Notes

Notes
1 Introduction: the grandeur of Marx

1. At one of the points where Deleuze discusses the nature of a philosophical practice of 'resonance' he explicitly mentions Marx. Here Deleuze writes (1994b: xxi), albeit in a rather enigmatic fashion, that 'a commentary should act as a veritable double and bear maximal modification appropriate to a double. (One imagines a philosophically bearded Hegel, a philosophically clean-shaven Marx, in the same way as a moustached Mona Lisa.)' Elaborating a little, he continues 'the most exact, the most strict repetition has as its correlate the maximum difference', as it seeks 'the pure repetition of the former text and the present text in one another (xxii).
2. 'Something that has not been adequately discussed about Marx's Capital is the extent to which he is fascinated by capitalist mechanisms, precisely because the system is demented, yet works very well at the same time' (Deleuze, in Guattari 1995a: 54).
3. See Deleuze (1998a) for discussion of the function of the 'empty square' in structuralism, as the forever vacated space of fixed meaning in any system.
4. Deleuze (1995a: 51) himself says that Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus are completely traversed by Marx and Marxism.
5. This point about the tension between the tendency to exponential production and the need to realize surplus value in a given arrangement is made by Marx (1974a: esp. 249"”50) in Capital III in his discussion of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall "” a text that Deleuze (n.d.b: n.p.) considers to be of central importance: 'One must reread three texts of Marx: in book I: the production of surplus value, the chapter on the tendential fall in the last book, and finally, in the Grundrisse, the chapter on automation.'
6. Holland (1998) discerns a movement from a politics of schizophrenia (or deterritorialization) in Anti-Oedipus to a more sober analysis of the intricacies of capitalist control in A Thousand Plateaus and other later works, where 'the highspeed control feature of advanced capitalism . . . casts doubt on the viability of schizophrenia as a potentially revolutionary line of flight' (72). Holland's essay is concerned to locate this shift textually, as part of an answer to the question 'What happened "in-between" . . . the first and the second volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia?' (65). There is no doubt that A Thousand Plateaus is a richer analysis of the intricacies of contemporary capitalist control and is more cautious in its assessments of schizophrenic processes (containing fewer of the injunctions to absolute deterritorialization that close Anti-Oedipus). I think it is fair to say, however, that Holland's emphasis on capital and control is as much a product of contemporary concerns and fears as it is of Deleuze and Guattari's work itself.
7. As Deleuze (1995b: 6) wrote of his concentration on Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza, and Nietzsche against the conventional 'history of philosophy', what appealed to him was 'their critique of negativity, their cultivation of joy'.
8. Stressing the importance of this position, Dauvé responds to Amadeo Bordiga's argument that the whole of Marx's work is an elaboration of communism by suggesting that 'This is undoubtedly the most profound comment made about Marx' (in Dauvé and Martin 1997: 83).
9. These points are made, respectively, in Marx (1973a: 488), Marx (1975b: 278-9), Marx and Engels (1974: 54-5), and Deleuze and Guattari (ACE: 294).
10. Whilst there is difference and variation in themes and styles between Deleuze's and Guattari's works, and between each and their collective work, this book draws on their individual and collective works as part of a single oeuvre, which, for convenience, I often signify with the name 'Deleuze' (as in the book title). Guattari (1998: 192"”3) discusses the problems with, and motives for, the frequent elision of his name from what he elsewhere calls the 'deleuzoguattarian' project (Guattari 1980a: 234), but suggests that 'Deleuze' has become an acceptable common noun for it.
11. Nietzsche puts it like this: 'This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expand itself but only transforms itself (1969: §1067). Nietzsche's (1968: §552) argument that there are no things, only perspectives, is applicable to even the smallest of 'units': 'It is only after the model of the subject that we have invented the reality of things and projected them into the medley of sensations. If we no longer believe in the effective subject, then belief also disappears in effective things, in reciprocation, cause and effect between those phenomena that we call things.

There also disappears, of course, the world of effective atoms.'
12. Deleuze (1983: 3) writes that 'The history of a thing, in general, is the succession of forces which take possession of it and the co-existence of the forces which struggle for possession.' There is, however, still something of a 'thing' in this expression. Foucault (1972: 47) perhaps expresses the Nietzschean conception of matter better when he writes: 'What, in short, we wish to do is to dispense with "things" ... To substitute for the enigmatic treasure of "things" anterior to discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse.'
13. Essentially, the term 'assemblage' describes a process of relations of proximity where the multiplicity of connection and flux across forces in relation is such that what defines the assemblage is its singular functioning (with forms of content and expression), and its mutation (around the play of territorialization and deterritorialization).
14. 'A thing has as many senses as there are forces capable of taking possession of it. But the thing itself is not neutral and will have more or less affinity with the force in current possession' (Deleuze 1983: 4).
15. For Deleuze, every 'thing' has two aspects, the 'actual' and the Virtual', where the former is a 'selection' of the manifold potential of the latter (cf. Deleuze 1994b).
16. Deleuze offers a useful example here of the polymorphous nature of May '68: 'Anti-Oedipus was about the univocity of the real, a sort of Spinozism of the unconscious. And I think '68 was this discovery itself. The people who hate '68, or say that it was a mistake, see it as something symbolic or imaginary. But that's precisely what it wasn't, it was pure reality breaking through' (N: 144"”5).
17. It is crucial to understand that there is no primary element to Deleuze and Guattari's monism other than an infinite process: 'What we are talking about is not the unity of substance but the infinity of the modifications that are part of one another on this unique plane of life' (ATP: 254).
18. Marx (1975a: 348) himself writes that '[communism] is the solution of the riddleof history and knows itself to be the solution'. It is clear from Marx's definition of the 'real movement' that the 'solution' "” whilst it may indeed point to a post-capitalist socius "” is immanent to the engagement with the riddle itself.

19. The term 'minor politics' is derived from Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of the 'minor', 'minoritarian', and 'minor literature'. Though they have used the expressions 'minor literature and politics' and 'Kafka politics' (K: 86, 7), 'minor politics' is not a term they employ.
20. See Massumi (1997: 760-1) and Mustapha and Eken (2001: 6) for a similar presentation of this kind of Nietzschean (but no less Marxist) communism.
21. Neither should it be seen as a denial of the crucial space of political theory and practice that has developed through a self-declared communist movement.
22. Deleuze does, however, at times pose his politics in terms of 'class struggle' and a 'revolutionary' project (cf. Deleuze 1977: 100"”1).
23. Deleuze (1990: 72"”3) comes closest to presenting his own project in these terms when he writes of the 'great politics' in The Logic of Sense: 'It suffices that we dissipate ourselves a little, that we be able to be at the surface, that we stretch our skin like a drum, in order that the "great politics" begin. An empty square for neither man nor God; singularities which are neither general nor individual, neither personal nor universal. All of this is traversed by circulations, echoes, and events which produce more sense, more freedom, and more strength than man has ever dreamed of, or God ever conceived.'
24. Deleuze (1992: 85) writes: 'The question of the corresponding assemblage of enunciation' to the cinema as machinic assemblage of matter-images 'remains open, since Vertov's answer (Communist society) has lost its meaning.'
25. Deleuze (1994b: 186) does give a certain priority to 'the economic', but it is the economic as the plane of configuration of life in capital which always operates through the quantitative organization and conjoining of abstract flows: 'In short, the economic is the social dialectic itself "” in other words, the totality of the problems posed to a given society, or the synthetic and problematising field of that society. In all rigour, there are only economic social problems, even though the solutions may be juridical, political or ideological, and the problems may be expressed in these fields of resolvability.'
26. One of the most important possible effects of Empire is the way it may draw out a new set of problematics for research and politics through critical engagement with the text "” something that Hardt and Negri (2001: 236) call for when they say that 'Ours is the kind of book that asks to be criticized.'
27. Deleuze's empiricism is a perspectivism toward an overturning of all thought of identity and representation (populated as identity thought is with the dualisms of subjects and objects, universals and particulars), with an affirmation of relations of connectivity and resonance across, against, and within 'things'. As Deleuze (1994b: 57) writes: 'The intense world of differences, in which we find the reason behind qualities and the being of the sensible, is precisely the object of a superior empiricism. This empiricism teaches us a strange "reason", that of the multiple, chaos and difference (nomadic distributions, crowned anarchies).' In Deleuze's empiricism, as should be clear from my discussion of materialism, relations are not derived from things, but vice versa: 'Relations are not internal to a Whole; rather, the Whole is derived from the external relations of a given moment, and varies with them' (Deleuze 1997b: 59). The particular as a unit of empiricism is thus not a unit at all, but a multiplicity of relations. Faced with these multiplicities, empiricism seeks to create new differences through new relations and resonances. It is thus a methodology of 'and' rather than 'is' (cf. Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 54-9).

2 Minor politics: the styles of cramped creation

1. 'America sought to create a revolution whose strength would lie in a universal immigration, emigres of the world, just as Bolshevik Russia would seek to make a revolution whose strength would lie in a universal proletarianization, "Proletarians of the world" . . . the two forms of class struggle. So that the messianism of the nineteenth century has two heads and is expressed no less in American pragmatism than in the ultimately Russian form of socialism' (Deleuze 1997b: 86).
2. When discussing the contemporary persecution of the Palestinians Deleuze argues that certain forms of colonialism "” notably those which seek a terra nullius (1998b) "” operate through the absolute denial of the existence of those who are not part of 'the people' being composed: 'From beginning to end, [Zionist terrorism] involved acting as if the Palestinian people not only must not exist, but had never existed' (1998c: 30). A certain degree of commonality between the experiences of the Palestinians and the indigenous North Americans is then marked in a conversation between Deleuze and Elias Sanbar (1998) entitled 'The Indians of Palestine'.
3. Ever since the reterritorialization of the Soviet revolution, 'There's no longer any image of proletarians of which it's just a matter of becoming conscious' (N: 173).
4. 'Writing has a double function: to translate everything into assemblages and to dismantle assemblages. The two are the same thing' (K: 47).
5. Kafka (1999: 150"”1) himself characterized the 'literature of small peoples' thus: '1. Liveliness: a. Conflict. b. Schools. c. Magazines. 2. Less constraint: a. Absence of principles. b. Minor themes. c. Easy formation of symbols. d. Throwing off of the untalented. 3. Popularity: a. Connection with politics. b. Literary history. c. Faith in literature, can make up their own laws.'
6. My discussion of the criteria and techniques of minor politics is more closely related to the structure of Deleuze's (1989: 215"”24) account of the criteria of minor cinema in Cinema 2, where the first principle is that the people are missing.
7. See Patton (2000: 83"”7) for a wider discussion of Deleuze's break with liberal understandings of freedom.
8. Kafka seems to reflect this when he says to Janouch (1971: 20) that he is in a cage, 'not only in the office, but everywhere ... I carry the bars within me all the time.'
9. I am grateful to Derrol Palmer for helping me find this reference.
10. Pascal (1982: 197"”201) argues that the difference between the ape's 'way out' and romantic ideas of freedom and the authentic independent self is a central aspect of the story: a story that he suggests presents the dilemma of existence under social constraints as an open, continuous, subtle, and pragmatic experimentation.
11. Deleuze and Guattari (ATP: 83) put it like this: 'A type of statement can be evaluated only as a function of its pragmatic implications, in other words, in relation to the implicit presuppositions, immanent acts, or incorporeal transformations it expresses and which introduce new configurations of bodies.'
12. Chapter 1 of Anti-Oedipus describes three 'syntheses' of desiring production: the connective synthesis of production, the disjunctive synthesis of recording, and the conjunctive synthesis of consumption-consummation. Essentially, the first synthesis is the site of the undifferentiated 'flow' of desiring production where desiring machines make continual couplings of the 'and . . . and . . . and' type. The second is the recording 'break' of desiring production that inscribes production on a surface (the Body without Organs) as a series of disjunctions which are distributed as a grid, network or series of coordinates. The third synthesis emerges on the recording surface of the BwO to produce a kind of subject through a localization and consumption of the sensual pleasure, or the product of the disjunctions. Operating together the three syntheses describe the production and investments of subjectivity in a social system. Relations of 'exclusive disjunction'serve to reinforce the demarcation of identity formed in the three syntheses as the subject - a product of the syntheses, and hence always 'adjacent' to them - comes to recognize itself as the cause. Relations of 'inclusive disjunction', on the other hand, serve to set the subject free to continuously and variously 'consummate' itself in every new disjunction, 'garnering here, there, and everywhere a reward in the form of a becoming or an avatar, being born of the states that it consumes and being reborn in each new state' (ACE: 16). See Holland (1999: Ch. 2) for an incisive explication of the three syntheses.

