Appreciating capital - criticising capitalism
From Capitalism and Schizophrenia
An attempt at levelling the grounds in the discussion of capitalism.
Capital deserves our admiration. It has a tremendous deterritorializing capacity, it does not in-itself obey any regime of signs, and it is a perfect milieu for a rhizome, as it can relate practically anything to anything other. It is all in the schizophrenic nature of capital.
This is why we first of all must refrain from the understanding of pro-capitalism as siding with capital against labour, and anti-capitalism as taking labours side against capital. A deleuzoguattarian critique against capitalism - as well as a classic marxist - recognizes that there is a conflict between capital and labour and then analyses the origins and effects of that conflict.
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[edit] The origin of the capital-labour conflict
To put it very simply: Deleuze and Guattari points out that capitalism has a violent history, that capital and labour must have been separated from each other in the first place. In "Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie" Marx' argument against the political economy of for example Adam Smith and David Ricardo was precisely their lack of a historical understanding of capitalism, basically that they allow the fallacy of capital presupposing itself.
In other words: Capital in-itself contains that amazing deterritorializing capacity mentioned above; the problem is that there is no capital in-itself, it has to be constructed via a separation from labour and relies upon the constant reproduction of such a dichotomy. (For example: The historical record of production on the surface of capital, forming the socius of a capitalist society, creates the illusion of capital as the very cause of social production, to maintain this dichotomy.)
[edit] The effect of the capital-labour conflict
Moreover, we must remember that wherever there is de-territorialization there is also re-territorialization going on. In order to contain and accumulate the fluent-natured capital a variety of forceful processes of territorializing capture must be launched, forming large-scale strata. Thus the “liberation” of capital is not capitalistic at all, but the fencing in of capital once it has been violently separated from labour.
In other words: With capitalism we fear the repressive reaction against a liberated capital, not capital itself. (Fernand Braudel presents the history of capitalism as a history of increased hierarchization and creation of anti-markets, certainly not as that increased marketization that many would argue.)
--Marcus Nilsson 13:00, 31 January 2008 (CET)
[edit] The working of an axiomatic
The capitalist axiomatic is not part of the second articulation of the formation of socially productive assemblages. It is not a code or overcoding, but rather an abstract set of conditions from which (or on top of which) practically all relations between functional elements of social production are formed.
One such condition of a capitalist axiomatic is the separation of capital and labour, a condition that was fulfilled by a number of contingent historical events in the late 17th and early 18th centuries (well described by Marx in for example "Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie"), making out the starting point of the capitalist "era". Since then these separated flows of capital and labour has been maintained through a vide range of processes and regimes of signs (such as the construction of a modern subject, one that is constantly induced with the notion that desire is a fundamental lack that can be filled, i.e. through consumtion).
Another condition would be the "objective" goal to accumulate capital, which naturally drives the reactive forces of capture and reterritorialization against the liberation of capital.
A third condition has to do with the highly rhizomatic connectivity of capital: The quantification and exchangability introduced by the use of money.
Another important aspect of the capitalist axiomatic, as the outtake from A Thousand Plateaus below will show, is the treatment of private property as a right, rather than a privilege.
--Marcus Nilsson 10:17, 1 February 2008 (CET)
[edit] In deleuzoguattarian...
Capitalism forms when "the decoded flows overspill their conjunctions and attain a level of decoding that the State apparatuses are no longer able to reclaim: on the other hand, the flow of labour must no longer be determined as slavery or serfdom but must become naked and free labour; and on the other hand, wealth must no longer be determined as money dealing, merchant's or landed wealth, but must become pure homogeneous and independent capital. And doubtless, these two becomings at least (for other flows also converge) introduce many contingencies and many different factors on each of the lines. But it is their abstract conjunction in a single stroke that constitutes capitalism, providing a universal subject and an object in general for each other. Capitalism forms when the flow of unqualified wealth encounters the flow of unqualified labour and conjugates with it. This is what the preceeding conjunctions, which were still topical and qualitative, had always inhibited (the two principal inhibitors were the feudal organization of the countryside and the corporative organization of the towns). This amounts to saying that capitalism forms with a general axiomatic of decoded flows. 'Capital is a right, or, to be more precise, a relation of production that is manifested as a right, and as such is independent of the concrete form that it cloaks at each moment of its productive function.' Private property no longer expresses the bond of personal dependence but the independence of a Subject that now constitutes the sole bond. This makes for an important difference in the evolution of private property: private property in itself relates to rights, instead of law relating it to the land, things, or people ... A new threshold of deterritorialization. And when capital becomes an active right in this way, the entire historical figure of the law changes. The law ceases to be the overcoding of customs, as it was in the archaic empire; it is no longer a set of topics, as it was in the evolved States, the autonomous cities, and the feudal systems;; it increasingly assumes the direct form and immediate characteristics of an axiomatic, as evidenced in our civil 'code.' ... there is no longer need for a state." (ATPC 500)
That is: Capitalism (and private property as a right) contingently occured at the back end of feudalism (and private property as a privilege) as the conjugation of flows of decoded labor and wealth, forming an axiomatic that preceeds and predetermines social production, rather than overcodes it as the law of State apparatuses.
--Marcus Nilsson 11:39, 1 February 2008 (CET)
