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 I: Deleuze, Marx and Proudhon

In the initial defense of Proudhon, it’s worth mentioning the trap that Marxists have time and time again fallen into. An irreparable historical reform ridden with a deep and fatal idolization doctrine surrounding Marx and Engels. Marxists today refuse to acknowledge whatsoever that Marx can and should be seen as an outdated philosopher from another time. Anarchy has continued its evolution as time has progressed since Proudhon’s work, whereas Marxism has remained stuck in it’s hole barking at itself about surplus extraction and party lines. Before defending Proudhon, we will seek to avoid this trap.

Proudhon, as regarded by (some) anarchists, is a fundamental and influential thinker who had many good ideas, ones that can and should be brought to today. That being said, he had many flaws. He was, quite frankly, an anti semitic bigot. His understanding of Hegel was lacking, as was his understanding of social domination as it related to freedom. His concepts of economics largely pale in comparison to the modern writings of mutualists in how compatible they are in the digital era (as to be expected). Before diving into his work, we should read him for what he is. A dead man over two hundred years old who was a product of his time, and to some extent, a theorist whose ideas are difficult to seperate from a common antisemitism of France in the nineteenth century.

I also want to say this, because the very idea of a Deleuzian mutualism has been met with various antagonisms by the marketist and the Deleuzian side of things. I’m firmly aware that Marx was inspirational in Deleuzian work, and to say otherwise would be (according to twitter) hearsay. What I meant when I said ‘Deleuze is in close proximity to Proudhon, closer than he is to Marx” (which i was responded to eloquently with various Deleuze screenshots and offhanded substack posts, and which i would now like to retract as a statement seeing as it remains unforgiven) was that if certain aspects of Deleuze are taken to what I believe to be their logical conclusion, many aspects of the Marxist canon don’t make sense, including his supposed remedies and his criticisms of individualized production. I also ask the Marxist canon of Deleuzians why they think Marrx invented the concepts of surplus extraction or, even according to some, the tradition of anti-capitalism? In a ‘Proudhonian-Deleuzian’ we take multiple aspects from Nietzsche, Deleuze, Proudhon, Lum etc. to form what we seek to be emancipatory and creative, not the most orthodox to these thinkers’ original work. This is not a historical piece, after all — quite the opposite. We look explicitly forwards.

Deleuze’s philosophy (more modern than Proudhon’s) has a few differing and groundbreaking criticisms. For one, his critique of psychoanalysis was devastating, and served as a fantastic follow up to Foucault in its utilization of socialist theories of production. His release of desire from its existing Fruedo-Marxist shackles was needed, and the Baudrillardian response to such a reform was mediocre at best. His conceptualization of lines of flight and hacking as opposed to traditional revolution helped set up a better and more creative movement going forward, and his works helped to synthesize an emerging neoteric anti-capitalism with existing post-structuralist thought. Most relevant to some though, is his abandonment of the dialectic through his reading of Nietzsche. Considering Proudhon was an open Hegelian Dialectician, what does this mean for him, and moreover, our reading of the two?

Considering a large piece of Marx’s critique of Proudhon was that he failed in regards to his dialectical analysis, an abandoning of dialectics as a concept can be quite freeing for mutualist thought. Proudhon himself, however, cited Hegel as a source of inspiration. His primary inspirations, as Proudhon put it, were

“First, the bible, second, Adam Smith, and third, Hegel.”

Beyond God and Smith, one of which Deleuze’s interactions with were largely Nietzschean and pessimistic and the other perhaps never made his way to Nietzsche, To respond to this supposed debunk of how Deleuze and Proudhon could’ve been similar, despite Deleuze’s overwhelming dialectic-skepticism and Proudhon’s open embrace, we should examine what made Proudhon a dialectician. From the biographical introduction to Proudhon’s infamous “What is Property?” we can see what ideas of his are specifically Hegelian

“Having no knowledge of the German language, he could not have read the works of Hegel, which at that time had not been translated into French. It was Charles Grün, a German, who had come to France to study the various philosophical and socialistic systems, who gave him the substance of the Hegelian ideas. During the winter of 1844–45, Charles Grün had some long conversations with Proudhon, which determined, very decisively, not the ideas, which belonged exclusively to the bisontin thinker, but the form of the important work on which he labored after 1843, and which was published in 1846 by Guillaumin.

Hegel’s great idea, which Proudhon appropriated, and which he demonstrates with wonderful ability in the “System of Economical Contradictions,” is as follows: Antinomy, that is, the existence of two laws or tendencies which are opposed to each other, is possible, not only with two different things, but with one and the same thing. Considered in their thesis, that is, in the law or tendency which created them, all the economical categories are rational, — competition, monopoly, the balance of trade, and property, as well as the division of labor, machinery, taxation, and credit. But, like communism and population, all these categories are antinomical; all are opposed, not only to each other, but to themselves. All is opposition, and disorder is born of this system of opposition. Hence, the sub-title of the work, — “Philosophy of Misery.” No category can be suppressed; the opposition, antinomy, or contre-tendance, which exists in each of them, cannot be suppressed.

Where, then, lies the solution of the social problem? Influenced by the Hegelian ideas, Proudhon began to look for it in a superior synthesis, which should reconcile the thesis and antithesis. Afterwards, while at work upon his book on “Justice,” he saw that the antinomical terms do not cancel each other, any more than the opposite poles of an electric pile destroy each other; that they are the procreative cause of motion, life, and progress; that the problem is to discover, not their fusion, which would be death, but their equilibrium, — an equilibrium for ever unstable, varying with the development of society.”

First, it’s important to mention that Proudhon never directly read Hegel. His interpretation of Hegel (dissolving down to a simple “thesis, antithesis, synthesis” ) was one that some Hegelians, both then and now, would consider greatly bastardized. His great draw from dialectic thought was that of an equilibrium between the beauty of market economies and the socialist destruction of property. This synthesis wasn’t really the aspect of the dialectic being criticized by Deleuze. Deleuze, through his reading of Nietzsche, moreso criticized the fundamental reactive, static force present in the dialectic, and opted for a system of fundamental multiplicity. This infinite active creativity can be found all throughout Proudhon’s work.

The synthesis, principle to what Proudhon takes from Hegel, is not disavowed by Deleuze whatsoever, in fact. The reconciliation of ideas isn’t one detested by deleuze so long as it is creative. In Deleuze’s own “Nietzsche and Philosophy,” he discusses the quite creative and beneficial potential of the unification of multiple ideas in the sense that rather simple negation or contradiction, a multitude of possibilities and existences can present itself as a workable concept to and from apparent dialectical contradiction (this is where the ‘neo’ comes into play within ‘neoteric-mutualism.’) Deleuze sees the dialectic as flawed due to the positioning of difference as a spawn of contradiction rather than as a fundamental of affirmation first of self-differentiating forces, of which contradiction follows and inspires reaction in its followers.