13. Writing of fetishism, value, and common sense in Marx (following the sense of his analysis of the fetishism of commodities; Marx 1976: 163"”77), Deleuze (1994a: 207-8) says that every 'solution' to a social problem is doubled with a 'false problem' where the identities produced in social regimes become objective truths in social consciousness (such that 'The natural object of social consciousness or common sense with regard to the recognition of value is the fetish') (cf. also ACE: 4).
14. See Wagenbach (1984) and Werckmeister (1997) for discussion of the importance and complex effects of Kafka's work in the Workmen's Accident Insurance Institution, as against the common interpretation of Kafka's employment as merely a strain on, and a distraction from his art.
15. Indeed, in Difference and Repetition Deleuze (1994a: 207, 327) aligns himself with the position developed by Althusser and the group around Reading Capital that Marx presents a theory of capital as premised on processes of difference and variation rather than contradiction: 'Those commentators on Marx who insist upon the fundamental difference between Marx and Hegel rightly point out that in Capital the category of differenciation (the differenciation at the heart of a social multiplicity: the division of labour) is substituted for the Hegelian concepts of opposition, contradiction, and alienation, the latter forming only an apparent movement and standing only for abstract effects separated from the principle and from the real movement of their production' (Deleuze 1994a: 207).
16. It is worth saying a little about Kafka's relations with socialist and anarchist movements. As Kafka reports to Janouch (1971: 86), an incident in his youth when his family cook playfully called him a Ravachol (the name of a French anarchist, though he knew this only later, being told at the time that it meant murderer and criminal) left him with a lasting 'groundless sense of guilt' such that he says 'I knew that I was an Ishmael, a criminal, in short "” a ravachol' (89). Later he studied in depth the lives and ideas of the historical figures of anarchism, and frequented various circles and meetings, including, in 1910, the anarchist Club of the Young. He says that he 'devoted much time and money to the subject' (90). Brod comments on Kafka's diary entry 'Don't forget Kropotkin!' that 'Kropotkin's memoirs were among Kafka's favourite books, as were the memoirs of Alexander Herzen' (in Kafka 1999: 233, 496). But Kafka's relationship, as one might expect, is clearly not a simple one of identity with these movements. A sense of ambiguity is clear in this section from Janouch (1971: 90): '"[The anarchists] all attempted to realize the happiness of mankind without the aid of Grace. But "”," Kafka lifted both arms like a pair of broken wings and let them fall helplessly, "I could not march shoulder to shoulder with them for long.'" Kafka also says to Janouch that he knows the Czech anarchists 'A little', but, Very nice, jolly people' that they are, he has trouble taking their radical pretensions seriously. And when coming across a workers' march he says: 'These people are so self-possessed, so self-confident and good-humoured. They rule the streets, and therefore think they rule the world. In fact, they are mistaken. Behind them already are the secretaries, officials, professional politicians, and all the modern satraps for whom they are preparing the way to power ... At the end of every truly revolutionary development there appears a Napoleon Bonaparte' (in Janouch 1971: 119-20). In response to Janouch's questioning of his feelings about an expansion of the Russian revolution, Kafka says: 'As a flood spreads wider and wider, the water becomes shallower and dirtier. The Revolution evaporates, and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy. The chains of tormented mankind are made of red tape' (119"”20).

17. 'The Anomalous is always at the frontier, on the border of a band or a multiplicity; it is part of the latter, but is already making it pass into another multiplicity, it makes it become, it traces a line between' (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 42). The anomalous can equally come from outside the pack: 'Sometimes the borderline is defined or doubled by a being of another nature that no longer belongs to the pack, or never belonged to it, and that represents a power of another order, potentially acting as a threat as well as a trainer, outsider, etc' (ATP: 245-6).
18. Slater (2001) provides an excellent analysis of the possible directions that disagreement, polemic and debate can take in a minority community in his analysis of the formation and splits in the Situationist International. The tendencies in this case are seen on one side as a movement towards an open and experimental critical engagement expressed in the Situationist Bauhaus slogan 'divided we stand' and Asger Jorn's understanding of 'open creation', and, on the other, towards the solidification of an autonomous racket through Debord's emphasis on theoretical coherence and Situationist discipline.
19. Though it might have been presented as a critique of the eleventh thesis, Deleuze (n.d.a) proposes something similar when he writes of Nietzschean interpretation: 'It is possible that in the current idea of interpretation, there is something that might go beyond the dialectical opposition between "knowing" [connaître] and "transforming" the world.'
20. In his period of non-involvement with groups after the collapse of the Communist League, Marx told Engels: 'I am greatly pleased by the public, authentic isolation in which we two, you and I, now find ourselves' (cited in Wheen 1999: 265). In this context, Marx's distaste for the cult of personality is also worth noting. Camatte interestingly presents this as a necessary aspect of the deferral of group identity, and cites Marx: 'Both of us scoff at being popular. Among other things our disgust at any personality cult is evidence of this . . . When Engels and I first joined the secret society of communists, we did it on the condition sine qua non that they repeal all statutes that would be favourable to a cult of authority' (Marx to Blos, cited in Camatte 1995: 20). Such an avoidance of identity is explained by Bordiga "” who did not sign his own work "” thus: 'it is the attribute of the bourgeois world that all commodities bear their maker's name, all ideas are followed by their author's signature, every party is defined by its leader's name . . . Work such as ours can only succeed by being hard and laborious and unaided by bourgeois publicity techniques, by the vile tendency to admire and adulate men' (cited in Camatte 1995: 175). Though the minor aspect of these positions is clear, it is worth pointing out "” following Camatte (1995: 175"”6) "” that there are always attendant dangers of the return of a self-sacrificial militancy and a subsumption of the singularities of life to the dictatorship of 'doctrinal monolithism'.
21. See Murphy (n.d.: section 6), Macey (1993: 392"”4), and the collection of Deleuze's short political articles and letters in Discourse 20(3).
22. 'For me, the aftermath of '68, was made up of action committees, psychiatric alternatives; the feminist and gay movements ... I was hoping that a collective development could be pursued, but instead a sort of prohibition against thinking set in. Today it's hard to imagine the kind of demagoguery that reigned at Vincennes and in those milieus: "What are you talking about?" "I don't get it!" "What does that mean?" "Why use complicated words like that?" Deleuze's course was continually interrupted by unbelievable idiots' (Guattari 1995a: 30).
23. A sense of the complexity of Guattari's (1984: 35) mode of group analysis is evident in his lament that 'There is, for instance, no description of the special characteristics of the working class that established the Paris Commune, no description of its creative imagination'.

24. See Cohn-Bendit and Cohn-Bendit (1969: esp. 48"”57) for an account of the formation of the 22 March Movement.
25. In a 1980 interview Guattari says: 'I've changed my mind: there are no subject-groups, but arrangements of enunciation, of subjectivization, pragmatic arrangements which do not coincide with circumscribed groups. These arrangements can involve individuals, but also ways of seeing the world, emotional systems, conceptual machines, memory devices, economic, social components, elements of all kinds' (Guattari 1996a: 227-8).
26. Jacques Camatte (1995) presents a left communist critique of the groupuscule, or 'racket' form in proletarian milieux in a fashion that resonates with Deleuze and Guattari's critique of subjugated groups. Camatte argues that political rackets are the political correlate of business organizations in the phase of the real domination of capital. The racket tends to coalesce in terms of what it collectively affirms itself to be rather than in terms of its critical practices: what it does, as internal differences are subsumed into models of 'authentic' unity in opposition to external relations (be they social forces or other rackets). Coherence and internal hierarchy are produced around attraction points of leaders (be they formal, or informal (cf. Freeman n.d.) "” sometimes being based around, for example, a particular member's cultural capital, such as their theoretical sophistication), revered texts, conceptual abstractions and particular political models, or sanctioned practices, and are enforced through the motive power of political 'commitment', continual 'racketerist marketing', and fear of exclusion.
27. Guattari (1984: 187"”8; 192"”3) offers an insightful account of Trotsky's relation to Lenin and the Soviet state, following the argument that having 'previously been among the loudest in denouncing the danger of the "political substitutionism" inherent in Leninist centralism', 'Trotsky, forced into Leninism by the revolution . . . came to apply with savage rigidity a grotesque Bolshevism' (188).
28. For developments in this understanding of the party as a movement immanent to capital, as against what Dauvé and Martin (1997: 67) identify as the false problem of 'need of the party/fear of the party' expressed by Leninism and councilism respectively, see Antagonism (2001), Camatte (n.d., 1995), and Dauvé and Martin (1997: 63-76).
29. Here I am making a point about which, at the time of the Manifesto, Marx was more ambiguous. In the Manifesto Marx does in fact write of the need 'to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State' (Marx and Engels 1973: 59). Whilst this is problematic, as Marx's theory develops "” particularly after the experience of the Paris Commune "” he breaks with this understanding of the state, such that, as Engels writes in 1888, the formulation of the state in the Manifesto becomes 'antiquated'. Citing Marx's The Civil War in France, Engels writes: 'One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that "the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes'" (in Marx and Engels 1973: 14).
30. Building on Marx's distinction between the 'formal' and 'material' party, Bordiga and theorists and groups related to the Italian left have developed one of the most useful communist analyses of the party in these terms. For Bordiga, there is no necessary continuity of a formal party across time. Indeed, devoid of a strong proletarian movement, the formal continuity of the party can function "” as it did with the Russian model "” as a mechanism of domination. Instead, in times of waning proletarian activity, Bordiga proposes a more informal and diffuse material party. The introduction to Antagonism (2001: 18) describes Bordiga's position: 'The party may exist as a more diffuse movement, perhaps of several groups, all or none of whom may be called parties. Or it may consist of fractions of such groups, or of informal connections amongst individuals who are not members of any group.'

31. I am only reading this problematic from Deleuze's perspective, not assessing the adequacy of his reading of Foucault. It is beyond the scope of this book to approach the question through Foucault's work. It is worth noting, though, that if Foucault had problems with the question of resistance, he did not feel the need to respond directly to Deleuze's interpretation. Perhaps there is some truth in Deleuze's rather touching comment after Foucault's death about their relationship: 'I needed him much more than he needed me' (N: 83). For a more detailed consideration of Deleuze's and Foucault's biographical and philosophical relations see Goodchild (1996: 131-5).
32. Foucault's 'anti-Marxism' is misconceived if it is seen as a refusal of a serious and wide-ranging political project. If anything, Foucault's problem with Marxism is that it is not radical enough "” being caught, as he sees it, in the nineteenth-century paradigm of Life, Labour, and Language, and its model of Man. Whilst at one point Foucault (1970: 262) thus, rather uncharitably, describes 'Marxism' as something which 'exists in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water: that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else', it is noteworthy that he also presents Marx alongside the privileged figure of Nietzsche as a force that decentres anthropology and humanism, albeit one that is continually subject to reterritorializations: 'One is led therefore to anthropologize Marx, to make him a historian of totalities, and to rediscover in him the message of humanism; one is led therefore to interpret Nietzsche in the terms of transcendental philosophy and to reduce his genealogy to the level of a search for origins' (Foucault 1972: 13).
33. Bringing together the two dominant misinterpretations of Foucault "” that the 'death of man' was a nihilism, and that Foucault's later works marked a 'return to the subject' "” Deleuze writes that 'misinterpretations are never innocent, they're mixtures of stupidity and malevolence' (N: 99).
34. 34 François Ewald (1994) explains how in 1977 Deleuze had entrusted these notes to him to pass on to Foucault, and describes them as having something intimate, secret, and confidential about them.
35. In a passage that is worth citing at length, Deleuze continues: 'In any case, they scare me. There is a molecular speech of madness, or of the drug addict or the delinquent in vivo which is no more valid than the great discourses of a psychiatrist in vitro. There is as much self-assurance on the former's part as certainty on the latter's part. It is not the marginals which create the lines; they install themselves on these lines and make them their property, and this is fine when they have that strange modesty of men of the line, the prudence of the experimenter, but it is a disaster when they slip into a black hole from which they no longer utter anything but the micro-fascist speech of their dependency and their giddiness: "We are the avant-garde", "We are the marginals" (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 139).

3 The lumpenproletariat and the proletarian unnamable

1. For examples of these lumpenproletarian positions see Fanon (1967), Clarke et al. (1994), E. Cleaver (1970, 1972), K. Cleaver (1975), 'What is the Provotariat?' in Heatwave (1993), and Gray and Radcliffe (1966). Eldridge Cleaver's (1970: 7-8) description of the lumpenproletariat in his attempt to theorize the class formation of the US black ghetto, is not untypical: 'OK. We are Lumpen. Right on. The Lumpenproletariat are all those who have no secure relationship or vested interest in the means of production and the institutions of capitalist society. That part of the "Industrial Reserve Army" held perpetually in reserve; who have never worked and never will ... all those on Welfare or receiving State Aid. / Also the so-called "Criminal Element", those who live by their wits, existing on what they can rip off, who stick guns in the faces of businessmen and say "stick 'em up", or "give it up!" Those who don't even want a job, who hate to work . . . / But even though we are Lumpen, we are still members of the Proletariat ... In both the Mother Country and the Black Colony, the Working Class is the Right Wing of the Proletariat, and the Lumpenproletariat is the Left wing.'

