Volume one of Capital through Anti-Oedipus
march 28 2025
I don’t like what I’ve wrote on Deleuze and Guattari and I will feel the same for this article within a week, too. But I have no pedagogical responsibility to be right all the time, so I’m compelled to keep writing and to build on my knowledge rather than efface all my mistakes from the surface of the earth.
But I want to address a misunderstanding in my original review that is torturing me a little bit. The rhetorical question I began with implies that D&G idealize the schizophrenic. Really, resistance to symbolization does not benefit the schizophrenic and D&G recognize the suffering that results from it. I would rather have used the word “necessary”; Lacan’s seminar on the psychoses implicitly asks if Oedipal symbolization is necessary.
Anyway, after completing the first volume of capital (the Penguin Classics Ben Fowkes translation which my page numbers will be referring to) I thought a good exercise would be to interpret certain passages through what I’ve read in Anti-Oedipus.
Political Economy and Psychoanalysis
“Although Ure’s work appeared in 1835, at a time when the factory system was still comparatively little developed, it remains the classical expression of the spirit of the factory, not only because of its undisguised cynicism, but also because of the naivete with which it blurts out the thoughtless contradictions of the capitalist brain.” (564)
“The solitary man cannot operate upon nature without calling his own muscles into play under the control of his own brain. Just as head and hand belong together in the system of nature, so in the labour process mental and physical labour are united. Later on they become separate; and this separation develops into a hostile antagonism. The product is transformed from the direct product of the original producer into a social product. The joint product of a collective labourer, i.e. a combination of workers, each of whom stands at a different distance from the actual manipulation of the object of labour.” (643)
Marx’s critique of political economy often positions the economist as falling for mere appearances. It is a significant point in Capital that capitalism has developed unconsciously, that economists can only derive their theories retrospectively, and that even the capitalist themself is not entirely aware of their own process for accumulating capital. It was only natural that Marxism would eventually call for the Frankfurt school to combine Marx with Freud. Wilhelm Reich in particular made strides for understanding unconscious desire when he analyzed what made so many Germans readily accept their subordination to fascism. However, D&G break with Reich when he concludes that it’s a trick of ideology; D&G are not satisfied to say that the will of desire is so weak to fall for imaginary illusions. I think the second quote here describes the concept in Anti-Oedipus of desire as group desire and its investment in social products. Even if a group preconsciously believes in revolution, it is not always beyond unconscious libidinal investment that tends toward its own repression.
Production / Antiproduction
“Although this absence of regularity in the expenditure of labour-power is a natural and crudely spontaneous reaction against the tedium of monotonous drudgery, it also originates, and to a much greater degree, from the anarchy in production itself, an anarchy that in its turn presupposes unbridled exploitation of labour-power by the capitalist.” (608)
“Modern industry never views or treats the existing form of a production process as the definitive one. Its technical basis is therefore revolutionary, whereas all earlier modes of production were essentially conservative.” (617)
“There are two circumstances which finally turn the scale: first, the constantly recurring experience that as soon as capital is subjected to state control, even at a handful of points on the periphery of society, it seeks compensation all the more unrestrainedly at all other points; and second, the cry of the capitalists for equality in the conditions of competition, i.e. for equality of restraint on the exploitation of labour.” (621)
I think Marx speaks of the same ontological production as D&G in the first quote. The anarchy of production tends towards the technological revolutions that have dispensed with all of its past modes; however, capitalism has made revolution immanent to itself. When Marx describes these past modes as “conservative,” it evokes the concept of antiproduction in Anti-Oedipus. The despotic state was an apparatus of antiproduction that slowed technical revolutions for its own preservation. But the capitalist state does not escape the throes of production, and neither does the schizophrenic. However, what separates capitalist and schizophrenic production is capital’s recoding of the socius, bringing me to the next point…
Deterritorialization / Reterritorialization
“Hence that remarkable phenomenon in the history of modern industry, that machinery sweeps away every moral and natural restriction on the length of the working day. Hence too the economic paradox that the most powerful instrument for reducing labour-time suffers a dialectical inversion and becomes the most unfailing means for turning the whole lifetime of the worker and his family into labour-time at capital’s disposal for its own valorization.” (532)
“This process of growth takes place only within the ebbs and flows of the industrial cycle.” (583)
“It is also obvious that the fact that the collective working group is composed of individuals of both sexes and all ages must under the appropriate conditions turn into a source of humane development, although in its spontaneously developed, brutal, capitalist form, the system works in the opposite direction, and becomes a pestiferous source of corruption and slavery, since here the worker exists for the process of production, and not the process of production for the worker.” (621)
D&G’s territorializations were really helpful for conceptualizing Marx’s contradictions of capitalism. It captures the conflicted feeling towards technological progress against the resulting loss for workers that I’m sure most people have experienced (e.g. AI). Production through human history tends towards liberating humans from the time they must spend labouring, and yet, technology only seems to antagonize workers today; capitalism simultaneously decodes the flows of desire and then recodes them into its repressive conditions for production. I really liked Marx describing this process as the “ebbs and flows” of capitalism, and I think D&G did as well.