Change, not as repeated negation and equilibrium of contradictions, but as a fundamentally active embrace of progress and a move away from all that is still, a force of affirmation first and foremost, driven primordially by positivity and the embrace of difference, is in fact quite central to Proudhon’s work — and the Deleuzian project’s entirety. The dialectic is founded in ressentiment, according to Deleuze and his Nietzsche, a term that came after Proudhon and yet a force explored in his work. In “The Philosophy of Progress” Proudhon himself argues that

“All that exists, I said in my first letter, is necessarily in evolution; everything flows, everything changes, modifies, and transforms itself unceasingly. Movement is the essential condition, almost the material, of being and thought. There is nothing fixed, stable, absolute, or invincible, except the very law of movement, that is the relations of weight, number, and measure, according to which all existence appears and conducts itself.”

The aforementioned essay concludes as such;

“You hear and, better than any other, you know how to express to the public these two very simple propositions:

The Affirmation of Progress

The Negation of The Absolute.”

In essence, Proudhon refused to embody any of the criticisms present by Deleuze thrusted towards Hegel, and all that Deleuze criticized of and by Hegel was absent or in practice disavowed by Proudhonians. The Hegelian nature of Proudhon is not adequate evidence to discard their quite apparent ideological similarities, and, if anything, the utilization of such critique helps to further display the similarities between Proudhon and Deleuze. In saying all that exists is moving, is affirming, Proudhon reads almost as a proto-Nietzsche (or at least a pseudo-Heraclitus who’s additions surrounding value would echo Nietzsche) speaking on the will to power before Nietzsche got the chance.

Reviving Proudhon in a positive, affirmative light is our goal here — but has it been done? Sort of. Bruno Frère, in 2009, wrote a piece declaring that, despite the fact that Proudhon’s work is “philosophically and economically much weaker than Marx’s” (which I obviously have contentions with — on both fronts), his anthropological project had much to offer that Marx’s didn’t.

According to Frère, Marx falls into the Hegelian trap of pure negation, and, as a result, loses any and all power positivity can give us in the realm of politics. Frère’s position on Proudhon’s anthropology acknowledges how Marx purely focused on the alienation present in the capitalist system, while ignoring the pragmatic implications and genuine benefits that can be found in capitalism. Marx’s critique ignored the liberatory, self-automating aspect of capitalist markets (one that Deleuze would also see as liberatory — deterritorializing). By doing such, he misses out on the benefits of market systems.

Even Marxists, as has been and will continue to display, question the static of the Marxian fundamental, and Deleuze, similarly, draws further and further away from the Marxist tide of the early twentieth century. Now that we’ve rid ourselves of quick gotcha!’s for how Proudhonian Deleuze can be conceptualized (or rather, can’t be), we will discuss their synthesis.

Beginning with their criticisms of capitalism as an economic system, where do Proudhon and Deleuze believe capitalism originates? Deleuze, as stated previously, sees the benefits of the free market (in the sense that it has ‘deterritorializing tendencies.’) Similar to what the libertarian movement had been preaching for decades, Deleuze and Guattari noticed the “deterritorializing” aspect of capitalism. According to Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism as a process (or, at least, what they considered capitalism) had an aspect that was fundamentally freeing (in a sense). Markets eroded borders and social roles- it released desire in a way economic systems of the past hadn’t and couldn’t. Markets globalized culture beyond recognition, decaying tradition.

Fascists realized this. Every historic fascist movement saw capitalism as a threat due to it’s culturally degradative foundations. What was the issue, then? Capitalism, in addition to it’s deterritorializing forces, was in a constant race with itself to stop itself. Deterritorialization wasn’t always a force for good in Deleuze- in the sense that at times, the force from which it spawns is fascist in and of itself.

As a force, the market was eroding authority. The capitalist, and by extension, capital, however, relied on this authority to survive. Without patent laws, absentee property, mass production rituals, artificial scarcity, desiring suppression and surplus extraction, capitalism had no feet to stand on, even if the liberatory aspect of the market was directly gnawing away at these authoritative cultural aspects. Capitalism must, as it deterritorializes, reterritorialize, in essence capturing its own released desire to stop itself from cannibalizing itself into blissful non-existence. This is what Proudhon argued in his dialectic! That there was an existing battle between that which makes markets great and that which makes markets terrible- one which later mutualists (like Tucker, Lum and De Cleyre) would attribute to be authority.

Our mutualist addition to Deleuze insists that despite deterritorialization not always being good, an exploration into market anarchist economics help to expand upon the emancipatory potential of the market, and displays how mutualism, as an ultimately affirmative force, has the ability to ‘escape the plane of capital.’

What were these reterritorializing forces? As mentioned previously, Deleuze and Guattari laid them out as follows in ‘Capitalism & Schizophrenia; Anti-Oedipus;’

“The capitalist machine deterritorializes, decoding and axiomatizing flows in order to extract surplus value from them, the more its ancillary apparatuses, such as government bureaucracies and the forces of law and order, do their utmost to reterritorialize, absorbing in the process a larger and larger share of surplus value.”

Deleuze saw the issue of capitalism as being beyond the existent Marxist critiques of markets as a form. In truth, despite left-communists describing themselves as the utmost of radical anti-capitalism, Deleuze took issue with the stance of “liberatory planning.” (This does not necessarily imply he was a marketist, I say for fear of Marxist backolash). He saw leftist governments as an oxymoron, as being on the left had, as he put it,

“Nothing to do with governments.”

Jean-Francois Lyotard, another French philosopher, would argue that despite Deleuzo-Guattarian attempts at Marxism, Capitalism and Schizophrenia was a mutated socialism separate from traditional revolutionary struggle. The abandonment of class struggle or worker parties as remotely central to a liberatory struggle, as well as the odd introduction of released desire (what some contemporaries saw as some odd revolutionary attempt at a fundamentally bourgeois hedonism) into a supposedly left wing politics is, according to Lyotard (and many of the Marxists like him that would attack Deleuze for his concepts of liberatory desire, i.e. Lacan & Baudrillard),

“in bad conscience in Marx himself, and worse and worse in the Marxists.”

Lyotard would add that the fascination that Deleuze and Guattari have with markets is one that echoes the fascination Marx had with them in Capital.

“We easily recognize what fascinates Marx: the capitalist perversion, the subversion of codes, religions, decency, trades, educations, cuisine, speech.”

This, according to twentieth century communists, is a flaw of the Deleuzian school. Although it might be Marxist hearsay, mutualists dare to ask, both then and now; was Marx wrong? Marx saw the potential for liberation in markets, but abandoned them. Why? Many of Marx’s criticisms of markets, including the inherent nature of worker alienation, surplus extraction and mass production have been torn to shreds by market anarchists since his works. According to Marx though, despite Proudhon’s attempt at a synthesis between free markets and socialism, free markets had failed to liberate anybody from anything. Their decay was fake. Deleuze, on the other hand, said the decay was real and dangerous, and that authorities were trying to keep it in check — as is the root of capitalism. So then, the disagreement on whether markets can be liberatory lies primarily on Marx’s criticisms of competition, and how it had failed to be non-capitalist.

