fact what provides Deleuze’s analysis of capitalism witha critical perspective. It offers recognition that the deterritorialisingtendencies of capitalism offer the potential to lead somewhere differentand unexpected, and it demands that this deterritorialisation be pursuedagainst capitalism’s simultaneous tendency to reterritorialise in order tofurther and protect private accumulation. This position is inspired inpart by Nietzsche, echoing the distinction between active and reactiveforces in Nietzsche and Philosophy. But it is also a strictly Marxistposition: like Marx, Deleuze recognises both the possibilities and thedangers immanent within capitalism.

In Anti-Oedipus we thus have the Marx that was promised inNietzsche and Philosophy: a reconstructed, non-dialectical Marx whoproposes a radical, immanent critique of the present in the name ofsomething yet to come. This is not to say that the Marx of Anti-Oedipushad already been worked out by Deleuze in Nietzsche and Philosophyand needed only further elucidation or application. Rather, in the sameway that Deleuze’s collaborative work with Guattari develops concepts

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that had already been created by Deleuze alone, so too does that workdevelop Deleuze’s Marx. Something similar can be said of Deleuze’s firstgreat work of philosophy, Difference and Repetition.

III. Marx and Social Ideas

Like Nietzsche and Philosophy, Difference and Repetition is a funda-mentally political text. Nietzsche and Philosophy sought to championthe creation of new values over the recognition of established values:Difference and Repetition maintains this critical distinction, and takesas its central target the dogmatic image of thought, whose contours hadbeen sketched out in the Nietzsche book. The dogmatic image of thoughtoperates through recognition, and in so doing ‘ “rediscovers” the State,rediscovers “the Church” and rediscovers all the current values that itsubtly presented in the pure form of an eternally blessed unspecified eter-nal object’ (Deleuze 2004b: 172). It is politically conservative, even re-actionary, endorsing established values rather than promising new ones.Deleuze’s critique of representation and the dogmatic image of thoughtin Difference and Repetition thus has political consequences: it aims toexpose and undermine forms of thought that reinforce the status quo.But this is not a primarily epistemological or ontological critique thatalso happens to produce political effects: to a great extent it is motivatedin the first place by political considerations. In the concluding chapterof the book, Deleuze states abruptly that ‘if the truth be told, none ofthis would amount to much were it not for the moral presuppositionsand practical implications of such a distortion’ (Deleuze 2004b: 337).He is referring here specifically to the dialectic, in particular Hegel. ButHegelian dialectics is only the most pernicious form of orthodox think-ing; the warning can be extended to give it wider significance and coverthe distortions of the dogmatic image of thought in general: the critiqueof representation amounts to little if it does not combat the presupposi-tions and practical implications of those distortions. The presuppositionsare not merely moral but profoundly political: it is presupposed thatthe established values of Church and State, the values that maintain thepresent political order, must be protected. If there is any doubt about thepolitical significance of the ‘practical implications’ that Deleuze refers to,a few lines later he provides a pertinent example: it is the bourgeoisie thatuses the weapon of contradiction to defend itself, while the (proletarian)revolution proceeds by the power of affirmation (Deleuze 2004b: 337).Deleuze’s 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 differ-ence – is therefore profoundly political. Thus while it is acceptable – evennecessary – to question and challenge the political consequences ofDeleuze’s metaphysics (as Badiou [2000] does), it would be profoundlymisguided to argue that Deleuze is merely apolitical (as Žižek does).

Where does Marx fit in this time? Deleuze’s reference to the proletariatmay once again suggest an ambiguous attitude: employing Marxianphraseology while simultaneously implicitly rejecting Marx’s relianceon the concept of contradiction. Yet we have already seen that inDeleuze’s work rejection of apparently fundamental Marxian tenets(like the notion of societal contradictions) is perfectly compatiblewith continued use of Marx. The broad arguments of Difference andRepetition can be seen to reflect the Deleuzian analysis of capitalismthat has already been outlined: capitalism both generates and curbsdifference, at once subverting what Deleuze calls ‘the qualitative orderof resemblances’ (destroying all traditional representational codes) andreinforcing 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 morereferences to Marx in Difference and Repetition than in Nietzscheand Philosophy, Marx’s presence is stronger in the second book:rather than allusive suggestions and unanswered questions there isa concrete use of Marx. His main appearance comes in the fourthchapter on ‘Ideas and the Synthesis of Difference’. Deleuze posits that,following Marx, we can say that there are social Ideas. What thismeans is that we can think of society as a structure or multiplicity:a system of differential elements with no prior identity, determinedby reciprocal relations and incarnated in actual relationships. In thecase of capitalist society, and following Marx, we can say that virtualrelations of production are incarnated in actual relationships betweenwage-labourers and capitalists. These relations – which are here classrelations – are not characterised by some pre-existing identity but arereciprocally determined. In this way, it is possible to claim that theeconomic conditions of a society determine all other aspects of thatsociety – not because actual economic relationships are the essence ofsociety considered as a totality, but because those actual relationships,and all social relationships, are the incarnation of economic relationsas differential virtualities that may be actualised in different ways.So we have something like the priority of the economic as found inMarx, without the economic essentialism as found in certain forms ofMarxism.