Master-slave
“Even the lightening of the labour becomes an instrument of torture, since the machine does not free the worker from the work, but rather deprives the work itself of all content … it is not the worker who employs the conditions of his work, but rather the reverse, the conditions of work employ the worker.” (548)
“The capitalist who produces surplus-value … is by no means its ultimate proprietor. He has to share it afterwards with capitalists who fulfill other functions in social production taken as a whole, with the owner of the land, and with yet other people … [surplus-value’s] fragments fall to various categories of person, and take on various mutually independent forms, such as profit, interest, gains made through trade, ground rent, etc.” (710)
“in so far as [the capitalist] is capital personified, his motivating force is not the acquisition and enjoyment of use values, but the acquisition and augmentation of exchange-values … what appears in the miser as the mania of an individual is in the capitalist the effect of a social mechanism in which he is merely a cog.” (739)
Marx’s Hegelian persuasions undoubtedly implicate the master-slave dialectic. While Hegel resolved that the very action of working for the slave sublimates the master’s enjoyment of the product, Marx argued that, in the case of capitalism, the work is lost of this essential content. Much less does the capitalist enjoy the worker’s product, as they ascetically throw their surplus away into the perpetual cycle of capital. What might be D&G’s most radical point is that capitalism is not truly made up of the two classes of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie but that it contains entirely slaves. The master signifier that maintained the antiproduction of the monarch has given away to the accelerating progression of the technological means of production; the master is lost to its deterritorialization and the slave is retained in its reterritorialization.
Mythology
“However terrible and disgusting the dissolution of the old family ties within the capitalist system may appear, large-scale industry … does nevertheless create a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of relations between the sexes. It is of course just as absurd to regard the Christian-Germanic form of the family as absolute and final as it would have been in the case of the Ancient Roman, the ancient Greek or the Oriental forms, which, moreover form a series in historical development.” (621)
“This primitive accumulation plays approximately the same role in political economy as original sin does in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race … Long, long ago there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and above all frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living … thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort finally had nothing to sell except their own skins.” (873)
“The rise of the industrial capitalists appears as the fruit of a victorious struggle both against feudal power and its disgusting prerogatives … The knights of industry, however, only succeeded in supplanting the knights of the sword by making use of events in which they had played no part whatsoever.” (875)
I think it's significant that volume one of Capital ends with primitive capital — the historical beginning of the accumulation of capital. Marx also sarcastically reiterates the origin myths of capital made up by other political economists, rejecting essentialist principles of cause and effect. This is similar to D&G’s abstention from speaking metaphorically and their rejection of the trend of representation in psychoanalysis. The centering of the Oedipus complex had universalized the image of the family while disregarding the more pervasive movements of desiring production. I also believe it was intentional of D&G to frame schizoanalysis as an opposition of psychoanalysis when it is really an evolution of it, just as Marx speaks as if he opposes the whole of political economy only for him to became one of its greatest contributors.
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About a year ago I first discovered Lacan and it’s made me the worse person I am today. But the philosophy I have read has definitely given me an edge over the literary theory I have been studying in my program. Marx, Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari excite me to study literature; to me, English is a concrete application of their thinking that I prefer over writing purely philosophically. I honestly even enjoy the analysis more than the actual assigned reading a lot of the time. My goal for this year is to get through Kant and to read Adorno, but we’ll see about that. For now, I’m rereading Anti-Oedipus while I wait for my order of Mille Plateaux to arrive, and I’m hoping this article will serve as a legend for me of their major concepts.