As mentioned in the previous chapter, Proudhon recognized that competition was the enemy of monopoly in The Philosophy of Poverty. Marx would later say that the two had developed to coexist, and that Proudhon’s observation did not take into account the progression of capitalism. However, as mutualists have pointed out, capitalism was never separate from the state, it was born from it, which even Marx acknowledged (and Engel’s denied in a criticism that has once again been torn to shreds by anarchists then and now). The fundamental concept of competition as the force that would bring capitalism to its knees had never been seen, which Marx would interpret as meaning that it failed at suppressing monopoly, when in reality it would have succeeded if not for state action.

Deleuze and Guattari, despite warnings from their contemporary communist peers, ventured deeper into the void of markets and the massive potential energy for creative destruction they had. Competition was degrading all which was oppressive, which was odd, seeing as competition was itself oppressive (in it’s capitalist form). Marx would cite this as proof that competition was failing as a liberatory force, but Deleuze would argue, contra Marx in Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy, that competition was not only working, but that capitalism was only alive because it continued to stifle it’s own cannibal potentiality.

Benjamin Tucker, a mutualist of the American strand, would say Marx makes a flaw in that he doesn’t trust people to free themselves without authority, which he sees as the root of capitalist oppression.

“The vital difference between Proudhon and Marx is to be found in the respective remedies which they proposed. Marx would nationalize the productive and distributive forces; Proudhon would individualize and associate them. Marx would make the laborers political masters; Proudhon would abolish political mastership entirely. Marx would abolish usury by having the State lay violent hands on all industry and business and conduct it on the cost principle; Proudhon would abolish usury by disconnecting the State entirely from industry and business and forming a system of free banks which would furnish credit at cost to every industrious and deserving person, and thus place the means of production within the reach of all. Marx believed in compulsory majority rule; Proudhon believed in the voluntary principle. In short, Marx was an autoritaire; Proudhon was a champion of Liberty.” (‘Karl Marx as Friend and Foe’ — Benjamin Tucker)

Does this not mirror the split between Deleuze and Baurdillard, Lacan, Lyotard and any number of other competing communist thinkers in Twentieth century France? Deleuze saw desire as a force for revolution, markets as a decoding process, progress as the elimination of all that is static, and was able to actively acknowledge the benefit the market had in such a fast scenario. Baudrillard, on the other hand, would insist desire will inevitably be consumed by a supposedly oppressive market process. The underbelly of reality, according to Baudrillard, is whole and (to a flawed extent) static, whereas the distinctly capitalist simulacrum has atomized it, along with labor power. On the contrary, Deleuze says that the socius, the simulacrum via the socius, has forcefully objectivized reality and labor processes with force, and that the emancipatory undercurrent independent of the simulacrum is one of heterogeneous structure and multiplicitous nature. There is a plurality of forces acting all at once in Deleuze, the plurality at the root of philosophy, and at the root of unilateral existence. Reality is subjective, but subjective beyond the subject, to the reality that flows in between subjects, that un-objectivizes the borders of identity itself. To Deleuze, the Baudrillardian error of hyper-singularity is the abandonment of philosophical thought altogether.

The real is contrasted only then, not to the virtual, but to the possible. There is no structured reality in a realm of possibility, potential energy. Atomized realit(ies). Virtualities. Multiplicity. Possibility. Movement. Central to the Deleuzian proposal, and what’s central here, and what’s central in Proudhon, is that despite these formations, there is nothing central. The only thing that is set is that things are moving. Movement is outwards. A river with no end.

Tucker, and by extension Proudhon according to Tucker, see exchange as a liberatory force, and see decoding as the natural result of market processes. They view suppression and collectivization, two key aspects of Deleuze’s criticisms of capitalism, as the root of capital and it’s flaws. If we are to use Deleuze’s concept of simulacrum, desiring-production and fascism as control, Marx and his purveyors fail to escape the static, whereas, from a mutualist lense, Proudhonians have escaped these same problems. Whereas marxists continue to centralize, refuse to deterritorialize, redraw borders based on the central, Proudhonians have always refused, refused, refused. Not via negation — quite the opposite, via the positive critique laid out by Deleuze in “Nietzsche and Philosophy.” Criticism in this form, of imagination in light of authority, is to Deleuze, the very height of the philosophical spirit.

Beyond this, Deleuze serves a more individualistic view of progress than his Marxist contemporaries. As mentioned, Baudrillard (and many other Marxists from his time) made the mistake of constituting reality as a homogenous entity that capitalism atomizes us from. Instead, Deleuze argues that existence is heterogeneous in form, and that reali(ties) are atomized in existence. Rather, the socius (and the simulacrum) collectivize (mutualist words, not Deleuzian words) our existence and suppress our desire. Desiring-production is an autonomous force, free of control, with ebbs and flows, one that dissolves the socius traditional Marxism sees as necessary and good. Any power, including the power of the mass over the mass, must necessarily be destroyed.

But wait! Deleuze and Guattari didn’t recognize all deterritorialization as inherently good! Market forces deterritorialize, but they characteristically recapture their own flows! I hear your criticism, and we should be clear that in order to move forward with anarchy, as has been stated, we mustn’t read Deleuze, Proudhon, or any other theorist as scripture. Here’s where the neoteric mutualist perspective comes in.

The “negative deterritorialization” (of the market specifically) is described by communists largely as characteristics of markets that demand capturing processes to survive. Are any of these genuinely integral to markets, though? Surplus extraction, externalities, monopolies, economies of scale, abundance, the spectacle, simulacrum, mass production algorithms, imperialism, resource exploitation, unnecessary, forced or non-desired labor power etc. As has been explored, these forces all are born out of authority. The mutualist proposal is radical in that it hunts down any and all authority with a hawk’s gaze and attempts to uproot the systems of domination it upholds beyond classical Marxist analysis surrounding production and labor. Mutualists do not deny negative deterritorialization, but we insist markets have the potential to escape them. If anything, deterritorialization as a process of maximizing exit has much more to do with markets than Marxists would like to admit, and much less to do with communism than they insist.

Indeed, it may also be responded that ideologies like fascism, to Deleuze, rest upon lines of flight. ‘Absolute deterritorialization is death,” according to D&G. They insist throughout their work that a BwO that goes too fast will kill itself, and that gradual building of networks (Dual Power)? is the way, which is why it cannot be said that ‘Deterritorialization is positive.’ This is true! Deterritorialization is not inherently anarchic — but the value Deleuze and Guattari see in it as a concept rests in its ability to escape, to destroy in a fundamentally creative fashion under certain conditions. Our thesis is not that ‘deterritorialization is inherently good’ but rather that ‘the form of deterritorialization that the freed market has the capability of is emancipatory and should be used in our construction of a ‘new earth.’’

Take imperialism as an example of a negative force of decoding. As a deterritorializing agent imperialism does function- breaking down borders, globalizing, decaying culture- imperialism is decoding, but it is simultaneously reliant on recoding. Statism, racism, colonial implications, power relations, productive capital in the global North. The goal of freed markets is to break away from recoding itself.