2. For example, though not actually holding a lumpenproletarian position themselves, the Situationist International suggest that 'the lumpenproletariat embodies a remarkably radical implicit critique of the society of work' (Vaneigem, in Knabb 1981: 126).
3. 1960s and '70s academic work on deviancy and political marginality, for example, frequently employs a model of an integrated working class and an extra-legal and subcultural lumpenproletariat (cf. Hall 1974; Horowitz and Liebowitz 1968; Taylor and Taylor 1968). Horowitz and Liebowitz (1968: 293) clearly express this thesis when they write: 'If any group has emerged as the human carrier of the breakdown between political and private deviance, it has been the lumpenproletariat, or the non-working class. This group has replaced the established working and middle classes as the deciding political force in America.'
4. It is noteworthy, in this context, that when Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis (in Benjamin 1986) describe the porous and intoxicating life of the people of Naples in a fashion similar to Deleuze and Guattari's minor (where 'each private attitude or act is permeated by streams of communal life' and 'Poverty has brought about a stretching of frontiers that mirrors the most radiant freedom of thought'; 171), they are writing of what Marx and Engels saw as the most lumpen of cities (cf. Bovenkerk 1984: 25).
5. I have used Beckett's (1979) term 'unnamable' because it is a useful means of characterizing the proletariat as an immanent potential which cannot be fixed or 'named' in any one time or space. Following Deleuze and Guattari's (ACE: 20"”1) use of the term, the unnamable can be seen as both the limit point of minor processes of inclusive disjunction and as the plane populated by, and expressed in, minor composition, just as Marx's communism is simultaneously the overcoming of the socius and an immanent engagement with it.
6. A third perspective "” on the conjunction of 'race', crime, policing, and unemployment "” is more empirically grounded (cf., for example, E. Cleaver 1970; Gilroy and Simm 1985; Hall et al. 1978). Because this chapter focuses on the way the lumpenproletariat works in Marx's texts, a consideration of this work is beyond its scope.
7. Indeed, Bovenkerk (1984) has argued, following historical work by Traugott (1980), that the key empirical peoples that Marx and Engels describe as lumpenproletarian turn out not to be so easily definable as such, by their own criteria. The Bonapartist 'swamp flower' of the Mobile Guard, for instance, is shown by Traugott to have been of a very similar social composition to the proletarian insurgents, indeed being typically more skilled (with their relative youth being the most marked difference). Most bizarrely Bovenkerk points out that the 10 December Society (which is almost the archetype of the lumpenproletariat, and for Marx of central importance in Louis Bonaparte's accession to emperor) is so undocumented that Traugott even suggests that this 'mysterious society may have been largely imaginary' (cited in Bovenkerk 1984: 41). Rather than follow Bovenkerk and see this as a refutation of the analytic efficacy of Marx's category, this anomaly should further encourage one to see the lumpenproletariat as not primarily a social group, but, as I am arguing, a mode of practice.
8. As one example, a partial list of the Parisian 'sectes communistes' in 1842 included égalitaires, fraternitaires, humanitaires, unitaires, communitaires or icariens, communistes, communionistes, communautistes, and rationalistes (Louis Reybaud, Revue des Deux Mondes, cited in Bestor 1948: 291).
9. Engels explains that 'communist' rather than 'socialist' was employed in the Manifesto because of its revolutionary connotations: 'Whatever portion of the working class had become convinced of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had proclaimed the necessity of a total social change, called itself Communist . . . Thus, Socialism was, in 1847, a middle-class movement, Communism a working-class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, "respectable"; Communism was the very opposite' (Engels, preface to the 1888 English edition of Marx and Engels 1973: 12"”13).
10. It seems as though Sismondi was the first to use the term in a modern sense in his 1837 Études sur l'économie politique, and it is not without importance that Marx (1978: 5) prefaces The Eighteenth Brumaire with a reference to his definition: 'People forget Sismondi's significant saying: The Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society, while modern society lives at the expense of the proletariat.'
11. This is not to say that there is not at times a highly dubious moral sentiment in Marx's accounts of the lumpenproletariat. It is in the account of the correlate of the lumpenproletariat, the nationally and ethnically defined 'unhistorical peoples' (notably the Slavs), that Marx's and especially Engels' methods display their most unsavoury aspects (as evident, for example, in Engels' use of Hegel's expression 'ethnic trash'). Ritter (1976) usefully argues that Engels' attitudes are a fall-out not so much of a nationalism and racism, but of the fanaticism of his proto-Darwinian Eurocentric method (though, of course, such Eurocentric evolutionism was historically immanent to racist formations). Whilst it is probably more productive to critique Marx and Engels for their method than their personal prejudice, the two cannot be wholly divorced. For example, Engels' (1943: 90-4) racist account of the Irish, contemptible in itself, can be seen to contribute to and reflect a flawed reading of the proletariat, in the formation of which, as Linebaugh (1991) has masterfully shown, the workers of Irish descent contributed much in internationalism and practical innovation. All this said, though it is by no means an excuse, Marx and Engels never match Bakunin in racist sentiment.
12. Sergei Eisenstein provides a cinematic version of this thesis in his account of lumpenproletarian reaction in the 'agitguignol' Strike (1924), a film which Bordwell (1993) describes as an anatomy of a political process. In a practice that is ironically marked as 'work', the lumpenproletariat are drawn forth to help break the strike at the behest of a secret service agent and with the call from the lumpen king, 'I need five unscrupulous men' (to which the reply naturally returns, 'None of us have any scruples'). The scene emphasizes extra-temporal debauched excess much like Marx's description in the Eighteenth Brumaire. The secret agent enters into a marginal space that is far from the mapped territory of the other scenes of the film (factory, police office, street), avoiding a dead hanging cat en route to an encounter with the lumpen king, where the comic effect, which pervades the whole encounter, is produced through a jazz soundtrack and the inversion of aristocratic trappings (before preening himself the 'king' spits in his dresser mirror, held by his midget servant, and he sleeps in a dilapidated car which doubles as a throne). In a most bizarre scene we then encounter a mass of assorted ragamuffins as they emerge from a field of sunken barrels. The stark contrast between the purity, coherence, and identity of the workers and the filthy proliferation of the lumpenproletariat is clearly marked. I should add that though this exemplifies an aspect of Marx's account of the lumpenproletariat, Strikes model of the proletariat is more akin to the political model of 'the people' than the minor mode of composition that I am elaborating here.
13. Marx's efforts to drive the secret societies out of the First International (as a masonic social form far from the mass open movement that Marx saw in the Chartists and sought to develop in a proletarian organization; cf. Nicolaevsky 1997), owe much to his conflicts with the Bakuninists and the conspiratorial forms of revolutionary politics most clearly expressed by Nechayev (1989) in his Catechism of the Revolutionist. To cite one passage amongst many, Nechayev describes the correct ethics of the covert nihilist revolutionary thus: 'The revolutionary is a dedicated man. He has no interests of his own, no affairs, no feelings, no attachments, no belongings, not even a name. Everything in him is absorbed by a single exclusive interest, a single thought, a single passion "” the revolution . . . All the tender and effeminate emotions of kinship, friendship, love, gratitude and even honor must be stifled . . . Night and day he must have one thought, one aim "” merciless destruction' (4"”5). Though the controversy as to the source of this essay seems to have cleared Bakunin from its authorship (cf. Avrich 1987), the conspiratorial and elitist thinking of Bakuninist anarchism "” whereby the revolution is declared as popular but is to be secretly driven by a handful of conspirators "” is put as strongly by Bakunin as Nechayev. For example, Bakunin (n.d.: 26"”7) writes: 'We are bitter foes of all official power, even if it were ultra-revolutionary power. We are enemies of all publicly acknowledged dictatorship . . . Rejecting any power, by what power or rather by what force shall we direct the people's revolution? An invisible force "” recognized by no one, imposed by no one "” through which the collective dictatorship of our organization will be all the mightier . . . But imagine, in the midst of this general anarchy, a secret organization which has scattered its members in small groups over the whole territory ... an organization which acts everywhere according to a common plan . . . This is what I call the collective dictatorship of the secret organization.'

14. The rationale behind the exclusion of Bakunin's Alliance of Social Democracy from the International is explained in some 120 pages (Marx and Engels 1988), but begins by stating that the danger of a broad banner workers' movement, as the International's explicit concern, was always in letting in declasse (lumpen) elements.
15. The argument that Bakunin perceives in Marx the seeds of statism "” that he, in a sense, predicts the Soviet Union "” is not uninteresting, but it can be made only by ignoring the centrality of Bakuninist notions of organization and 'invisible dictatorship' to Leninist politics (cf. Blissett 1997; Blissett and Home n.d.).
16. Engels refers to this as 'that old pan-Slav swindle of transforming ancient Slav common property into communism and portraying the Russian peasants as born communists' (Marx and Engels 1981: 44). For discussion of Marx's understanding of the possibilities of the commune, see Camatte (1978).
17. Bakunin seems to practise what Marx and Engels (1988: 520) refer to as a 'law of anarchist assimilation', whereby a whole series of groups (from religious sects to students and brigands) are brought under the banner of a spontaneist 'anti-authoritarian' movement. Marx's critique is not just that the collective 'community' of these formations is often little more than a product of Bakunin's imagination, but that it is also a cynical deployment of a populist rhetoric that disguises a tapestry of secret societies and 'invisible dictatorship' (cf. Marx and Engels 1988).
18. This is not to suggest that Bakunin was not an advocate of revolutionary change, but simply that his change was to be the expression of the identity of his political agent.
19. In Revolutionary Catechism, for example, Bakunin (1973: 76) writes: 'Replacing the cult of God by respect and love of humanity, we proclaim human reason as the only criterion of truth; human conscience as the basis of justice; individual and collective freedom as the only source of order in society.'
20. Debord (1983) presents one of the most concise and incisive Marxist critiques of Utopian socialism and anarchism in these terms (albeit a critique which could apply to the humanist and Hegelian tendencies in the Situationist International itself; cf. Ansell Pearson 1997:155-60; Debray 1995). Having argued that Marx's 'science' is an understanding of forces and struggle rather than transcendent law (Debord 1983: §81), Debord writes: 'The Utopian currents of socialism, although themselves historically grounded in the critique of the existing social organization, can rightly be called Utopian to the extent that they reject history "” namely the real struggle taking place, as well as the passage of time beyond the immutable perfection of their picture of a happy society' (§83). Debord then moves to consider anarchism: 'The anarchists have an ideal to realize ... It is the ideology of pure liberty which equalizes everything and dismisses the very idea of historical evil . . . Anarchism has merely to repeat and to replay the same simple, total conclusion in every single struggle, because the first conclusion was from the beginning identified with the entire outcome of the movement . . . [I]t leaves the historical terrain by assuming that the adequate forms for th[e] passage to practice have already been found and will never change' (§92).

21. Marx (1976: 280) clearly makes this point when he writes: 'The sphere of circulation or commodity exchange, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. It is the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham.'
22. In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx (1974b: 358; emphasis added) writes that a general prohibition of child labour '"” if possible "” would be a reactionary step. With strict regulation of working hours according to age and with other precautionary measures to protect children, the early combination of productive labour with education is one of the most powerful means for the transformation of present society!
23. It is noteworthy that from 1937 Soviet workers were no longer officially defined as a 'proletariat' (Gould and Kolb 1964: 547). The difference between the empirical reality of Soviet workers' lives (cf. Haraszti 1977) and their conceptual definition (as a proletariat so much 'for itself that it had self-dissolved in the end of prehistory) hardly needs pointing out.
24. It is important to note that Marx (1973b: 240) draws a distinction between the 'conservative' smallholding peasant who seeks to consolidate this state of affairs, and the 'revolutionary' peasant who, 'in alliance with the towns', 'strikes out beyond it'. The question of the relation between the peasantry and the proletariat in contemporary global arrangements obviously has to be thought through in a more complex fashion.
25. Marx (1976: 342) famously describes the capital/labour relation thus: 'Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.' Hence, in stark comparison to the passage about child labour above, Marx (1976: 548) writes: 'Factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost; at the same time, it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity.' See Marx (1973a: 123) for a clear statement that this is nothing peculiar to 'factory' work, and Midnight Notes (1981: 1) for a more recent version of this position.
26. Deleuze and Guattari (ACE: 265) explain the process similarly: 'Individual persons are social persons first of all, i.e., functions derived from the abstract quantities; they become concrete in the becoming-related or the axiomatic of these quantities, in their conjunction . . . the capitalist as personified capital "” i.e., as a function derived from the flow of capital; and the worker as personified labour capacity "” i.e., a function derived from the flow of labour.'
27. For this reason Gilles Dauvé (1997: 30) argues that 'All theories (either bourgeois, fascist, Stalinist, left-wing or "gauchistes") which in any way glorify and praise the proletariat as it is and claim for it the positive role of defending values and regenerating society, are counter-revolutionary. Worship of the proletariat has become one of the most efficient and dangerous weapons of capital.'

