Deleuze and Guattari and Minor Marxism

Abstract

‘Felix Guattari and I have remained Marxists, in our two different ways, perhaps, but both of us. You see, we think any political philosophy must turn on the analysis of capitalism and the ways it has developed’, Gilles Deleuze said in 1990 in conversation with Toni Negri (Deleuze, 1995, p. 171). It is fairly clear in Anti-Oedipus what happens to Freud at the hands of Deleuze and Guattari: psychoanalysis gets transformed into a ‘revolutionary materialist psychiatry’ called schizoanalysis. It is not so clear, even taking the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia together, what happens to Marx — especially in light of the fact that a Marxist concept central to the first volume, the mode of production, gets demoted (though not eliminated) in the second volume: in A Thousand Plateaus they ‘define social formations by machinic processes and not by modes of production’; it is modes of production, they go on to say, that ‘on the contrary depend on the processes’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 435). And so ‘[i]t is not the State that presupposes a mode of production; quite the opposite, it is the State that makes productions a “mode”’ (1987, p. 429). Marx nonetheless remains crucial to the political philosophy that develops across the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia and in their last collaboration, What Is Philosophy? — and, in effect, what happens is that orthodox or dialectical Marxism gets transformed into what I call a ‘minor marxism’ (see Holland, 2011).