When Deleuze and Guattari speak of capitalism’s respective deterritorializing and reterritorializing tendencies, the concepts of debt may come up. For example, in breaking away from central authority, the man is no longer bound by laws, but by the law of capitalism that states that without working, he will starve. The question, though, is what makes these capitalist axiomatics work in the first place, and the answer is capital-authority. Indeed, the laws against theft, the cultural panopticon and surveillance state under capitalism… capitalist axiomatics as a reterritorializing force, when analyzed through a mutualist lens, cannot be separated from state hierarchy.

Marxists will preach about the self destructive nature of the dictatorship of the proletariat, seeing as beyond oppression the proletariat has no reason to exist- it negates itself into the obsolete. This is flawed in that it lacks an understanding of what authority is and how repression works. This “dictatorship of the proletariat,” no matter how supposedly anti-capitalist, organizes and captures desire in the name of the socius, creating new systems of domination and eliminating any cannibal instinct present in the ruling class. We seek to let desire work like acid, decaying capitalism, rather than trying to withhold it to create structures supposedly separate from capitalist existence.

The market, however, is self destructive. The proletariat dictatorship lacks a genuine cannibal quality in that by its existence, it demands autonomy restriction. It separates people based on their economic class while also trying to abolish such economic classes, but by looking at capitalism as purely a class with a production monopoly, we are misguided into recreating capitalist mistakes. We must look at every social issue, exchange monopolization, how calculation occurs, how debt is stored, if trust is mediated etc. to gain a sufficient sense of capitalism, and once we do, the dictatorship of the proletariat begins to resemble capitalism more and more.

The proletarian dictatorship can be both self destructive and recoding, like capitalism, right? The difference is that as a process capitalism is still decoding. Exchange is still free. The dictatorship of the proletariat is communizing, freezing exchange. This will be touched on shortly, but this is antithetical to the concept of progress.

Markets, on the other hand, when examined further, fundamentally demand none of these capitalist negatives. Decoding existing processes faster than any communist project dreams to be capable of, the mutualist goal is thus to unlock the market from it’s agency minimizing confines and let it fly in every direction at once. Multiplicity. In a brief thread online, Land and I ended up agreeing in an argument with a communist, albeit from distinctly different sides; it’s odd that communists refuse to see the massive potential for change in market force.

To be clear, markets are self-destructive in the capitalist sense. Markets, purely as moments of reciprocity through exchange, do not destroy themselves. They do, however, as networks erode force, thus capitalism is gnawing away at itself. Deleuze realized this, and noticed that capitalism was actively trying to make itself keep breathing. It needs a state to do this.

That, then, is the mutualist read of Deleuze on markets. Separate from his Marxist contemporaries, Deleuze dared to see the potential energy capitalism had captured, and by freeing exchange, we have the capability as people to set it free- to scrap the organs of capitalism and leave it in its purest form. Capitalism is a decoding recoder, a cannibalist machine, because markets erode authority (capitalism’s life force). It is our plan then, to free the market — a vehicle of progress. What is progress?

II: Progress as Breakage

Proudhon was a truly revolutionary thinker. As he himself put it,

“Movement exists: this is my fundamental axiom… now, every composition, whether it exists in nature or results as an operation of the mind, is a product of movement.” (The Philosophy of Progress)

The key notion of the anarchist movement in the nineteenth century (found in the works of Dyer D. Lum and Benjamin Tucker as well) was just that; movement. The idea was that progress, as a concept, was a progression away from violence, authority, or control- and to voluntary labor. Not progress in a linear sense, but in a sense defined in it’s own agency-focused affirmation.

This idea posits social progress as something not just separate in concept from temporal progress but also separate in application — but still yet, it feels outdated. Deleuzian terminology, however, fits this old mutualist puzzle. To Proudhon, to be is to become, to move, as it is to Nietzsche and Deleuze — as it is to Heraclitus. Is there not more in common, perhaps, between Deleuze and Proudhon, however? Going forward we will first argue the varying metaphysical similarities of Proudhon to Deleuze, and then make conclusions surrounding progress untapped by the standard mutualist or postmodernist school.

According to Proudhon,

“ The idea of direction, inherent in the idea of movement, being acquired, the imagination takes hold of it and divides it into two terms: A, the side from which movement comes, and B, the side where it goes. These two terms given, the imagination summarizes them in these two others, point of departure and point of arrival, otherwise, principle and aim. Now, the idea of a principle or aim is only a fiction or conception of the imagination, an illusion of the senses. A thorough study shows that there is not, nor could there be, a principle or aim, nor beginning or end, to the perpetual movement which constitutes the universe. These two ideas, purely speculative on our part, indicate nothing more than relations. To accord any reality to these notions is to make for oneself a willful illusion.From that double concept, of commencement or principle, and of aim or end, all the others are deduced. Space and time are two ways of conceiving the interval which separates the two terms assumed from movement, point of departure and point of arrival, principle and aim, beginning and end.” (The Philosophy of Progress, P.J. Proudhon)

There’s a lot packed in the passage. First, we can gather that movement has direction. This will be important later, but for now, we will use it to point this out; We have discussed that the primary force is one of affirmation, that there is an undercurrent of affirmative drive. The question then, is in which direction this force is moving — moving us?

Tabeling that for just a bit, it’s worth mentioning the metaphysical claims made by Proudhon here. Echoing the philosophy of the far East (remember Laozi)? with claims that to be is to exist in a cycle that never started and will never end. Apply this to desire, and perhaps we see beyond the psychoanalyst’s veil of lack- sure- but surely there is something deeper to be observed in this. Indeed- what is unmasked is the concept, both in Proudhon and Deleuze, of positive flows acting in a positive way. What is positivity to us?

Here is where we get our fundamental metaphysical axiom; ‘To progress is to atomize, to atomize with creativity, imagination, and networks decentral enough to repel force in a centripetal fashion.’

Let us return to our Deleuzian conception of a heterogenous reality. If capitalism, authority, collectivize by force (THIS is the ‘society of the spectacle’ mr. Debord) then progress — Which according to progress- is the affirmation of movement, the fundamental non-reaction in Deleuze — the creative spirit and the affirmation of flow — the criticism of the stale (yes, Deleuze and Proudhon have much in common in the sense of political ontology), is individualization, atomization… breakage.

PhD Lorna Collins delves into the etymology of “schiz” in the “schizophrenic” metaphor employed quite frequently by Deleuze and Guattari (mostly to mean freed desire — a body without organs, or schizophrenitization, the process of freeing desire and eroding socially constructed machinery).

“The etymology of ‘schiz’ in schizophrenia and schizoanalysis comes from skhizein, meaning to split, break, separate, or divide. With schizophrenia, this refers to the ‘split’ in the mind, or the multiple, broken up experiences of reality that an individual with schizophrenia has during a psychotic episode. Schizoanalysis is trying to locate exactly where and how these breaks in reality arise, and then mobilize them to manufacture a new production of subjectivity. By contrast, Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis is concerned with dampening these breaks, to flatten or resolve any divide and eliminate any possible entry or exit points into the turmoil of this splitting. In this way the consequent mental health profession instills its hegemony onto the psyche, since, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, the psychoanalytic dam (with its singular oedipal constriction) curbs the mechanised flow of desire that defines subjectivity, thus detaining it. By contrast, they want to release and liberate the schizo’s split/multiple senses of subjectivity and the world.” (Collins, An Introduction to Schizoanalysis)

What is “schizoanalysis?” The goal of schizoanalysis as proposed by Deleuze and Guattari is to reformulate psychoanalysis in a way that is fundamentally materialist, creative and non-reactionary (aka non negative). In the sense that psychoanalysis restricts desire and institutionalizes hierarchy when it comes to psychiatric practice, schizoanalysis sees hierarchy and institutionalization of psychoanalysis as causes of harm, not healing. Schizoanalysis eats away at institutions of harm, analyzing things from a freed perspective.