28. At a more empirical level, the way that the critique of work straddles both lumpenproletarian and proletarian formations leaves Marx in a much more sticky position than I am able, in this conceptual elaboration, to explore here. A brief point, however, can be made. By placing the transatlantic relations and flows of people, ideas and practices at the centre of analysis, Linebaugh (1991), Linebaugh and Rediker (1990, 2000), and Gilroy (1993) have shown how a complex, vibrant, polyglot, transatlantic working class existed long before Marx and Engels were placing their hopes, in the Manifesto for example, in the relatively territorially and culturally fixed factory. If we are to follow this argument, a number of the peoples and social sites that Marx was inclined to see as manifesting lumpenproletarian tendencies "” the 'escaped galley slaves' and the taverns of the docks, for example "” can be seen as traversed by capitalist social relations. As such, the critique of work that emerges amongst these peoples can actually be seen as a product of proletarian experience. Research in this direction does not undermine Marx's conceptual elaboration of the proletariat, but it can help to overcome some of the more narrowly focused, moralistic and, at times, racist aspects (cf. Ritter 1976) of his and Engels' more empirical work on lumpen and proletarian formations. It can also provide a rich site for the exploration of the techniques, styles, knowledges and inventions of historical proletarian politics. Linebaugh and Rediker (1990: 240), for example, have shown that the 'strike' was an invention not of the factory, but of the ship (as a practice of 'striking' the ropes of the ship's sails to prevent it from sailing).
29. Here 'working class' is meant in its sociological sense as an empirical group of people.
30. Marx does, of course, produce outlines of possible practice and sets of demands (in, for example, the Manifesto or the programme of the International), but none of these are anything but situated in time and space.
31. For Balibar, the proletariat is thus a 'nonsubject' that emerges intermittently from the configurations of capital. Balibar argues that the great failure of Marxism was to think of the proletariat as the subject of history, and hence remain within the antinomies of dominant knowledge. This is manifested in two central problems of orthodox Marxism: first, the assumption that the party represented the essential continuity of this subject in history, and the resultant illusion that party unity equated with class unity; and, second, the related positing of proletarian standpoint in terms of (true) 'consciousness', rather than in a more situated 'theory'.
32. It is important to note that for Deleuze and Guattari this dispersion of points of political tension and invention is not an assertion of minority independence. Minority inventions only tend toward proletarian composition in so far as their concerns and problematisations are articulated and reverberate in a fashion that prevents an isolated solution (cf. Deleuze 1977: 104"”5).
33. Because the proletariat is not an empirical group of people but a mode of composition, it is not subject to that 'critique' of Marxism that proposes that a previously homogenous working class has, in the development of modernity, split into a plethora of different class and social fractions. See Bordiga (in Antagonism 2001: 37"”8) for an early challenge to this weak critique of Marxism.
34. I would suggest that the model of lumpenproletarian composition that this chapter has developed is akin to the self-fetishization of the marginal that Deleuze criticizes in Dialogues (cf. Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 139).

4 The social factory: machines, work, control

1. The translation of operaismo as 'workerism' is, as Hardt (1990a: 249) points out, problematic: 'The English usage of "workerism" and the French "ouvrièrisme" correspond to the Italian "fabrichismo" in that they are used pejoratively to designate those who cannot or will not recognize the power of social struggles outside the factory. The characteristic of "operaismo" is that it has been able to transform itself in step with the changing nature of work.'

2. Zizek's (2001) more recent comments on Empire have been more critical.
3. In this context it is noteworthy that Negri (1998: n.p.) indicates that he has some knowledge of the intended focus of Deleuze's unfinished book on Marx. Whatever access Negri had to Deleuze's ideas in progress, he presents Deleuze's argument, I think problematically, in terms very similar to his own, as a communism of the multitude: 'Here there is the multitude that constitutes the common. And this is the concept of communism that, from what I have understood, was constructed in the "Grandeur de Marx", Deleuze's unfinished book.'
4. An earlier English language engagement with Negri, operaismo and autonomia emerged in the more expressly political milieu of the Red Notes group (cf. Red Notes 1977, 1979, 1981; Italy 79 Committee 1982; Negri 1988a), and in the US journals Zerowork and Midnight Notes, and the work of Harry Cleaver (1979).
5. Thus, whilst I would agree with Wright (2002) that a simplification of the complexity of operaismo and autonomia and the over-alignment of this current with Negri owes something to Negri's reception through Deleuze and Guattari, a 'melange', as Wright (2002: 2) puts it, of Deleuze and operaismo can also function in a productive way, and without either simplification or subsumption of complex positions to Negri's perspective.
6. Operaismo and autonomia maintain a persistent presence in Deleuze and Guattari's work. A Thousand Plateaus, for example, cites Yann Moulier, Tronti, and Negri in the context of new forms of socialized work, the emarginati, the problem of the Subject of orthodox Marxism, and the refusal of work (cf. ATP: 469, 571"”2). Guattari wrote an essay with Negri (1990) and had some involvement with autonomia (cf. Guattari 1980a, 1980b; and Semiotext(e) (1980: 133) for a photograph of Guattari in Radio Alice's studio). He also wrote the preface to Collectif A/traverso (1977). As well as signing the petition against the repression of autonomia, along with Sartre, Barthes, and Foucault, amongst others (cf. Red Notes 1978: 36"”7), Deleuze (1980) wrote a letter against Negri's imprisonment in 1979, a preface to the French edition of Negri's The Savage Anomaly, and a review of Marx beyond Marx (Deleuze n.d.c) that was forwarded as a proof of Negri's innocence. As apiece of anecdotal evidence of the influence of Deleuze and Guattari in autonomia, Liberation reported that a student questioned in France about Franco Piperno (who had fled Italy to escape imprisonment) was asked if he had read Anti-Oedipus (Massumi 1987: 71).
7. There are, of course, exceptions. It is notable that Meaghan Morris, who is generally critical of cultural studies' tendency to populism and the neo-Gramscian politics of hegemony, wrote an excellent account of autonomia and its relations with the PCI as early as 1978. Paul Gilroy (1982), equally critical of the neo-Gramscian vein in cultural studies, also draws on some of the insights of autonomia.
8. Whilst the theoretical and political tendencies of operaismo pushed well beyond the PCI, the current maintained a relation to the orthodox left, due both to a reluctance to develop as an independent faction, and to a sense of the possibility of radicalizing the rank and file, and even the party itself. For Tronti, in particular, the party was of central political importance, and his struggle to save it from social democracy saw him eventually return to the fold (cf. Wright 2002: 68"”75; Piotte 1987: 28). If the critique of the functionality of the PCI to the incorporation of working-class struggle was a while coming, the struggles around '68 saw a change of position, from where the PCI was to have no place in operaismo's and, later, autonomia's politics (cf. Wright 2002: 110-14).
9. See Bologna (1980a) for a short account of the variations of position, Piotte (1986) for relations between Tronti and Negri, Wright (2002: 58"”62) for the split between Panzieri and Tronti, and Wright (2002: 141-51) for the tension in Potere Operaio between Negri, Piperno, and Scalzone.

10. Despite a continued flirtation with Leninism, Potere Operaio dissolved following a meeting in Padua in 1973 saying: 'We have rejected the logic of the political group in order to be within the real movement, in order to be within organised class autonomy' (in Red Notes 1979: 32). Bifo (1980: 151-2) suggests that following the big FIAT Mirafiori occupation earlier that year (cf. Negri 1979b), within which the revolutionary groups only had a marginal presence, Potere Operaio's dissolution showed that it was the only group to recognize the changes taking place in the movement.
11. 'Results of the immediate process of production' (sometimes known as 'the missing sixth chapter') was first published in 1933 in German and Russian, but took on particular importance - especially for the Italian and French extra-parliamentary communists "” when it was republished in other European languages in the late 1960s (1976 in English).
12. Pioneered by Romano Alquati operaismo adopted Marx's method of the 'Workers' Inquiry' (cf. Marx 1973d) as a means of 'hot investigation' into the conditions and forms of resistance in the factories (cf. Bologna 1991). The workers' enquiry enabled the operaists to develop analysis from close attention to a social sphere which itself embodied a considerable degree of political, tactical, and organizational sophistication developed through the collective experience of the workers' movement since the Resistance (cf. Bologna, in Cuninghame 2001). Ironically, as Moulier (1989: 14) reports, these 'hot investigations' were the object of considerable interest from the employers who found they gave more insight to the functioning of their factories than conventional studies.
13. The practicality of operaismo's position is evidenced by Moulier's (1989: 13) anecdote that the bedroom walls of activists saw the substitution of diagrammatic maps of the FIAT Mirafiori factory for the epinal figures of Mao and Che Guevara.
14. As Rosenberg (1982: 36) points out, this accusation usually follows a citation from The Poverty of Philosophy, where Marx writes 'The handmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist'.
15. This is not to deny the possibility of specifically technological innovation, but it is to say that it is only as an expression of particular social problematizations, possibilities, and lines of flight that a technological innovation could be possible, and maintain any consistency. To cite a passage from Marx (1970: 21) that Deleuze is fond of using at these moments, 'Mankind . . . inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation' (cf. Deleuze 1994a: 186).
16. Deleuze and Guattari (1977) at one point suggest that Marx does not always present such a machinic conception of the relation between the technical machine and the human, but, rather, that he sees the machine as a succession to the tool in an evolutionary understanding of the human biological organism. I am arguing, however, that the presentation of machines in Capital (Chs 14 and 15) and in the Grundrisse "” though occasionally displaying humanist errors "” does not present the machine in such a fashion, but rather, as Deleuze and Guattari (1977: 131) suggest elsewhere, presents 'man and the tool [as] already components of a machine constituted by a full body acting as an engineering agency'. For, as I argue below, Marx's distinction between tools and machines is not based on the notion that machines are more complex tools, but that the technical machine "” as it emerges in capitalist manufacture "” is created by, and is functional to the social configuration of capital, machining the humans and tools within itself for the maximization of surplus value.
17. Marx (1976: 490) makes these points as follows. First: 'manufacture was unable either to seize upon the production of society to its full extent, or to revolutionise that production to its very core. It towered up as an artificial economic construction, on the broad foundation of the town handicrafts and the domestic industries of the countryside. At a certain stage of its development, the narrow technical basis on which manufacture rested came into contradiction with requirements of production which it had itself created.' Second: 'the complaint that the workers lack discipline runs through the whole of the period of manufacture'.
18. 'Cooperation in its capitalist form is ... the first and basic expression of the law of (surplus) value' (Panzieri 1976: 7). This is the directly 'capitalist' process where the super-adequate power of collective labour is manifested after the sale of individual labour at its necessary price (cf. Marx 1976: 451).
19. 'The specifically capitalist mode of production not only transforms the situations of the various agents of production, it also revolutionises their actual mode of labour and the real nature of the labour process as a whole' (Marx 1976: 1021).
20. Marx (1976: 563) thus writes: 'It would be possible to write a whole history of the inventions made since 1830 for the sole purpose of providing capital with weapons against working-class revolt.' Other crucial elements of this new machinic environment, as Linebaugh (1991) and Thompson (1967) have emphasized, are the wage and the clock.
21. In the terms of Anti-Oedipus, the recording surface of the Body without Organs of capital sets its disjunctions in and through the technical machines such that they become the quasi-cause of production, and the productive desiring machines are left circulating around, and constrained within them. With the development of real subsumption, the 'productive powers and the social interrelations of labour in the direct labour-process seem transferred from labour to capital. Capital thus becomes a very mystic being since all of labour's social productive forces appear to be due to capital, rather than labour as such, and seem to issue from the womb of capital' (Marx, cited in ACE: 11).
22. Bearing in mind that there is little debate about the possible relations that could be drawn between aspects of operaismo and the earlier Italian left, it should be noted that this point was made by Bordiga in his 1953 essay 'The spirit of horse power' (in Bordiga 2001). In this trenchant critique of the Russian and Chinese states' claims to be an existent socialism, Bordiga rehearses Marx's discussion of machines to show that with the development towards production driven by 'the sinister steel automatons', 'The physical person of the individual master is ... not required, and bit by bit he disappears into the pores of share capital, of management boards, of state-run boards, of the political state, which has become (since a long time ago) entrepreneur and manufacturer, and into the very latest vile form of the state which pretends to be "the workers themselves'" (82).
23. In the second and third volumes of Capital Marx explains how, through credit and finance, initially through the formation of stock companies, capital develops into a social system that is in a sense 'social' in its ownership. Individual capitalists and separate spheres of society, all competing with each other, and necessarily not supporting an 'unproductive' (reproduction) sphere, are replaced by a mutually self-supporting system of 'social capital'. Competition is no less important, but it increasingly becomes a mechanism internal to the social whole (rather than a game between distinct players).
24. Marx (1974a: 388) puts it like this: 'But since, on the one hand, the mere owner of capital, the money-capitalist, has to face the functioning capitalist, while money-capital itself assumes a social character with the advance of credit, being concentrated in banks and loaned out by them instead of its original owners, and since, on the other hand, the mere manager who has no title whatever to the capital, whether through borrowing it or otherwise, performs all the real functions pertaining to the functioning of capitalist as such, only the functionary remains and the capitalist disappears as superfluous from the production process.'

