Capitalism
From Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Industrial capitalism usually refers to an economic system which emerged in the mid 18th century in Europe. There are many modern theories of how capitalism works as a logic, and the first ones out to formulate political economy in the modern episteme were Ricardo, Smith and eventually Marx. Central to these theorists were the notion of labour, and they were all centered around labour theory of value
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[edit] Capitalism according to Deleuze & Guattari
The notion of "capitalism" is a contested one among readers of Deleuze. The opening chapter in a Thousand Plateaus, "Rhizome", contains the following passage:
“There is no universal capitalism, there is no capitalism in itself; capitalism is at the crossroads of all kinds of formations, it is neocapitalism by nature. It invents its eastern face and western face, and reshapes them both - all for the worst” (ATP: 22)
Thus, capitalism is not a master narrative, but appears in local formations. However, to narrow down this concept even more we have to shift to page 501 and forward on, where the axiomatic of capitalism is elaborated.
"Capitalism, on the other hand, is not at all territorial, even in its beginnings: its power of deterritorialization consists in taking as its object, not the earth, but "materialized labour", the commodity." (ATP: 501)
At first glimpse, this sounds very much like a Marxian way of thinking. Capitalism precedes a State-apparatus because of its deterritorrializing capabilities. And just like Marx, Smith and Ricardo, labour is in the motor of capitalism. Also, capitalism is everywhere:
"Even the so-called socialist States are isomorphic, to the extent that there is only one world market, the capitalist one. (ATP: 503)
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[edit] The capitalist axiomatic
Capitalism can be "understood as a mechanism or set of mechanisms for the maintenance of a relatively stable assemblage of the social factors required to sustain the extraction of flow surplus" (Paul Patton, "Deleuze and the political", Routledge, 2000: 95). This set of mechanisms is an axiomatic (or an axiomatic system), which should not be confused with any kind of code, overcoding, or recoding: "the axiomatic deals directly with purely functional elements and relations whose nature is not specified, and which are immediately realized in highly varied domains simultaneously; codes, on the other hand, are relative to those domains and express specific relations between specific elements that cannot be subsumed by a higher formal unity (overcoding) except by transcendence and in an indirect fashion" (ATPC 501).
The “functional elements” of a capitalist axiomatic is capital and labour, or rather the flows of capital and labour respectively. Capitalism, then, “forms when the flow of unqualified wealth [capital] encounters the flow of unqualified labour and conjugates with it” (ATPC 500).
(The industrial revolution – and with it: capitalism – was an effect, not just of advancements in technology, but of a more effective agriculture that along with several political actions, such as the process of Enclosure, suddenly left a large number of people without private property – the proletariat. (A more specific reference might be needed, but the general historical outline can be found in the Wikipedia entry on Industrial Revolution) These events basically created an unprecedented flow of unqualified labour (a purely functional element whose nature is not specified) streaming from the countryside to the thriving urban areas, where it met capital, unqualified and unspecified wealth.)
[edit] To Hardt and Negri
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[edit] DeLanda and the C-word
Manuel DeLanda, on the other hand, is refraining from even using the C-word, as it leads us into assuming things about the economy that are not compatible with his interpretation of Deleuze. First, in everyday use, capitalism tends to be associated with the market. Moreover, in recent years, there have been a number of scholars pointing to how - since the 1970s - we are living in a "new capitalism" of dismantled hierarchies. However, he argues history is better seen as a a process of hierarchisation (a construction of Braudelian "anti-markets"):
"Braudel himself prefers to keep the word 'capitalism' and change its meaning (so that it refers exclusively to nonmarket-competition, i.e., big business). However, such an entrenched meaning cannot be changed so easily. That is why I prefer to use a different term altogether [...] otherwise we will be confined, when thinkning about possible routes for social development, between two choices that are equally hierarchical: capitalism and socialism." (DeLanda, 1997, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, page 288-289.)
Secondly, DeLanda also argues that the notion of capitalism leads us to misinterpreting the origins of the economy. In short, the notion of capitalism implies that the hierarchies of economic power are of bourgeois origins, whereas DeLanda's point has always been that economic structures tend to be of a military origin.
"With regards to Fordism, the most important insight which goes beyond economics is due to people like Michel Foucault. The basic idea is that several of the key elements of mass production are not of bourgeois origin but of military origin. […] As Foucault says, discipline increases the powers of the body in economic terms of utility but decreases them in political terms of obedience. How are we to change this oppressive system if we are not even aware of its origins? […] As long as we call this system “Fordism” are we not concealing its real sources? Marxists at this point like to mention Adam Smith’s pin factory as example of a civilian use of discipline prior to rifle manufacturing, but for every example they use I can find an earlier military one […]" (DeLanda, Protevi & Thanem, 2005, 'Deleuzian interrogations', Tamara.)
He also criticises the totalising and essentialist claims about the "iron laws of capitalism/the value theory of labour", which are constantly harked back to within the Marxist tradition: "Despite the fact that meshwork-generating processes are active today in several parts of the globe, hierarchical structures enjoy a commanding, two- or three-hundred-year lead [...] But even if the future turns out to belong to the hierarchies, this will not occur because a law of "capitalism" somehow determined the outcome from above. [...] If command structures end up prevailing over self-organised ones, this itself will be a contingent historical fact in need of explanation in concrete historical terms." (DeLanda, 1997: 99)
Indeed, there are thinkers within the ANT-cum-Deluzian tradition who propose that "capitalism" is best seen as a discursive formation, invented and kept in place, by the Marxist tradition itself (possibly supported by other early political economists such as Smith and Ricardo):
"Isn't capitalism itself and the framing of the economy as capitalism, itself a product, to put it very crudely, of the whole history of critical political economy and anti-capitalist political movements and the various technical devices they have deployed to make this thing capitalism apparent?" (Barry & Slater, 2005, 'Technology, politics and the market: an interview with Michel Callon', i Barry & Slater (eds.) The Technological Economy. London: Routledge)
Thus, the fact that it has become so popular to construe the economy as capitalism - the fact that the 'Marx meme' is multiplying itself through human hosts - is in itself key to understanding why capitalist strata are kept in place. (Needless to say, this expressive component is but one of several components maintaining the consistency of such strata.)
In this way, accounts of capitalism - based on Platonic, transcendent essences, be they based on Marx or neoclassical economics - can serve to "molarise" the economy along "capitalist" lines. Brian Massumi writes:
"A molar individual is the dominated term in a relation of power (a content for an overpowering form of expression [eg. "the Marx meme"]). A contained population is called a "subjected group". The unity of a molarized individual is transcendent (exists only from the point of view of the forms of expression to which the individual is subjected, and on their level) ... A molarized individual is a "person" to the extent that a category (cultural image of unity [eg. "Worker" or "Capitalist"]) has been imposed on it, and insofar as its subsequent actions are made to conform to those prescribed by its assigned category." (Massumi, A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, page 55)
The Marx meme is essential to the stabilising of capitalism, as molar structures are never stable: "Molarity presents itself as stasis, but … is in reality a productive process: a making-the-same."(106) Thus, "No body can really be molar. Bodies are made molar, with varying degrees of success." (64) Hence, "total" capitalism will never exist - though it may be maintained, on average, through the able help of the Marx meme: ""A structure is at best metastable: stable on the whole (statistically) or as a whole (from the regularized view of its molarity). Stability is not fixity. It is varition within limits... A structure is defined by what escapes it." (57)
[edit] Discussions
Appreciating capital - criticising capitalism by Marcus Nilsson