As discussed, the capitalist system enforces collectivization in the metaphysical sense. It congeals reality into a unified being — when it is not naturally so. The etymology of ‘schiz,’ as discussed, stems from ‘breakage.’ The breakage of the confines of hierarchical being imposed by collective consciousness — the shattering of reality, so to speak, is the root of schizophrenia as a process. The goal of schizoanalysis is to create a healthy, affirmative alternative to the normalcy-oriented psychiatry of modern capital. A process rooted in subjectivity, fluidity, imagination and affirmation.

What did Proudhon say progress was? The affirmation of motion, the criticism of the still. Political progress found its form in the increased power in the individual (the subjectification of power) and the new opportunities for political creativity (the imaginative influx of non reactionary socialism). Deleuzian schizophrenia is Proudhonian progress. That is one of our realizations surrounding our synthesis of the two — that their concepts under widely different names wield discernibly similar aspirations and results.

Apply this to economics. If ‘progress’ is ‘breakage’ away from the mass production force, it is atomization. In essence, these two notions of progress are very emblematic of the nature of the difference between anarchist and marxist economic theories.

Progress is progress away from competition. The non-reactionary is the non-monetary, as exchange freedom is faux-freedom. Capitalism is an atomizing process, and the liberatory process is the one that socializes the labor force.

Progress is progress through competition. The non-reactionary is the release from force, and economic liberty is the centrifugal counterpart to authority. Capitalism is a collectivizing process, and the liberatory process is one that atomizes the labor force.

To progress is to break, to melt, to meld into millions of different realities. To become multiple — to individualize against the individual. Progress is a schizophrenic machine, and so our social and fiscal applications of schizophrenia as a mechanic force are at the very root of a Deleuzian (accelerationist)? mutualism.

III: Schizophrenia and The Privatized

Where do we disagree with Deleuze? Quite explicitly on his work on privatization. Indeed, Deleuze acknowledges that privatization has a deterritorializing effect, but only insofar as it necessitates its own reterritorialization via state apparatus. Mutualists have already engaged with this.

Collectivization in its liberatory format, for Deleuze, would do away with the strict labels around identity that must be reterritorialized in a privatized format, and get rid of the authority necessary to enact privatizing property norms. This, however, is a flawed economic narrative common across Marxist literature as a genre.

In the same way that Max Stirner was simultaneously an ‘individualist’ and recognized the flawed notion of the ‘individual’ as a label projected by external forces, so do we economically. A network of exchange away from collective authority would do away with this economic ‘othering,’ and although the economy could rightly be described as hyper-privatized, capital axioms and state authority are absent in our possessive rhizomes.

That is probably the most explicitly creative aspect of this entire body of work. I advocate for the treatment of privatization not as an enforcement of strict property boundaries, but the individualization of possession, and thus, away from state apparatus and its own force. By achieving this fluidity in individual possession beyond collective force, the economic concept of the self is more fluid than ever before. A ‘collectivized’ ownership relies on the strictness of collective identity, whereas pure private ownership can simultaneously advocate for and corrode the concept of the self.

The schizophrenic, in D&G, is anti-collective in the sense that the schizophrenic’s desire refuses to be strictly coded by collective force, and yet, the schizophrenic also detests the label of ‘I’ or the notion of strict self identification as projected onto them by the collective force. (It is in this sense that we are hyper-individualists. We reject collective ownership, but also individual ownership, due to it’s collective nature). In terms surrounding the concept of ownership, this applies specifically to absentee property in the sense that strict borders and labels surrounding the concept of ownership rely on collective force. In the same way that desire individualized beyond traditional capitalist enterprise would help to corrode the concept of the capitalist self, as would the hyper-privatization of the market economy do away with the concept of capitalist ownership, removing the room for abundance and exploitation present in the capitalist economy.

If the explicit goal of schizo-analysis is to materialize psychiatry away from treatment and into a liberatory format, schizophrenatization as a process does away with culturally imposed authority limits and decodes desire. The idea in D&G is that capitalism has a sort of built in schizophrenatization in the sense that it decodes desire with currency and incentivizes the breaking down of borders, and these forces are indeed inherent to market forces, as Marx and Proudhon alike would point out.

D&G also point out the fundamentally reterritorializing aspects of capitalism (as discussed), but these aspects are inherently statist in capitalism’s case. When we advocate for privatization, which Deleuze and Guattari were openly against, we recognize that economically full privatization would eliminate the strict borders around ownership, and that the current reterritorializing aspects of property (those of intellectual, absentee or accumulated property etc). are authoritarian. The ultimate private economy escapes what D&G falsely label as ‘capitalist privatization,’ and property at its very core is indeed an extension of the ‘affirmation of life’ and ‘creativity’ that Deleuze praises so highly (which he would’ve known perhaps if he had read Lum).

Schizophrenitization, to us, is a process of liberation through the revolutionary processes stored within capitalist decoding power. These revolutionary processes, those of self-destruction, automated distribution, intelligence automation, network construction, anti-state praxis etc. are all inherent and necessary to a modern anarchist analysis of market potential, precisely the potential the agorists had recognized in the late twentieth century.

‘Schizophrenia is inherent to the privatized’ in the sense that the process of liberation and revolutionary potential is inherently present in the exchange networks presented to us by market forms, and that the withholding of emancipation from markets is the state’s purpose under capitalism. Capitalism differs from past social forms in D&G in precisely the fact that it is a monster, a cannibal, a frankenstein, working in a million ways at once and devouring itself in the process. The market is eating capitalist authority from the inside out, so we’re told, and when we abandon D&G’s communism in favor of an equally anti-capitalist revolutionary privatization doctrine, we see the compatibility with agorist notions of liberation.

The war machine, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is a decoding force that lies outside of the state apparatus. It’s violently rupturing nature is one that inherently displaces static conceptions of identity and security and destroys them from the inside out. Outside of the state of pure negation present in state violence, the affirmation of difference and the pure exteriority of the war machine is emphasized by Deleuze and Guattari (all within their essay ‘Nomadology’ within ATP). It is not the agorist in the sense that the entirety of the war machine is the agorist, considering the war machine is characterized purely by violent exteriority. Rather, agorism, we say, has the power to use to violence of the war machine.

To D&G, the state can attempt to capture the war machine, in response to which, the war machine which lies beyond the state instrinsically can either succumb to static or commit a fundamentally positive suicide. This is where we draw on the concept of capitalist cannibalism. Agorists, as a force, are born within the internalities and capitalist axiomatics of authority present in the current market force, and yet out of them are born multiplicitous networks of exteriority, the violence of rupture and breakage redirected towards the state, the violence unleashed that fights back against the restraints from which it was born. A positive, violent market, then, is the function of the agorist as a war machine.