25. The PCI is a central example. Building on its earlier politics of an 'anti-fascist' cross-class alliance, the post-war PCI was to develop with an explicit focus on formal democratic politics and working class participation in the development of national capital (cf. Partridge 1996: 76-7; Wright 2002: 8-9).
26. The first article of the 1948 Italian Constitution reads: 'Italy is a democratic republic founded on labor' (cited in Hardt and Negri 1994: 55).
27. The American journal Zerowork (1975: 6) neatly summarizes the case against socialism: 'Our analysis of the crisis implies a rejection of the basic proposal of the Left: socialism . . . [Socialism] can mean only one of two dubious things. Either, as the ideology of the libertarian Left, it finds in small-scale production the solution to the "degradation of work", or it is a capitalist strategy of economic planning. In the first respect socialism is romantic and quaintly useless. In the second respect, however, socialism means primarily disciplining the working class ... In both cases the demand for socialism clashes with the working class demands against work.'
28. Passages from the 'Fragment' return throughout Negri's work from his essays in Potere Operaio up until Empire. The importance he attributes to the 'Fragment' is clear when he writes that it is 'without doubt, the highest example of the use of the antagonistic and constituting dialectic that we can find, certainly in the Grundrisse, but perhaps also in the whole of Marx's work' (Negri 1991a: 139).
29. The 'Fragment on Machines' covers the end of Notebook VI and the beginning of VII of the Grundrisse, but the exact page references vary a little between commentators. I use Negri's (1991a) inclusion of pages 690"”712 in Marx (1973a).
30. In his excellent critique of the 'end of work' thesis, Caffentzis (1997: 30) cites a range of sources to show that in the US the work day, the work year, and the number of waged workers have all significantly increased since the 1973"”4 energy crisis (and that OECD figures are similar for the advanced capitalist world).
31. There are, thus, sections in the 'Fragment', notably at the point where Marx uses the expression 'general intellect' (706), which seern to present technology more as a generic human creation, an almost pure knowledge "” the product of the 'human hand' and the 'human brain' "” than as a functional product of specific (and, in capital, exploitative) social relations.
32. 'Socialized worker' is a translation of operaio sociale, sometimes also translated as 'diffuse worker' and 'social worker'.
33. The broader argument of Empire concerning the history and contemporary forms of global governance is beyond the scope of this chapter.
34. Negri traces this development as a direct response by capital to the effective power of the mass worker (cf. 1988b: 212-16).
35. Hardt and Negri (1994: 280"”1) give a fuller definition: 'living labor is manifest above all as abstract and immaterial labor (with regard to quality), as complex and cooperative labor (with regard to quantity), and as labor that is continually more intellectual and scientific (with regard to form). This is not reducible to simple labor "” on the contrary, there is a continually greater convergence in techno-scientific labor of artificial languages, complex articulations of cybernetics and systems theory, new epistemological paradigms, immaterial determinations, and communicative machines. This labor is social because the general conditions of the vital process (of production and reproduction) pass under its control and are remodelled in conformity with it.'
36. '[T]he more production becomes immaterial and the more it is socialized, the more labour becomes autonomous from capitalist command' (Hardt and Negri, in Brown et al. 2002:205).
37. Negri (1989: 78) describes this communicational network of activity/work as both a Foucauldian 'spatial universe' and a site of Habermassian 'communicative action'. The premise of Foucault's work is of course that micro-powers infuse the social as its very basis of constitution (cf. Foucault 1980: 94). The degrees of intensity and complexity of this are such that, contra Habermas, any talk of pure communication is a theoretical fiction (or, put another way, itself a product of a particular conjunction of power/knowledge). For Negri to utilize Foucault's image of proliferating networks as constituting a possibility for communism as an equality in communication is thus, to say the least, problematic. The idea that communism is collective control over a purified language resurfaces in Empire where Habermas is again deployed, only this time he is seen as presenting the possibilities of communicative action in a too limited fashion: '[Habermas] grants the liberated functions of language and communication only to individual and isolated segments of society' (Hardt and Negri 2000: 404).
38. Negri sees this process as an overcoming of the law of value, interpreted as a quantitative relation between labour time and price, and its replacement with a law of command' (Negri 1991a: 172; cf. also Hardt and Negri 2000: 357-8, 401). This is a reductive interpretation of the law of value, which, as Elson (1979) argues, should not be seen as a question of the price of a commodity, but of the form labour takes in capital. However, in so far as Negri suggests that production becomes determined by social needs (rather than the capitalist need for productive work) he seems to have dropped both a limited and a full concept of the law of value.
39. Exploring Empire's very confusing sense of the relation between Empire, multitude, and biopolitical production, Moreiras (2001: 225) provocatively asks of the clothes company Zara (which operates in a decentralized, flexible manner in direct relation to consumer desire and without the exploitation of third world labour), 'what keeps Zara from understanding itself as an instance of counter-Empire? And what would keep us from suspecting that there is finally no difference between Empire and counter-Empire, once immanentization has run full course?' One suspects that Hardt and Negri interpret the apparent coming to immanence of production and desire in contemporary biopolitical production ('In the new modes of life, in an ever larger domain, labour becomes desire'; Hardt and Negri, in Brown et al. 2002: 205) as the impending arrival of what Deleuze and Guattari see as the condition of the 'new earth', when desiring-product ion and labour-power finally manifest their unity of substance in 'production in general and without distinction (something capital discovers, but continually realienates) (ACE: 302), hence Hardt and Negri's ambivalence over the affirmation or critique of Empire that is the focus of Moreiras' essay. The emphasis in contemporary work on the drawing-in of desire to work (as a means of overcoming the 'crisis of work' of the 1960s and 70s; cf. Virno 1996c; Heelas 2002) is a crucial site for contemporary research, but, as Moreiras' example highlights, it is problematic indeed to see desire as somehow set free in this arrangement (desire, after all, always invests the socius - and its identities, arrangements, objects, and horrors - in some fashion).
40. Though this discussion focuses on Negri's more recent elaboration of the socialized worker, it is worth noting that in his early exploration of the socialized worker's tendency toward autonomy (in, for example, Negri 1979a) it is less self-management than political violence and 'armed struggle' which becomes the mechanism for shrugging off an external capitalist command.
41. By moving toward an affirmation of the current composition of life as communist, Negri also starts to sound like the 'planning' perspective critiqued by Panzieri. Whilst, no doubt, certain forms of general intellect-rich labour are composed of more diffuse and complex attributes and forces that far exceed the limited form of composition of factory work, as Bifo (1980: 168) writes, 'it would be simplistic to conclude that the revolution . . . needs to substitute a Leninist seizure of Knowledge for a Leninist seizure of the State. The problem is in reality much more complicated, since not only the properties and use of Knowledge, but also its structure, are determined by its capitalist functioning.'

42. See the exchange between Negri and Derrida on this point in Sprinker (1999).
43. 'Communication society' is in this essay Negri's term for Deleuze's model of 'control society' (cf. Negri 1992:105). Deleuze's expression 'control' clearly brings pejorative connotations to an understanding of a system (where communication is indeed prevalent) that Negri would prefer to elide, as is evident in his question. Though in Empire control emerges to an apparently central place, as the book develops it seems to become subsumed in the category of 'Empire', which itself becomes increasingly 'empty'. When Deleuze and Guattari (ATP: 460) write of the return of 'empire' ('modern States of the third age do indeed restore the most absolute of empires'), it is immanent to the most intricate control.
44. In Empire Hardt and Negri (2000: 28) suggest that Deleuze and Guattari 'discover the productivity of social reproduction . . . but manage to articulate it only superficially and ephemerally'.
45. That said, it is only after the arrival of capital that, as was also the case for Marx, the possibility of approaching a 'universal history' emerges, for the deterritorialization actualized by capital (as it discovers and sets free abstract labour) is revealed to be the limit that all previous socii' sought to ward off (ACE: 153). As Holland (1999) considers in detail, it is on this precondition that it is possible for life in capital to perform an autocritique towards the full development of universal or world history, whose subject "” akin to Marx's communist overcoming "” would be molecular life, where 'Nature = Industry = History' (ACE: 25; cf. Holland 1999: 95,111).
46. Thus Deleuze and Guattari are fully in accord with Marx's description of capital in the Manifesto: 'Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober faces his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind' (Marx and Engels 1973: 36-7).
47. For Marx's account of the centrality and novelty of the quest for 'wealth itself in disrupting all previous modes of community (and the denunciation of such practice in antiquity for fear of this very potential) see Marx (1973a: 540"”1).
48. This 'double movement' is presented in Anti-Oedipus (259) thus: 'In Capital Marx analyzes the true reason for the double movement: on the one hand, capitalism can proceed only by continually developing the subjective essence of abstract wealth or production for the sake of production, that is, "production as an end in itself, the absolute development of the social productivity of labor"; but on the other hand and at the same time, it can do so only in the framework of its own limited purpose, as a determinate mode of production, "production of capital", "the self-expansion of existing capital.'"
49. In this Marxian sense, money is first and foremost not a mechanism of exchange, but of command and management of social labour. For an explanation of this point, and a series of analyses of the politics of money that follow from it, see Bonefeld and Holloway (1996).
50. Massumi (1992: 128-9) explains this well: 'Capital functions directly through incorporeal transformation, without having to step down or up to another level . . . Capital can be given an image - in fact it must have one in order to act - but it is imageless as such. It is a body without organs. In other words, a network of virtual relations, a selection of which is immediately actualized at ground level wherever one of capitalism's working images (organs) goes. These images are conveyances (components of passage). They bring to designated bodies at each spatiotemporal coordinate through which they circulate a relation that fundamentally changes those bodies' social and physical reality. That relation is capital as an immanent social agency.'