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Deleuze acknowledges that this reworking of Marx is not entirelyoriginal: Althusser and his collaborators had already read Marx insimilar terms, and Deleuze quotes Althusser approvingly throughoutDifference and Repetition. For Althusser, Marx’s great theoreticalcontribution was to rethink the concepts of structure and structuralcausality (Althusser and Balibar 1970: 186): the Marxist conceptionof society is not a Whole in which the elements are expressions of aninner essence, but a complex and differentially articulated structure inwhich the elements are reciprocally determined. Deleuze’s rereading ofMarx thus looks very much like that of Althusser – yet Deleuze goes astep further. Althusser introduces the concept of ‘overdetermination’ inorder to combat Hegelian Marxisms: instead of reducing the complexityof a society to a simple, central contradiction (as Althusser claims Hegelhas done), overdetermination allows us to think society precisely as astructure in which differential elements are codetermined. But as Deleuzepoints out: ‘It is still the case that for Althusser it is contradictionwhich is overdetermined and differential, and the totality . . . remainslegitimately 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 toMarx [Althusser 1972: 174]). In addition, and relatedly, the Deleuzianlanguage of virtuality allows us to avoid the risk of reintroducing asimple determinism such as comes with the Althusserian ‘determinationin the last instance by the economy’: the movement from the virtual tothe actual is creative and always leaves other potentials unactualised. SoDeleuze’s critique of certain forms of Marxism is thus also in part anescape from Althusserianism. Of course Althusser himself later soughtto break away from Althusserianism: in particular, the turn towards‘aleatory materialism’ in the 1980s can be characterised as an attempt tooffer a more open philosophy that is less beholden to dialectical thinkingand provides greater sensitivity to the contingent singularity of events.Yet this move by Althusser comes long after Deleuze’s radical readingof Marx in Difference and Repetition. Indeed, while there were clearlynumerous factors – both theoretical and political – that led Althusser toreformulate his philosophical approach, it is not fanciful to speculatethat in doing so he may have been influenced by Deleuze: certainly hecites Deleuze positively in his later work (Althusser 2006: 189).

We have seen that Deleuze’s Nietzschean Marx resurfaces in Anti-Oedipus; similarly, the presentation in Difference and Repetition of theMarxist 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 abstractmachines that can be actualised in a variety of social assemblages.Deleuze and Guattari refer to ‘machinic assemblages’: concrete assem-blages effectuate or actualise abstract machines and ‘[a]bstract machinesoperate within concrete assemblages’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988:510). There remains a common purpose, however, behind the twoterminologies of social Ideas and social machines: namely, to theorisesocial forms without reference to any kind of organic totality or anytranscendent imposition of unity. In one sense Deleuze and Guattarido this in conscious opposition to Marx: ‘We define social formationsby machinic processes and not by modes of production (these on thecontrary depend on the processes)’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 435).But this reflects a transformation rather than a rejection of Marx. Theconcept of a social machine enables Deleuze and Guattari to rethinkMarx’s concept of a mode of production in various ways. A machine ismade up of fluid connections: it selects, connects and combines differentelements, interrupting and arranging flows – flows of people, of wealth,beliefs, desire, and so on. The Deleuzian ‘machine’ is therefore moredynamic than either simply the Marxian ‘mode of production’ or theAlthusserian ‘structure’: a machine is a process rather than a staticcombination of determined elements. The terminology of machines alsoallows Deleuze and Guattari to overcome certain traditional binaries.It identifies different elements and levels of analysis without dependingon a simplistic base–superstructure model whereby one needs to divebeneath the surface to find the hidden, determining instance, the inneressence that drives the whole. As Jean-Jacques Lecercle has said of theconcept of assemblage (as actualised machine): ‘It makes it possibleto go beyond the separation between material infrastructure and idealsuperstructure, by demonstrating the imbrication of the material and theideal’ (Lecercle 2006: 200). Deleuze himself claims: ‘There is no base orsuperstructure in an assemblage’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2002: 71). Relatedto this deconstruction of the relation between a supposedly material baseand a supposedly ideal superstructure is the machine’s imbrication oflabour and desire: in a machine, there is no division between that whichis objective, political and real and that which is subjective, libidinal andfantastic or ideological. This is, however, not a repudiation of Marx’sconcept of the mode of production but rather a development of it: anattempt to push Marx in an even more materialist direction.