Competition is not war, and war is not a war that is explosively violent within constructed alternative networks. Rather, war here serves a purpose to mean a centrifugality feared by the state, the one we have touched on in the sense of how it relates to market processes. Competition then is war, but only insofar as it is the forceful explosion of power against state control.

These ‘war machines’ should also not be confused with that of the military. Disciplinary action within war machines is only present after the state apparatus has captured them, which we as mutualists extend to networks of exchange. Without such authority, instead of centers of power, Deleuze and Guattari say, networks form in a rhizomatic (we will touch on this) fashion, focusing on ‘packs.’

“It is the State, on the contrary, that makes possible the undertaking of large-scale projects, the constitution of surpluses, and the organization of the corresponding public functions. The State is what makes the distinction between governors and governed possible.” (D&G ‘Nomadology’ in A Thousand Plateaus)

The figure of the nomad is an important one when it comes to the Deleuzian conception of the war machine. Deleuze posits a difference between the trajectory of static state science and ‘nomad science,’ or nomadicity in general, a violence born of flux. In the same way that, to Nietzsche, negation is affirmations cold and shallow counterpart, the piece of the nomad science, or nomad tendencies (the war machine) overall are co-opted by the state are only the cold and shallow counterpart to the true potentiality contained within the force of the war machine.

“The great state mathematicians did their best to improve it’s status, but precisely on the condition that all the dynamic, nomadic notions — such as becoming, ‘heterogeneity, infinitesimal, passage to the limit, continuous variation — be eliminated and civil, static and ordinal rules be imposed upon it.”

The state’s absorption of the complexities of the sciences is the abandonment of the natural complexity and heterogeneity within them. In this sense, the capitalist market is a static and cold misrepresentation of the potential of the market as a force, and the agorist is powerful in that it abandons capitalist notions of strict property and legality surrounding exchange and deterritorializes markets in an emancipatory fashion. The agent of pure (positive) deter, the war machine, is the agorist in market anarchism.

Other aspects of agorism (not in its explicitly capitalist form as introduced by some of its more rightist purveyors, but the ultra-private, mutualist and fundamentally anti-capitalist form) are also seen as aspects of the war machine in D&G. Flows of labor in many directions, unorganized/dictated exchange, non-statist loose organizations, families not based on control but on solidarity — these are at the root of a radical marketist notion surrounding exchange, as well as the root of an economic war machine beyond the state’s vestige of exchange.

“Nomad science does not have the same relation to work as royal science. Not that the division of labor in nomad science is any less thorough; it is different. We know of the problems States have always had with journeymen’s associations, or compagnonnages, the nomadic or itinerant bodies of the type formed by masons, carpenters, smiths, etc. Settling, seden-tarizing labor power, regulating the movement of the flow of labor, assigning it channels and conduits, forming corporations in the sense of organisms, and, for the rest, relying on forced manpower recruited on the spot (corvee) or among indigents (charity workshops) — this has always been one of the principal affairs of the State, which undertook to conquer both a band vagabondage and a body nomadism.”

Economic control mechanisms, microscopic reproductions of state authority, are opposed to a radical notion of markets. The reasoning behind the state’s control of the economy in effect, contrary to the Keynesian proposal, is not that an organic economy is fundamentally flawed in its function, rather, that an organic economy does not serve the interest of the state itself.

“In any case, if the State always finds it necessary to repress the nomad and minor sciences, if it opposes vague essences and the operative geometry of the trait, it does so not because the content of these sciences is inexact or imperfect, or because of their magic or initiatory character, but because they imply a division of labor opposed to the norms of the State.”

` The nomad is the ultimate figure of positive corrosion in Deleuze; the flux nature of the war machine is examined in relation to the nomad. When it is said that an ultimately liberated agorist, one who by the disobeying of capitalist property laws and relations constructs alternative exchange networks to those mandated by capital, is the nomad, is the war machine, what is being said? That, within mutualist praxis, the construction of non-capitalist networks is the construction of nomadic networks, those that actively wage war on the state. The market is a war machine in that the state attempts to capture it for its own survival, and by doing so, dampens the ultimate potentiality of the market as a force.

The nomad, unlike the migrant, principally travels to a point only because it is a symptom of travel itself, vs. the migrant who on principle is traveling somewhere. To nomad-igy exchange, so to speak, is make exchange as a process rid of its state upheld identities surrounding ownership, and thus the agorism that specifically not only acts as a money making scheme for the agorist but the agorism as a construction of non-state networks of exchange, largely through the direct disobedience of state laws, especially regarding tracking and absentee ownership, allow exchange to enter itś most fluid state, one what fundamentally wages war on the static of the capitalist market.

For Eugene Holland, the author of the book that inspired Carson to write his ´The Free Market as Full Communism,’ (and the amazon review of which opened this piece) outlines the benefits of the market within the context of nomadology as follows;

“For nomadology, two distinctive features of capitalism stand out. First of all, whereas other modes of production are fundamentally conservative and favor the reproduction of existing power relations over the production of the new, capitalism is revolutionary and subordinates political reproduction to economic production: it fosters “constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation,” as Marx and Engels put it in The Communist Manifesto. This first feature is closely tied to the second: by organizing social relations by means of markets instead of politics or directly interpersonal relations, capitalism subordinates the qualitative to the quantitative; whereas other modes of production impose order through meaningful, qualitative codes, capitalism does so through the meaningless quantitative calculus of the cash nexus, which undermines codes and promotes difference over identity.”

“For schizoanalysis, the principal benefit of markets involves the process of decoding, which frees desire from capture in illegitimate fixed representations. Indeed, any fixed representation is repressive from the schizoanalytic perspective, inasmuch as desire operates according to a radically free form of semiosis referred to as schizophrenia. Market transactions are based on quantitative comparison (this product is worth that product or a certain amount of money) rather than qualitative evaluation (neither product needs to be “good” in any absolute or concrete sense to nonetheless have economic value). In market societies, exchange-value replaces use-value as the defining feature of things, and monetary value dissolves meaning; “all that is solid melts into air,” as Marx and Engels put it. Wherever social relations are mediated primarily by money, the semiotic codes governing meaning weaken, and meanings become free to vary ever more widely according to circumstances, whereas in non-market societies, they are more or less strictly controlled from on high.” (Holland, Nomad Citizenship)

It’s worth noting that Holland attributes semiotization to capitalist process, and sees the potential for market processes within themselves, those of quantifiable value, to erode the supremacy of semiotic value in society. Holland would similarly point out how free exchange, and thereby the specifically free specialization of labor (away from monotonous capitalist mass-production rituals) creates assemblages in the form of labor and it’s use. Indeed, nomadology deals primarily with production, labor and it’s flux, and the market form, as has been proved by countless economists and the nature of control in general, outway planned economies in every way when it comes to such a nomad nature, as well as directly incentivizing the freed specialization of labor and the production in line with desire aspired to by nomad communists.