51. The term 'bourgeoisie' is used because it is the dominant class, or axiomatic model of smooth-running capital "” the mechanism of identity formation that functions to realize and fix the super-adequacy of life in capitalist forms. This notion that the bourgeoisie is not a social group but a particular mode of composition immanent to capital explains Deleuze's argument (in Guattari 1995a: 65) that the bourgeoisie 'has never been revolutionary'. Even in the emergence of capital, it is the name for one side of the double movement of capital "” the immanent control of the forces that the other side "” production for production's sake "” sets loose.
52. This investment in the capitalist socius, as fundamental to identity as it is (since that which is invested produces the identity and its investment in the first place), is the basis for Deleuze and Guattari's crucial assertion that the question of support for, and critique of, the status quo resides not in one's 'interest', but in one's 'desire', or libidinal investment. Since we are all, as Guattari (1996a: 101"”15) puts it, 'machinic junkies', Anti-Oedipus asks, how can one not invest in the great mutant flow of capitalism?: 'a pure joy in feeling oneself a wheel in the machine, traversed by flows, broken by schizzes. Placing oneself in a position where one is thus traversed, broken, fucked by the socius, looking for the right place where, according to the aims and the interests assigned to us, one feels something moving that has neither an interest nor a purpose ... a taste for a job well done' (ACE: 346-7).
53. 'There is no ideology, there are only organizations of power once it is admitted that the organization of power is the unity of desire and the economic infrastructure.' For example, 'The church is perfectly pleased to be treated as an ideology. This can be argued; it feeds ecumenism. But Christianity has never been an ideology; it's a very original, very specific organization of power that has assumed diverse forms since the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages' (Deleuze, in Guattari 1995a: 57"”8).
54. It is Burroughs' delirious fascination with the intricacies of controlling techniques "” from word locks to Nova police, the atom bomb to the Mayan calendar and psychoanalytic and hypnotic suggestion "” and his fully social, even cosmic understanding of the plane of composition of power which, one can imagine, inspires Deleuze.
55. Incidentally, Deleuze (1995a: 51) calls this text 'completely marxist'.
56. Guattari (1984) identified this tendency in the mid-1970s in the context of the break-up of the psychiatric hospital. '[W]hat. . . strikes me', Guattari says, 'is that all the great repressive organizations like schools or army, which used to consist of a single institutional whole, are now tending to become fragmented and scattered all over the place .. . {V}ery soon everyone will become his own mini-instrument of repression, his own school, his own army . . . [T]he policy of community psychiatry and psychoanalysis (and the two are now closely related) corresponds to the most sophisticated technocratic forms of population surveillance and control' (48). It is interesting, given Guattari's complex relation to Lacan, that he identifies 'Lacanism' "” with its 'mathematico-linguistic' model of the unconscious and its subtle and incorporeal mechanisms of analysis "” as 'A testing-ground, an advance technology, the prototype of [these] new forms of power': 'The psychoanalyst of today doesn't say a word to his patient. Such a system of channelling the libido has been achieved that silence is all that is needed' (50).
57. My use of the term 'cybernetic' here is slightly problematic, for in Deleuze and Guattari's (ACE: 251"”2) assessment it is too mechanical a model, too reliant on 'isolated formulas'. The axiomatic generally - and this tendency is only increased in control "” operates as a more subtle series of 'intuitions' and 'resonances' with a plethora of decisions, administrations, predictions, reactions, and inscriptions, for which more technical concretizations are only aids. That said, Guattari and Alliez (in Guattari 1984: 285) describe this model of production as 'cybernetic capital'.

58. It is for this reason that Guattari (1984: 259) writes that 'Kafka is not, as some have said, a nineteenth-century writer imprisoned in family conflicts. He is a twenty-first-century writer describing the earliest stages of a process whose implications we are barely beginning to grasp today.'
59. The importance of business as an abstract form concretely embodied in varied spheres is stressed in a number of examples: TV game-shows are said to be popular 'because they're a perfect reflection of the way businesses are run' (N: 179), continuing education and continuous assessment are 'the surest way of turning education into a business' (179), and 'Even art has moved away from closed sites and into the open circuits of banking' (181). This 'business' or 'enterprise' model is also put forward by Negri as central to what he calls in pit-Empire work, the 'crisis-state'. As with Deleuze, this is a form of control that arises with the collapse of distinct enclosure, and of the normalizing regulation of labour through Keynesian wage/productivity tie-ins. In ever more fluid productive space, the 'enterprise' comes to be the site of productivity across the social as a modulating capture of energies that is able to remove the stabilities of large-scale production and compose forms of identity and self-control in varying and changing fashion: 'The key control mechanism in this transformation is the enterprise, in the sense that it extends the norms of factory-command over work to the whole social labour time' (Negri 1988c: 123).
60. Clearly aware of the centrality to Marx's overall system of his argument that machines cannot create value, Anti-Oedipus' assertion of machinic surplus value is couched in what Deleuze and Guattari rather self-consciously call a deliberate 'indispensable incompetence'. This is a ruse they take from Maurice Clavel's apparent use of 'wilfully incompetent questions' to Marxist economists concerning the credibility of the centrality of human surplus value in the face of the productive power of machines (ACE: 232), but they situate their 'incompetence' around the question of the 'surplus value of flux' which, as I am arguing, is in accord with the essential logic of the labour theory of value.
61. Making a similar point, Diane Elson (1979: 123) has argued that 'the object of Marx's theory of value was labour. It is not a matter of seeking an explanation of why prices are what they are and finding it in labour. But rather of seeking an understanding of why labour takes the forms it does, and what the political consequences are.'
62. Though Deleuze and Guattari (ACE: 492) suggest that machinic surplus value emerges 'less and less by the striation of space-time corresponding to the physicosocial concept of work' we have seen already how 'business' becomes a pervasive model for an increasingly subdivided and diffuse 'productivity', and hence I would suggest that they are here using the word 'work' in a limited, descriptive sense (something like the Keynesian 'job') rather than in a machinic sense. In the sense in which this book defines work in abstract terms as the axiomatized reterritorialization of human practice immanent to the capitalist mission of production for production's sake, the extension of machinic enslavement is simultaneously an extension of work (cf. ATP: 400"”1).
63. Guattari (1996a: 206) thus suggests that 'The recasting of the quantification of value based on work-time won't be, as Marx assumed, the privilege of a classless society.'
64. Notably the essay overplays the reduction of work time as a measure of value (since the quantification of labour, however impossible it is to really measure individual contribution, is still fundamental to the capitalist valuation and axiomatization of life) and suggests that the concept of 'average social labour' is an abstraction inappropriate for an understanding of the concrete practices of labour (when in fact it is central to an understanding of the processes of abstraction necessary for unbounded productivity, as I explored above through Anti-Oedipus).

65. See Terranova (2000) for an examination of internet labour in similar terms.
66. 'The sales department becomes a business centre or "soul" . . . Marketing is now the instrument of social control and produces the arrogant breed who are our masters' (N: 181).
67. Massumi (1996) provides an example of a study of children's experience of a TV film where non-verbal bodily response, even as it contradicted verbal response, was used as the basis for judgement of the affective content of the image.
68. This primacy of machinic arrangements, as against a framework based on the demarcation of human and technical elements, is clear in Paolo Virno's (1996b: 22) characterization of contemporary production: 'In contemporary labor processes there are entire conceptual constellations that function by themselves as productive "machines", without ever having to adopt either a mechanical body or an electronic brain.'
69. As Rose (1999b: 483) argues in his discussion of the 'etho-politics' of the political and governmental imaginary of the 'Third Way', we have a model of the human actor that is 'no longer the nineteenth-century economic subject of interests but an entrepreneur of his- or her-self, striving to maximize his or her own human capital by choices which are, as it were, investments for the purpose of the capitalization of one's own existence.'
70. Fox Piven and Cloward (1972: 6"”7) draw attention to the historical problem of unemployment which the JSA and the New Deal are the latest attempts to overcome: 'The regulation of civil behavior in all societies is intimately dependent on stable occupational arrangements. So long as people are fixed in their work roles, their activities and outlooks are also fixed . . . Each behavior and attitude is shaped by the reward of a good harvest or the penalty of a bad one, by the factory paycheck or the danger of losing it. But mass unemployment breaks that bond, loosening people from the main institution by which they are regulated and controlled. Moreover, mass unemployment that persists for any length of time diminishes the capacity of other institutions to bind and constrain people . . . [W]ithout work, people cannot conform to familial and communal roles; and if the dislocation is widespread, the legitimacy of the social order itself may come to be questioned.' It is with this in mind that Walters (1994) has shown how the 'invention' of unemployment "” loosely fitting with the diagram of discipline "” and its institutional apparatus was a strategy intended to construct a coherent unemployed subject comparable to the employed subject. Contemporary emphasis in neo-liberal governance on an ethically intensive process of 'jobseeking' (where benefit is only paid on the basis that the jobseeker enters into arrangements of self-optimization "” including training and maintenance of acceptable physical appearance "” and continual job application) can be seen as the form of 'unemployment' appropriate to control. And, indeed, the JSA can be seen as a direct response to the breakdown of the disciplinary model of the unemployed subject that became evident "” with the increasing affirmation of unemployment as a space of relative autonomy from work "” under Thatcher and Reagan (cf. Aufheben 1998).

5 The refusal of work

1. The Movement of '77 was the high point of autonomia, characterized by the emergence and politicization of a wealth of marginal practices, feminist struggle, a strong critique of orthodoxy, countercultural experiments, and mass occupations, especially in Rome and Bologna in the spring. The Hot Autumn of '69 was the summit of the autonomous struggles of the students and the mass workers in the Northern factories. See Bifo (1980), Bologna (1980b), Lumley (1990), and Wright (2002) for histories of these movements.

2. The complexity of this formation is visually exemplified by a flow diagram that appeared in L'Espresso of the development of the extra-parliamentary left between 1968 and 1977. Tracing independent and intersecting lines for anarchists, Leninists, Trotskyists, situationists, and Bordighists, and their various journals and political groupings, the diagram resorts to the illustrative technique of an amorphous bubble to map the area of autonomia (in Red Notes 1979: 204"”5).
3. It should be noted that Moulier (1989: 21) suggests that this mode of engagement was not without its problems "” notably in the persistent use of Leninist vocabulary which, whilst certainly changed in meaning in the hands of operaismo, was something of a problematic feature of this current, particularly in its understanding of organization and armed struggle.
4. Though they also offer considerably more than the self-management thesis, the main figures here are Pannekoek, Gorter, and Rühle "” those who Lenin (1965) described as manifesting the 'infantile disorder' of left communism.
5. For this perspective see Barrot (1987), Camatte (1995), Dauvé and Martin (1997), and International Communist Current (1992). For critical overviews see Antagonism (2001) and Aufheben (1999).
6. As Antagonism (2001: 8) puts it: 'The council communists put faith in "the workers themselves" and tended to assume that communism was immanent in all workplace struggles.'
7. Dauvé ('Leninism and the Ultra-Left' in Dauvé and Martin 1997) argues that the ultra-left's assertion of the centrality of the 'workers themselves' (against the Leninist party) ultimately only affirms one subject of capitalist relations, 'the workers', against another, 'the capitalists', because it posits its critique on the terrain of 'management' rather than on production. Assertion and fear of the party (Leninism and ultra-leftism respectively) are thus false problems, and mirror images of each other, which overemphasize the 'form' of the communist movement against its 'content' which is the organic product of the capitalist mode of production itself (which was where Marx's few comments on the party as a product of the 'real movement' are located).
8. Such an interpretation of 'self-management' is amply evident in Katsiaficas's (1997) book on European 'autonomous movements', including autonomia, which argues that 'our natural tendencies to favour equality and love freedom' are enabled in a self-management (as against vanguard politics) that lets the 'I' speak forth (239). Though the movements that Katsiaficas discusses are primarily a product of large industrial and post-industrial cities (the very precondition of metropolitan squatting, for example), he wants to distil their essence (sometimes, it has to be said, with the aid of the pronouncements of some of these movements themselves) to a naturalized humanity. He suggests, for example, that, against Haraway's 'cyborg' figure, a 'role of movement participation is to preserve and expand the domain of the heart in social relations "” of all that is uniquely human, all that stands opposed to machine culture' (238).
9. The affirmation of the Lip occupation as an exemplary moment of revolutionary struggle (no doubt seized upon after the disillusionment of the post-'68 period) is evident in the conclusions "” which contain no hint of irony "” of one British pamphlet on the subject: '[Lip] is exemplary because for the first time in many years the working class has attacked, in deeds not just in words, the roots of capitalist society: private property, control and distribution of the means of production and consumption. What is also radical is that, as a result of the
methods of action used, a factory has been functioning for 2 months without the boss. The workers started up production again, they sold, and they paid themselves' (Lip 1973: 10).