Some commentators have argued that Deleuze and Guattari’s theoryof 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 commentatorsupon Deleuze – better, in fact, simply to call him Deleuzian than acommentator upon Deleuze, precisely because the value of his work liesin the fact that he does not merely comment on Deleuze but attempts toreconstruct Deleuze’s philosophy, not unlike the way in which Deleuzehimself approaches other thinkers. But there is in DeLanda’s work acurious blind spot when it comes to Marx, or rather a strange hostility.Although DeLanda’s best work is a Deleuzian study of the philosophyof science (DeLanda 2002), he cannot be counted among those whoobliterate Deleuze’s politics by ignoring it, for elsewhere he has offeredlucid and thoughtful accounts of the implications of Deleuze’s workfor social and political thought. Marx, however, is eliminated fromthese accounts: else occasionally explicitly condemned as the kind ofanachronistic thinker Deleuze tried to escape from, but more oftensimply ignored. From Deleuze’s work on abstract machines and socialassemblages DeLanda develops what he calls ‘assemblage theory’, thevalue of which he claims is that it can account for entities withouthaving to suppose either that there is an organic totality whose partsare seamlessly fused together or that the whole is nothing more thanthe aggregate of its parts. In contrast to these flawed approaches,assemblage theory is ‘an approach in which every social entity isshown to emerge from the interactions among entities operating ata smaller scale’ (DeLanda 2006: 118). This does not mean simplyrecognising that societies are made up of relations between individuals.The problem with existing theories, DeLanda argues, is that they treatscale as absolute – so that, for instance, individual persons are considered‘micro’ while whole societies are ‘macro’. In contrast, assemblage theoryrelativises scale: both individuals and societies have both micro- andmacro-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 thevery distinctions of scale that assemblage theory reveals: a society or thecapitalist system are not wholes of which other entities are componentparts, but can themselves be component parts (if considered in a globalor even planetary context, for example).

In his discussions of assemblage theory DeLanda largely passes overMarx’s work in silence, pausing only to accuse Marx (amongst others)of a ‘macro-reductionism’ within which only the social structure reallyexists, with individuals relegated to the status of epiphenomenonaleffects of the social structure (DeLanda 2006: 5). If Deleuze and Guattaricontinue to talk of ‘capitalism’ then according to DeLanda this only

Deleuze, Marx and the Politicisation of Philosophy 23

attests to the fact that ‘the Marxist tradition was like their Oedipusthe little territory they did not dare to challenge’ (DeLanda 2008: 174).This is a problematic argument, in at least two (related) ways. First,Deleuze’s dependence on Marx is far more than a residual terminologicalaffiliation: as we have seen, in his own writings and those producedwith Guattari, a critical engagement with Marx is an important part ofthe development of Deleuze’s (and Guattari’s) analyses of social forms.Second, Deleuze’s work itself demonstrates that we do not need to readMarx as a theorist who prioritises the social structure at the expenseof its components: any society is an actualisation of virtual relations,and thus a dynamic solution to the problem of how to order relationsof production rather than a static structure that determines and fixesthe relations within it. A major problem with DeLanda’s presentationof ‘assemblage theory’ is his insistence on interpreting it in terms ofscale. What Deleuze and Guattari call ‘micropolitics’ – that is, the centralproject of A Thousand Plateaus – has nothing to do with scale.7 They areunequivocal on this point: ‘the molar and the molecular are distinguishednot by size, scale, or dimension but by the nature of the system ofreference envisioned’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 217). Micropoliticstherefore does not entail a rejection of a concept like ‘capitalist society’for being too generalised or too large, unable to account for scale; itentails a different kind of analysis of capitalism. Micropolitics meansanalysing different kinds of line: molar lines of rigid segmentarity,molecular lines of supple segmentarity, and lines of flight (that whichescapes and provides new connections and the possibility of change).A micropolitical analysis of capitalism is an analysis that recognisesthat capitalism is traversed by deterritorialising lines of flight – indeedthat these lines of flight are its very conditions of operation: inorder to function capitalism must necessarily release and encourageflows that may lead in unexpected directions which it cannot control(Deleuze 1997: 189). This insight is taken in large part from Marx’sanalysis of capitalism as a mode of production that must constantlyrevolutionise the instruments and relations of production – and thathence, in Deleuzian language, is always creating new flows and linesof flight. Far from being predicated upon a rejection of Marx, themicropolitics of social assemblages is deeply indebted to his work.