Nomadology does nothing if not differentiate between markets and capitalism (and thereby negative capitalist axiomatics) and offer the freed market as an instrument of war on state institutions.

That there is serious and long-standing confusion between capitalist markets and free markets is no accident. It is partly due, of course, to the ideological force of the pro-capitalist free-market tradition discussed earlier. Confusion also arises because it was capitalism itself that transformed societies-with-markets into veritable market societies in the first place, by making market exchange the very basis of social relations, even though markets had long preexisted capitalism and can function perfectly well (arguably far better) without it. Finally, and most significant for our purposes, some of Marx’s best-known analyses of capitalism have led to considerable misunderstanding about the relations among markets, exchange value, and capital and about the very nature of capitalism as a mode of production.” (Holland)

What is the benefit of nomadology, though? Of nomadic production, and of mechanic war markets? War is not a state of nature to Deleuze, rather a social existence that actively wards off the state. By constructing the agorist, the agorists’ economic networks in a nomadic fashion, we directly build dual power that is economically outside of the state while also warding off the state, pointing out the importance of nomadic production to an anarchist revolution. As pointed out, the market is nomadic, and thus, from an anarchist standpoint, the market is a revolutionary force, and the one who constructs the market is the agorist.

Currency plays an important role here as well. Despite communist criticisms of currency as a vast determinant of objective value, the static use of currency, as has been explored, and as Deleuze and Guattari mention, is upheld by the state. In fact, the numerical element of market organization has within it the power to organize people in a way beyond lineage and state violence, and only in its institutionalization does it become a concept of capitalist repression.

“Some people nowadays are too eager to criticize this numerical organization, denouncing it as a military or even concentration-camp society where people are no longer anything more than deterritorialized “numbers.” But that is false. Horror for horror, the numerical organization of people is certainly no cruder than the lineal or State organizations. Treating people like numbers is not necessarily worse than treating them like trees to prune, or geometrical figures to shape and model. Moreover, the use of the number as a numeral, as a statistical element, is proper to the numbered number of the State, not to the numbering number. And the world of the concentration camp operates as much by lineages and territories as by numeration. The question is not one of good or bad but of specificity. The specificity of numerical organization rests on the nomadic mode of existence and the war machine function. The numbering number is distinct both from lineal codes and State overcoding. Arithmetic composition, on the one hand, selects, extracts from the lineages the elements that will enter in to nomadism and the war machine and, on the other hand, directs them against the State apparatus, opposing a machine and an existence to the State apparatus, drawing a deterritorialization that cuts across both the lineal territorialities and the territory or deterritoriality of the State.”

Deleuze goes on to explain that the characteristics of a currency-based economy are not distinctly evil, or different from other capitalist organizations, but rather rely on the context in which people are numerized. They still don’t diminish the untapped potential currency has for anti-state destruction. The agorist war machine is the market equivalent of nomadology, the violence taken over by the state and yet autonomous from it (exchange), one that, despite a lack of authoritarian self awareness, will be the force to tear down the force from the inside out.

The power of the violence within the war machine lies in its capability to utilize weaponry, forces of absolute movement, absolute speed. Deleuze contrasts the weapon with the tool in that a tool has an amount of force, but it is moved into a position of “violence” whereas a free-acting weapon is characteristically and ultimately violent. This, applied to the market, points us towards the weapon potentiality of exchange.

“ In free action, what counts is the way in which the elements of the body escape gravitation to occupy absolutely a non-punctuated space. Weapons and weapon handling seem to be linked to a free action model, and tools to a work model. Linear displacement, from one point to another, constitutes the relative movement of the tool, but it is the vortical occupation of a space that constitutes the absolute movement of the weapon. It is as though the weapon were moving, self-propelling, while the tool is moved.”

It is then added that the characteristics of the two, tools and weapons, are fundamentally similar, and that the differentiation lies in the function of the social machinery, the collective assemblage. The social machinery organized in a “free-action” format, to us, then, is the market, and thus freed exchange is characterized by the weapon. A violence of speed thrust against the capitalist order.

This section ends by seeing the possibility for lines of flight born out of the free action within work, and the work within free action. The birth of revolutionary potential within existing capitalist “work” processes are precisely the goal of the agorist, and, to a large extent, Deleuze. As I put it earlier,

“Agorists, as a force, are born within the internalities and capitalist axiomatics of authority present in the current market force, and yet out of them are born multiplicitous networks of exteriority, the violence of rupture and breakage redirected towards the state, the violence unleashed that fights back against the restraints from which it was born.”

IV: Rhizome and Stigmergy

V: Nietzshce and Aristocratic Anarchisms

We have had a heavy discussion of Gilles Deleuze in this work thus far, both surrounding his solo works on positivity and his works with Guattari on war machines, rhizomes and schizophrenia. What we have only mentioned briefly, however, is the influence Nietzsche had on Deleuze. His goals surrounding affirmation were most heavily discussed in his book ‘Nietzsche and Philosophy’ and Nietzsche’s thinking in general inspired his entire intellectual work.

There are of course objections to anarchist readings of Nietzsche. He conceptualized the ‘will to power’ after all, his ideas were co-opted by nazis (including his own sister) and the aristocracy was quite often pointed to as an example of positivity within Nietzsche. An in depth reading of Nietzsche (and Deleuze’s Nietzsche) point out how none of these come in conflict with anarchism, and indeed, how an ‘aristocratic anarchism’ in the spirit of Nietzsche is viable (what)?

To start, let’s discuss the aforementioned ‘will to power.’ According to Deleuze, to say that the will to power is a ‘desire for power’ is preposterous on multiple grounds. The ‘will’ is not a desire, firstly. The will is the force that is behind desire, it does not rely on attributed values the same way desire does. Will is simply pure affirmation, the steam in the motor engine of life. Power is not power over another (this slips back into the negation of external will, a crime once again rooted in ressentiment) rather power is pure self affirmation, the genetic component of will. The will to power is the drive to affirmation of the self (as is difference first self-affirmation, so is power) in a creative and joyous fashion.

“All those who discover the essence of the will in a will to power or something analogous never stop complaining about their discovery, as if they ought to draw from it the strange resolve to flee from it or to ward off its effects. It is as if the essence of the will puts us into an unlivable, untenable and deceptive situation. And this is easily explained: making the will a will to power in the sense of a “desire to dominate”, philosophers see this desire as infinite; making power an object of representation they see the unreal character of a thing represented in this way; engaging the will to power in combat they see the contradiction in the will itself.”

“Against this fettering of the will Nietzsche announces that willing liberates; against the suffering of the will Nietzsche announces that the will is joyful. Against the image of a will which dreams of having established values attributed to it Nietzsche announces that to will is to create new values.”

“Will to power must be interpreted in a completely different way: power is the one that wills in the will. Power is the genetic and differential element in the will. This is why the will is essentially creative. This is also why power is never measured against representation: it is never represented, it is not even interpreted or evaluated, it is “the one that” interprets, “the one that” evaluates, “the one that” wills.” (Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy)

The desire to dominate is not even close to a correct understanding of the will to power to Deleuze. The entire construct of the ‘will’ is one that is fundamentally introspectively positive.