10. Negations critique is, of course, not at the level of political accusation against the workers, who, given the isolated nature of the struggle and the impending withdrawal of their means of subsistence were in many ways compelled by the social configuration into this practice.
11. With the Lip case in mind, Antagonism (2001: 11) argue that 'Self-management operates ... as a weapon of capitalist crisis management.' '[A]s a measure that is often introduced in unprofitable, failing companies, by workers trying to prevent closure and their own unemployment, self-management often entails a higher level of exploitation than a normal business. The workers "freely choose" (under pressure from the market) to work harder for less money, in order to keep the enterprise going.'
12. Such predictions actually go as far back as antiquity. In response to Cicero's and Aristotle's propositions that machines could overcome work, Marx (1976: 532) writes: 'Oh those heathens! They understood nothing of political economy and Christianity.'
13. Two anecdotes can make the point. An advertisement for a leading cold and influenza remedy that appeared in the London Underground in the winter of 1997/8 displayed some of the imperatives and pernicious mechanisms of work when it asked: 'What sort of person goes to work with the flu?', and gave the response: 'The one after your job.' Elsewhere, the intensification of work which accompanied the growth of flexible production techniques was such that the Japanese were induced to coin a new word "” 'karoshi' "” to describe a condition of death through overwork (cf. Kamunist Kranti 1997).
14. The way that this naturalization appears to have been eased by the Labour Party's historical relations to a socialist tradition (with the return of 'Old Labour' talk of full employment, the right to work, and a community of workers) exemplifies a little of the mainstream left's uncritical relation to the category 'work'.
15. In a 1987 conversation with Pope John Paul II, the Polish leader General Jaruzelski proposed that the common ground between East and West was not the Eastern block's movement toward capitalism, but the affirmation of what he called 'the Theology of Work' (cited in Hunnicutt 1988: 314-15). But such a perspective on work was not limited to Stalinism. Trotsky's 'militarization of labour' is a useful example since Trotsky has retained a popular image of being on the left of Marxism. As is clearly evident in this passage, in Trotsky's socialism there is to be no reduction in work: 'Under capitalism, the system of piece-work and of grading, the application of the Taylor system, etc., have as their object to increase the exploitation of the workers by the squeezing-out of surplus value. Under Socialist production, piece-work, bonuses, etc., have as their problem to increase the volume of socialist product, and consequently to raise the general well-being. Those workers who do more for the general interest than others receive the right to a greater quantity of the social product than the lazy, the careless, and the disorganizers' (1961: 149).
16. Lafargue's essay, as far as I know, is the first to explicitly emphasize the critique of work as the basis of a communist politics within a Marx-informed communist milieu. In a broader sense, the critique of work of course emerges earlier than this. As Illich (1981) has argued, work itself is a modern capitalist invention (cf. also ATP: 400"”1, 490"”1). The problems with generalizing sweeps through history aside, Illich argues that for the classical Greeks and Romans work done with the hands was a more lowly practice than begging (not, of course, that this prevented slaves and women doing it), and through the Middle Ages wage labour (as against
household subsistence, certain trades such as shoe making, and begging) was a sign of misery and lack of community. In the emergence of modern capitalism it took considerable effort to turn peasants and vagabonds into the proletariat (cf Linebaugh 1991; Marx 1976: 899; Thompson 1967). In the politics of modern capitalism itself, Lafargue was by no means the first to raise the issue; anti-work perspectives and practices were a persistent feature of slave resistance (cf. Rawick 1972), and were prevalent amongst other elements of the transatlantic working class (cf. Linebaugh and Rediker 1990, 2000).

17. It is noteworthy that the politics of the refusal of work has often emerged from movements seeking to overcome the neat demarcation between workers' politics, counterculture, and artistic practice. That said, as journals like Aufheben, Midnight Notes, and Zerowork have sought to highlight, the refusal of work is a persistent feature of global workers' struggle, and hence should not be seen only through this rather Euro-American lens.
18. For accounts of the refusal of work in these movements and currents see, respectively, Thoburn (forthcoming), Huelsenbeck (1966), Thirion (1929), Knabb (1981), Hoffman (1996), Rubin (1970), Neville (1971), Cleaver (1970), Linebaugh and Ramirez (1975), Gambino (1976), Carpignano (1975), Échanges et Mouvement (1979), Rothbart (1978), Gilroy (1987: 199-203), Hall et al. (1978), Howe (1973), 'After Marx, April' Collective (1981), Aufheben (1998), Bad Attitude (1995), Carr (1975: 54-5), Kenyon (1972), Unwaged Fightback (1987) and Job Shirkers Alliance (n.d.).
19. A photograph of this graffiti ('Never Work') appeared in Internationale Situationniste no. 8 1963 (IS 1970), with the heading 'Preliminary program to the Situationist movement', and it reappeared in the Sorbonne in May '68 (Pagès 1998: 36). Much of the elaboration of the refusal of work in these smaller groups and journals has developed from some relation to the politics of the SI, but the best of it is part of a movement of overcoming the SI's contradictory position, highlighted by Dauvé (2000: 48), of affirming the critique of work on the one hand, whilst advocating workers' councils on the other.
20. This is something of a sine qua non for autonomist theory. Midnight Notes (1981: 1), for example, reiterate the principle thus: 'our struggles against capital are its only motors for development. This is not a picture of some pure defeat in which the harder we struggle the more perfect capital's dominion; rather, the struggles that develop in one mix of living and dead labor, in one social arrangement of exploitation, force the specific arrangement to collapse. A crisis ensues. In the labyrinth of the crisis, capital can only find its way by following the working class and trying to devour it at the exit.'
21. Negri's essay on Keynes (in Negri 1988a), where Keynesianism (productivity/pay tie-ins, the welfare state, the general interest of labour) is presented as the capitalist response to the Soviet revolution, is the classic example of research premised upon the reversal of perspective.
22. Hardt and Negri (in Hardt et al. 2002: 189) present the relation to the reversal of perspective "” of 'proletarian class struggle as an autonomous and creative power' "” as the fundamental marker of any Marxist and materialist politics' efficacy.
23. Against what he presents as a 'weak version' of the reversal of perspective - that capital is a reaction to working-class struggle "” Holloway (1995: 163) argues, in a fashion that has influenced my argument here, that a 'stronger version would be that capital is nothing other than the product of the working class and therefore depends, from one minute to another, upon the working class for its reproduction'. For Holloway, the working class, then, is not an external force outside and against capital, but a force 'against-and-in' capital.
24. That this position is compatible with Tronti's general framework is marked by Deleuze (1988: 89, 144) when he considers the later Foucault. At this point -
when Deleuze discerns that Foucault's resistance changes from a reactive practice to a 'folding' of undetermined force "” he suggests that we see an 'echo' of Tronti's reversal of perspective; that is, Deleuze brings Tronti into the same framework of a rich understanding of the forces of politics.

25. As Marx and Engels (1974: 49) put it: 'the satisfaction of the first need (the action of satisfying, and the instrument of satisfaction which has been acquired) leads to new needs; and this production of new needs is the first historical act'.
26. This was at a time of a mass of austerity measures, instituted in 1976 by the Andreotti government and backed and often implemented by the PCI (which had control of municipalities like Bologna) and the unions. By the beginning of 1977 there was acute economic hardship, with 25 per cent inflation and unprecedented unemployment (1,700,000 officially). Giorgio Amendola, secretary of the PCI, wrote in 1976 of the austerity measures: 'it would be wrong ... to view . . . sacrifices as "concessions" given to the capitalists and the government . . . On the contrary, the sacrifices are necessary in order to serve primarily the interests of the working class by pulling the country out of crisis: so that the young might find employment, for the betterment of the living conditions of the people etc' (cited in Semiotext(e) 1980: 91).
27. According to Lumley (1990: 31, 209), between 1951 and 1961 77 per cent of the 1,439,013 rise in population of the Northern industrial triangle was the result of immigration. In stressing the importance of immigrant workers in the 1969 struggles, one member of Lotta Continua suggested that something like 75 per cent of FIAT's workforce were immigrant workers (in Red Notes 1979: 184).
28. FIAT, for example, used complex vetting procedures involving local police and priests to keep out troublemakers (Abse 1985: 12).
29. Platania (1979: 176) writes: 'I couldn't understand the Communist Party blokes in the factory. They made it a point of honour never to be faulted in their work by the foreman.'
30. This expression originated in one of the first big struggles of the mass worker to extend beyond the factory walls, the events of Corso Traiano in July 1969, when a union-organized strike in the Turin FIAT plants Mirafiori and Rivalta extended beyond its formal structure to end in a day of street-fighting. 'What Do We Want? We Want Everything!' was written on a poster on one of the barricades (cf. Red Notes 1978: 191-3).
31. One worker describes the process: 'it was enough that you struck for half an hour in the morning and the same in the evening to make the mechanism break down. When you strike, you go around as pleased as punch and you can't be stopped . . . When you are busy with a "chequer-board" action not even the gatekeepers manage to understand the comings-and-goings . . . The damage to the bosses was enormous, unlike in the case of pre-organized strikes of previous years . . . It was the expression of mass creativity and inventiveness' (cited in Lumley 1990: 228).
32. The diversity of experience of the emarginati is evidenced at a formal level by the myriad terms used to describe the socio-political position of these groups. Thus as well as the unemployed, feminists, and emarginati, Lumley (1990: 341) lists: emergent groups (ceti emergent?), proletarian youth (giovani proletari), minorities (minoranze), the unprotected (non garantiti), the precarious (precari), and plebeians (plebe). That we are clearly on a terrain of ambiguity rather than distinct identity is evident in an article in Primo Maggio in 1977 which stated that this group 'seems not to have any objective, material reality' and yet that it comes together precisely 'through a denial of its own material condition (the position of being casual labour, lump labour, students etc)' (in Red Notes 1978: 41).
33. Bologna reports that Foucault had some influence on autonomia: 'Certainly the '77 Movement and several of these intellectuals linked to Autonomia had read Foucault, especially, with great passion. They identified more with Foucault, sometimes, than with Marx or Lenin, and this is obviously very important. A discussion was opened.' Foucault (1996: 93), for his part, expressed something of the emarginati's position in a panel discussion in the early "70s: 'what if it is the mass that marginalizes itself? That is, if it is precisely the proletariat and the young proletarians that refuse the ideology of the proletariat?'

34. This position was not only held by the orthodox left. The British journal of the International Communist Current (which situates itself in some relation to the German, Dutch, and Italian left communist currents), expressed its opinion of this 'swamp' in no uncertain terms: 'Today people talk about the "Area of Autonomy" rather than Workers' Autonomy. The milieu has turned into a somewhat grimy froth composed of all kind of petty-bourgeois fringe groups, from students to street theatre performers, from feminists to marginally employed teachers, ail of them united in exalting their own "specificity" and in frantically rejecting the working class as the only revolutionary class of our epoch . . . Contrary to what is written in the bourgeois press, these marginal movements do not represent the Hundred Flowers of a revolutionary spring: they are simply some of the thousand and one purulent snares of this degenerating society' (Beyle 1979: 20).
35. See Castellano in Semiotext(e) (1980: 229-30) for discussion of the tendency of elements in autonomia to develop a fetishized self-representation of exclusion and marginalization.
36. See Caffentzis (1975) for a detailed analysis of the changing composition and politics of American students as they similarly became more internal to the social factory.
37. Thus, Bologna (in Red Notes 1978: 97) writes: 'I do not at all share the definition of "marginalisation" which is being given to the mass of people who have been in the forefront of the struggle in the Universities this week. In particular I do not believe that there exists, in Italy, an area of society that is radically excluded from the relations of production.'
38. The possibilities for inverting the meaning of 'untorelli' were not lost on the emarginati, who sought, in a sense, to affirm their 'plague-bearing' relation to the society of austerity and work (cf. Recherches 1977). This inversion of naming has not been uncommon amongst radical movements. A recent example is the appropriation of the word casseur (literally wrecker or hooligan) by the student and beur movement in France in 1994 (cf. Nous sommes tous des casseurs n.d.) which replicates the sense of the May '68 slogan used after the deportation of Cohn-Bendit as an 'undesirable German Jew': 'Nous sommes tous des indésirables', 'Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands' (cf. Rohan 1988: 110"”11).
39. Virno's sense of the use of the resistance and desire of the '70s to develop a new regime of production is, then, different from Negri's in that he does not see this as a new plane of autonomous production.
40. This is an interesting example of the strong sense of complexity these groups embodied: 'The idea came up almost by chance. We were pondering over time, on the many types of woman's time: on work time and love time, on "free" time and "liberated" time, on research time. One of us put forward the idea of having an hourglass on the cover, an ancient instrument of time keeping. Then musical time came to mind, perhaps just by playing on words. Someone else suggested putting the score of a Schonberg piece on the cover, a piece called "All in due time". Later, we were not able to trace that score. In the meantime we had started discussing Schonberg, whom some of us loved, some did not, and others knew little about. It seemed that the contrasting readings offered on Schonberg were relevant to us: the drama of dissolution of tonality and the ultimate failure in the attempt to construct a new musical norm, said somebody. Others did not agree. Atonality and 12"”tone music, breakdown of the old order and the impossibility of a "spontaneous" and non-painful journey towards a new order of things' (cited in Magale l980: 137).