IV. Conclusions

Analysis of the place of Marx in Deleuze’s early works achievesa number of things. First and foremost, it validates and reinforces

24 Simon Choat

Deleuze’s self-description as a Marxist. This aids understanding of hislater work with Guattari. The point is not to attempt merely to reversethe orthodox view of the Deleuze–Guattari books, so that the Marxistpolitics therein becomes all Deleuze’s, to the neglect of Guattari’scontribution. Rather, by recognising that both Deleuze and Guattariwere Marxists when they came to work with each other, we are betterable to trace the lineage of their arguments and concepts: it is not onlywith reference to Deleuze’s broader conceptual innovations that we cansketch a line between his early and his later, collaborative work, butalso with reference to his specific use of Marx. In addition to throwingnew light on the joint works, recognition of Deleuze’s Marxism altersour understanding of his solo work, bringing out passages or insightsthat have been ignored. The image of Deleuze that arises from bothNietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition is not at allthat of an apolitical elitist yet to show an interest in Marx, but of apolitically committed thinker involved in contemporary debates withinMarxism and making the first steps towards a reformulation of Marx’sideas, unafraid to deal with him even though he was still associatedwith trends that Deleuze must have found repellent and that many ofDeleuze’s contemporaries had abandoned Marx altogether.

There has in recent years been an effort by some commentatorsto align Deleuze with a liberal-democratic, even Rawlsian, politics.8

This effort is not in itself illegitimate, and may even yield significantinsights. Nor is it wholly incompatible with recognition of the importantplace of Marx in Deleuze’s work. But there is a risk that if Deleuzeis aligned with the liberal tradition in this way – even if as a criticalinterlocutor – then what makes his work interesting in the first placemay be smoothed away, to the extent even that Deleuze may effectivelybecome depoliticised: assimilated into mainstream thought and practiceand into an academic exercise in the history of thought, his workloses his political impact. It might be argued that, on the contrary, toalign Deleuze too closely with Marx is to depoliticise him. There has,after all, been a long-standing accusation made against Marx that he isdepoliticising, in that he supposedly effects an economistic reduction oreffacement of the political. But Deleuze and Guattari know that thisis not true: what they show throughout both volumes of Capitalismand Schizophrenia is that far from reducing the political to theeconomic, Marx demonstrates that it is capitalism itself that performsthis reduction, as it functions directly through an axiomatic, without theneed for political codes or beliefs. Simultaneously, they show that Marxpoliticises realms that had been previously thought to be apolitical: it

Deleuze, Marx and the Politicisation of Philosophy 25

is true that capitalism effaces politics by making political institutions,values, beliefs, practices, etc., secondary or even unnecessary – but thiseffacement of politics is itself a political manoeuvre: it is generated byeconomic forces that prior to Marx (in the work of the classical politicaleconomists) had been considered an apolitical realm of natural andspontaneous order, but which Marx reveals to be pervaded by politicalrelations of power and domination. When they claim that it is Marx’sanalysis of the encounter between the deterritorialised worker anddecoded money that lies at ‘the heart of Capital’ (Deleuze and Guattari1977: 225), Deleuze and Guattari indicate the importance of Marx’ssection on primitive accumulation. They do this not simply becausethis section counters determinist readings of Marx and demonstrates hisrecognition of capitalism’s contingent origins, but also because it is hereabove all that Marx politicises economics. For Marx as for Deleuze andGuattari, the recognition that the capitalist economy depoliticises mustbe based upon the simultaneous recognition that the capitalist economyis highly politicised.

Furthermore, all this rests upon a politicisation of philosophy. Marxdirects philosophy’s attention to the political struggles and forces thatexist as an integral part of apparently apolitical domains, including thatof philosophy itself: philosophy’s function after Marx is no longer toseparate the true from the false but to analyse, interrogate and changethe material conditions of its own emergence, challenging the existingorder in the name of a new world. Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophyand Difference and Repetition, far from being apolitical, are in a similarway politically motivated by the need to challenge established values andcreate a new order. To recognise this is to begin to recognise Deleuze’sdebt to Marx. A political Deleuze and a politicised Deleuzian philosophyare both possible and welcome – but we will get nowhere until weacknowledge the profundity and persistence of Deleuze’s Marxism.

Notes1. 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 whereasthe former rejects the political implications of Deleuze’s work, the latter deniesthat Deleuze’s work has any real political relevance at all.

3. It is not my aim to offer a thorough critique of all of Žižek’s argumentsconcerning Deleuze (which are more interesting and sophisticated than manyDeleuzians have acknowledged): I am interested only in Žižek’s claim thatDeleuze 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 ‘first page of Deleuze’s mostimportant philosophical work, Difference and Repetition, lays the groundworkfor his analysis of capitalism’ (Holland 2009: 147).

7. For further criticism of this sort, see the review of DeLanda’s A New Philosophyof Society by Read (2008).

8. Patton is perhaps the leading figure here; see Patton (2005, 2007, 2008). See alsoTampio (2009) and the review of Patton’s Deleuze and the Political by Smith(2003).

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DOI: 10.3366/E1750224109000695