41. The Wages for Housework campaign emerged with Lotta Feminista in the 1972 Programmatic Manifesto of Housewives in the Neighbourhood (cf. Bono and Kemp 1991; Edmond and Fleming 1975; Federici 1982; Fortunati 1995; and, for some of the heated debate about this current, Malos 1982). I am only considering the early theory of this campaign, as an aspect of the area of autonomia, not assessing its subsequent development.
42. This analysis resonates with Deleuze and Guattari's (ACE) analysis of the family in the capitalist socius. Deleuze and Guattari argue that it is precisely when the family ceases to be an autonomous model of production and reproduction "” as the capitalist socius comes directly to take on the relations of alliance and filiation as all identities become formed through the axiomatization of abstract flows "” that its privatization and naturalization 'outside' of capital becomes most necessary: 'Precisely because it is privatized, placed outside the field, the form of the material or the form of human reproduction begets people whom one can readily assume to be all equal in relation to one another; but inside the field itself, the form of social economic reproduction has already preformed the form of the material so as to engender, there where they are needed, the capitalist as a function derived from capital, and the worker as a function derived from labor capacity, etc.' (263).
43. It is notable in this context that Haraway (1991: 166) describes the contemporary global 'homework economy' "” in a formulation not dissimilar to the general thesis of the social factory "” as a now generalized 'feminization' of work.
44. See Comitati autonomi operai di Roma (1976) for two leaflets advocating autoreduction of service bills.
45. Lama and Cossiga were prominent union and PCI figures.
46. See Morris (1978: 70) and Red Notes (1978: 57) for two of these leaflets, and É
47. il '77 (1977) and Grimshaw and Gardner (1977: 16) for images of 'Metropolitan Indians'. Such a move was not, of course, characteristic of the whole movement, and neither was it always popular. The intervention of A/traverso's Bifo in the September 1977 Conference on Repression (by letter from exile in France), which began with the expression 'We have to go against the stream even when the stream is going against the stream', was greeted by at least one of the audience with dismay, and an assertion of the need to communicate with the masses with simplicity and immediacy (cf. Kunzle 1980: 115-16).
48. See also the mao-dadaist parody of the 'right to work', 'Work makes you free and beautiful' (in Morris 1978: 70), and A/traverso in Guattari (1984: 238-40).
49. Downing (1980: 204) reports that in June 1978 there were an estimated 2,275 radio stations and 503 television stations spread fairly evenly across the population centres of the country. Radio Alice transmitted from 9 February 1976 until 12 March 1977, using an old military transmitter located in two rooms of an apartment building in a residential area of Bologna (cf. Cowan 1978; Grimshaw and Gardner 1977).
50. In his critique of the Movement of '77, Umberto Eco suggested that Radio Alice was not being quite honest about the avant-gardist and academic origin of its mao-dadaism (1977a: 116), that Anti-Oedipus and its 'metaphor' of desiring machines needed to be read seriously, not reduced to easy slogans (116), and that the workers did not really understand (1977b: 126) and were using a 'laboratory language' in a (by implication, dangerous) practical fashion (1994: 172). Bifo and Pasquini (1977) responded by insisting on the relation of their practice to the wider political movement and the refusal of work: 'In Eco's article, everything could be reduced to a little abstract game between Norm and Violation . . . But this is to forget that behind this transgression of the Norm and the gestural and linguistic transformation there is a practical, collective, subject, which produced behaviour and signs capable of violating the codes of interpretation precisely because the social practice of the subject is capable of violating that productivist code of sacrificing a lifetime to an exploitative society' (cited in Morris 1978: 69). For Bifo and Pasquino (1977: 135) it was not the workers who did not understand (indeed, they argued that the workers were practising 'mao-dadaism' in their struggles at FIAT Mirafiori), but the bourgeoisie, or 'pale faces'.

51. 'During the months of spring"”summer '75, a new subject, the young proletarian, appeared on the scene, no longer with the old frames of reference of the avant-garde, a subject which moved in a certain transversal fashion through the separate orders, not reducible to the categories of politics, and therefore immediately reduced (by the reformists and fascists) to the categories of criminology, of psychiatry, of sociology, of spectacle' (Collectif A/traverso 1977: 89-90; my translation).
52. In this project A/traverso were directly influenced by Deleuze and Guattari's formulation of the minor, and the Collectif A/traverso (1977: 67"”72) collection includes a precis of the minor literature thesis. In turn, Guattari's experience of Radio Alice encouraged him to contribute to the development of free radio in France, though, without a similarly radicalized milieu, the movement was quickly subsumed in more molar media forms.
53. Guattari (1996a: 74"”5) continues: 'We are far, very far, from the technocratic conceptions of the French partisans of local radio, who insist, on the contrary, that those who express themselves on radio represent their particular interests; or from the conceptions of the traditional left which is concerned above all that nothing more than the party line and certain mobilizing propositions be expressed on their wavelengths.' '[S]uch an assumption of direct speech by social groups . . . fundamentally endangers traditional systems of social representation, it puts in doubt a certain conception of the delegate, the representative, the authorized spokesman, the leader, the journalist... In these conditions, one can expect certain truths to find a new matter of expression.'
54. An article in Primo Maggio reported that no sooner had Alice come on air than it was able to mobilize 2,000 people for a musical jam session, and that it had an average listening audience of 30,000 (in Red Notes 1978: 41).
55. The closure of Radio Alice was part of the general repression of autonomia. This repression took a complex path, and a full account is far beyond the scope of this chapter. Nevertheless, a little needs to be said. In the judicial procedures and criminal prosecutions, the complex and mutating area of autonomia was converted into a hierarchical and organized body in a degree of efficiency that would no doubt confirm Debord's (1983: 19) assessment that Italy at this time was 'the most modern laboratory of international counter-revolution'. Central to the process was the deployment of the Red Brigades (BR) as a kind of consolidating 'agent' enabling the solidification of identity-forming regimes across the movement. The BR was always a rather orthodox workerist formation, and, with its movement from the factories to the politics of 'carry the attack to the heart of the State', it became increasingly spectacular and functional to the repression of the social movement. As Sanguinetti (1982) argues, the question of whether the BR was aided by the secret services "” which would fit with secret state practice since the 1969"”73/4 'strategy of tension' of aiding or even instituting fascist terrorism "” is better left aside in favour of considering the reactionary effects of the BR's practice. Certainly, the BR's approach was far removed from the diffuse politics of autonomia, as is evident in the Metropolitan Indians' rather astute parody of the BR position with the slogan 'Carry the attack to the heart of the Papacy! All power to the armed vicars!' (in Red Notes 1978: 124). Nevertheless, with the pretext of increased violence, the vague historical links across the whole of the extra-parliamentary movement, and no doubt aided by some of the violent rhetoric and practice of aspects of autonomia and the clandestine bands, the judiciary sought to 'expose' the subterranean links between autonomia and the BR, and prosecute the lot (though many 'repentant' Brigadists received large commutations for implicating, frequently in contradictory ways, elements of autonomia). The specific techniques of identification are described by Lotringer and Marazzi (in Semiotext(e) 1980: 19) as part of a process whereby the state assumed something of its adversary's form: it 'simulated the fluidity characteristic of Autonomy'. In his consideration of the judicial procedure, Deleuze (1980: 182-4) argues that the prosecution overcame two fundamental principles of democratic law: that justice must conform to a principle of 'identifiable consistency' where the content and subject of the charge must have a precise and non-contradictory identity, and that in the committal hearings 'facts' must conform to a principle of 'disjunction and exclusion' ('Either A is the case, or B; if B, then it is not A'; 182). The judiciary thus presented not a distinct series of subjects (in Judge Calogero's theorem there was only one, Potere Operaio = autonomia = Red Brigades) but an 'orgy of identifications' that replicated Anti-Oedipus' inclusive disjunction with a principle of inclusion and accumulation of all contradictions. The fatal proviso was that the construction of the inclusive disjunctive plane served to produce criminal subjects of the law, as the total plane was subdivided into units with responsibility for the whole. Thus, everything from political actions, texts, and archive collections (all of Negri's works and files were trawled through and formed the basis of his prosecution "” see Negri (1988d) for a sobering transcript of the process of the prosecution of ideas) to mysterious telephone calls (the BR's telephone call to Aldo Moro's wife was initially attributed to Negri), and, if we expand beyond Negri's case, to cartoons (a comic strip in Metropoli illustrating the similarity of position between the BR and the state was said to display knowledge of Aldo Moro's kidnap that only the BR could have "” see Semiotext(e) (1980: 300"”14) for the comic strip) were used as points of connection to autonomia/BR. Once 'connected' there was no need to maintain consistency in the charges "” which took simultaneously serious, and vague and nebulous forms such as 'subversive association' and 'insurrection against the powers of the state' - since the specific content could not change the generalized guilt, hence the continual mutation in the charges against the defendants (in a kind of 'endless deferment' that would have made Kafka proud), enabled by the possibility of up to twelve years of preventative detention, the use of witnesses with contradictory testimonies, and the refusal to present the prosecution's evidence to the defendants (cf. Italy '79 Committee 1982; Portelli 1985; Red Notes 1981).

56. Negri's presentation here helps mark his sense of the rather dramatic change in the regimes of contemporary production. It does, however, display a very different sense of the meaning of 'the refusal of work' to his earlier work, and to how I have elaborated the concept in this chapter. As I have argued, the refusal of work is a cramping mechanism for the refusal of workers' plenitude and a compulsion to political activity immanent to capitalist configurations, not a simple 'Luddism', or a refusal of 'command' (as something exterior to work itself). The refusal of work in an age of general intellect and the social individual "” when, for some, affect, communicational competence, and technical expertise have come to the fore "” would not be a 'suicidal' self-destruction, but a critical engagement with the axiomatizing relations immanent to these formations as they are born of, and functional to, capital. There is no reason that the refusal of work is not still valid for this configuration "” so long as one does not see work itself as an expression of autonomous self-production, as Negri seems to.

6 Conclusion: the strange joy of politics

1. Explaining his early mode of engagement with the philosophical canon, Deleuze famously wrote 'I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous' (N: 6).
2. The Internationalist Communist Group (1987: n.p.) put it like this: 'there is no such thing as a "democratic ideal" or, to be more exact . . . the democratic ideal is just the ideal image of the reality of capitalist dictatorship'.
3. In his critique of the 'worthless' thought of the 'new philosophers', Deleuze (1998d: 40"”1) shows how such thinking in the grid of electoral politics serves to close down alternate possibilities and reintroduce a certain state philosophy: 'whatever their position regarding the elections may be, they inscribed themselves perfectly well on the electoral grid. From that position, everything fades away, Marxism, Maoism, socialism, etc., not so much because real struggles would have made new enemies, new problems and new means arise, but because the revolution must be declared impossible, uniformly and for always. This is why all the concepts which were beginning to function in a very differentiated manner (power, resistances, desires, "the plebs" even) are globalized anew, regrouped in an insipid unity of power, the Law, the State, etc'
4. Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 98"”9) write: 'The immense relative deterritorialization of world capitalism needs to be reterritorialized on the modern national State, which finds an outcome in democracy . . .' Showing the essential complementarity of democracy and capital they further challenge any philosophy conceived in terms of 'democratic conversation' as essentially producing concepts as commodities: 'Of course, it may be tempting to see philosophy as an agreeable commerce of the mind, which, with the concept, would have its own commodity, or rather its exchange value . . . If this is what is called philosophy, it is understandable why marketing appropriates the concept and advertising puts itself forward as the conceiver par excellence, as the poet and thinker.'
5. The passage continues in a discussion of rights and theories of democratic consensus, and, for the force of its argument, is worth citing at length: 'Rights save neither men nor a philosophy that is reterritorialized on the democratic State. Human rights will not make us bless capitalism. A great deal of innocence or cunning is needed by a philosophy of communication that claims to restore the society of friends, or even of wise men, by forming a universal opinion as "consensus" able to moralize nations, States, and the market. Human rights say nothing about the immanent modes of existence of people provided with rights. Nor is it only in the extreme situations described by Primo Levi that we experience the shame of being human. We also experience it in insignificant conditions, before the meanness and vulgarity of existence that haunts democracies, before the propagation of these modes of existence and of thought-for-the-market, and before the values, ideals, and opinions of our time' (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 107).
6. As an example, Bill Ayers' (2001) autobiography of his days in the Weather Underground is a fascinating insight into the increasingly self-sacrificial and monomaniacal tendencies of 'militancy'. Driven by the compulsion to stop the war in Vietnam and to 'Bring the War Home', the constituent elements of the Weather Underground moved from a relatively diffuse political and countercultural form in the movement around Students for a Democratic Society to an ever more obsessive urban guerrilla activity which increasingly presented all outside the group "” and all those in the group seeming to lack enough commitment - as failing the cause. At the height of its racket tendencies Ayers describes a benzedrine-fuelled stifling atmosphere as 'the collective assumed the stance of an eagerly policing superego' in an accelerated process of the most 'brutal and excessive criticism sessions', a 'purifying ceremony involving confession, sacrifice, rebirth, and gratitude' (154). Attachments to anything unmilitant, such as emotional relations with lovers or a fondness for the poetry of Brecht, were seen as 'the dead hand of the romantic past' (155), in contrast to the need, as Ayers put it, to 'hurl myself into war in solidarity and sacrifice'(198).

7. Deleuze and Guattari (ACE: 373) consider Marx's work as driven by a similar humour and fascination: 'Marx's black humour, the source of Capital, is his fascination with . . . [the mad capitalist] machine . . .'