“The State is said by some to be a necessary evil; it must be made unnecessary.” (Benjamin Tucker, Instead of a Book)

Position these two realizations, as well as the contradiction between an affirmative aristocracy and it’s negation of collective will, and you recognize that, contrary to the notion that anarchism is rooted in the ‘negation of external power’ it is indeed the affirmation of one’s own power that outlines an anarchist conception of Nietzsche.

When read in this format, the person free of negation or ressentiment (to Nietzsche, the super-human, perhaps another element in a post-humanist lens), is not a king insofar as he is dictating what others may say and do, but a king insofar as he affirms his internal power, lives without conceptions of externally placed sin (which, in both the socialist and christian format, are external values rooted in the negation of life).

To be an aristocrat, to Nietzsche, is emblematic of a life that is escaping this sort of ultimate envy, rage and ressentiment that drowns the populus. Socio Political power matters little here. ‘Every man a king,’ then, is essentially the goal of an anarchist aristocracy. The ultimate affirmation of power, which, in a market freed of external control, in exchanges in which wealth is created and exploitation is destroyed, is everywhere. How does Nietzshce relate to other specific lines of flight in Deleuze though?

A Body without Organs in deleuze is emblematic of pure deterritorializing force. It is destructive only by the power of its own pure self affirmation. To read Nietzsche and his thoughts on the body, however, can guide our understanding of the BwO to a different level.

The Body without Organs’ enemy in Deleuze (whom we will read from a Nietzschean lens in regards to the ‘body’) is not the organs themselves, rather the organism. To Nietzsche, the body is an oligarchy of higher functions forcing it’s organs into submission. A body without organs, in this sense, is the abandonment of this domination (anarchist Nietzshce)? and a repelling of the overall organism of control, not the pieces within the organism. The goal of Nietzsche’s ‘affirmation of power’ in Deleuze’s lens is not, then, to dominate in the sense of controlling others, but to dominate in the fundamentally positive way, that through it’s BwO, lacks control or suppression of others whatsoever. That slips back into the negation of life, of positivity, and it returns to the reaction, as opposed to ultimate power embracing in all hands.

An ‘aristocratic anarchism’ is to take what Nietzsche sees as the fundamentally affirmative class, the aristocracy, and make it everybody’s. What keeps the aristocracy in control, to us, is the aspects of negation it’s still entrenched in. To free it is to collectivize it. To collectivize it is to privatize it.

It may be said indeed that much of the left still reeks of ressentiment and negation. This is why Nietzsche detested the socialists, emblematic of everything wrong with the left is the pure negation of power, the construction of sin (Marie Antoinette was a bad person because she indulged herself) etc. allowed the socialists to create a new state that was supposedly free of sin (capitalist exchange) and yet continued to exist in an ultimately negative format (the continuity of a state of hostility towards self-affirmation of life in all scenarios).

This is the difference between market anarchism and socialism (in the Marxist sense). We seek to affirm power, constructing networks of exchange free of negation, actions only taken in self-affirmation, the elevation of all and the liberation of power. The socialists construct flaws of the capitalist class beyond just the systemic nature of authority, resigning anti-capitalism to a destiny of resentment and neo-capitalist state enterprises.

The socialist conception of populism relies on the construction of cultural sin, a negation of power, and much of the modern left attempts to construct an ethics against desire, against hedonism. This is the error of the anti-desire socialists. Indeed, an anti-capitalism is anti-capitalism insofar as it is pro-power, contrary to the capitalist negation of power. Instead of populist ethics constructed on stalwart fundamentals, our ethics deal only in affirmation. We rely on desire in it’s most emancipatory format, one away from populist rhetoric, and towards equalizing networking.

Truth as the root of the revolutionary cause is also criticized in Nietzsche. To Nietzshce, reason, truth, as a value are opposed to life in the sense that they insist on truth to deny creativity. To Nietzsche, the true philosopher is the legislator in the sense that the philosopher is the creative, the inventor of concepts, ideas, of art. Truth, art, these are affirmations of possibilities, and therefore affirmations of the will to deceive that are non-reactive, life-like in and of themselves.

The power of falsehood must be taken as far as a will to deceive, an artistic will which alone is capable of competing with the ascetic ideal and successfully opposing it (GM III 25). It is art which invents the lies that raise falsehood to this highest affirmative power, that turns the will to deceive into something which is affirmed in the power of falsehood. For the artist, appearance no longer means the negation of the real in this world but this kind of selection, correction, redoubling and affirmation.28 Then truth perhaps takes on a new sense. Truth is appearance. Truth means bringing of power into effect, raising to the highest power. In Nietzsche, “we the artists” = “we the seekers after knowledge or truth” = “we the inventors of new possibilities of life”.” (Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy)

As far as ethical frameworks, Nietzsche throws into question the ideology of reason that had plagued enlightenment philosophers, and criticizes Kant for refusing to escape the theology of reason, even within his attempt to do so, by allocating the trial of reason to a self-automated judge, reason itself. Nietzsche, though, still, has values with which to evaluate ethical decisions, and insists that we can look towards the sciences to inform the creative values surrounding ethics we form.

“To that end [of creating ourselves] we must become the best learners and discoverers of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world: we must become physicists in order to be creators in this sense [wir müssen Physiker sein, um, in jenem Sinne, Schöpfer sein zu können] — while hitherto all valuations and ideals have been based on ignorance of physics … . Therefore: long live physics!” (Nietzsche, Gay Science)

An, in turn, he would later discuss how this sort of assumption of ultimate rationality as a new theology would end up justifying hierarchy in a way that was still fundamentally negative.

“In so-called modern philosophy, and in the so-called modern or rational State, everything revolves around the legislator and the subject. The State must realize the distinction between the legislator and the subject under formal conditions permitting thought, for its part, to conceptualize their identity. Always obey. The more you obey, the more you will be master, for you will only be obeying pure reason, in other words yourself.” (Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus)

By looking towards the information readily available to us, we can examine the patterns that conclude in a ‘higher being’ to Nietzsche. To Nietzsche, this higher being avoids the tyranny of the majority, lives in a way that is introspectively affirming and creative, and yet still lives without ressentiment (the superhuman, the overman). To an anarchist reading of negation as a concept, the overman lives in his own positivity, away from the democrat’s and their negation of life as a principle.

“The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought. That this should be so terribly apparent in a country whose symbol is democracy, is very significant of the tremendous power of the majority.” (Goldman, Minorities and Majorities)

The ethical, at the end of the day, both to the virtue ethicists and to Nietzshce, is that which affirms eudaimonia, the underlying drive forward, that which affirms the will to power. Life. This is why master morality is to be strived for, because it deals in the affirmation of it’s own life. Anarchism can do this insofar as it can abandon constructs of sin, democracy etc. and deal in an ethicality surrounding freedom, agency and life itself. This has long been at the center of the anarchist movement, as displayed by Goldman and the like.

Aristocratic anarchism affirms itself, affirms will, affirms life. Contrary to the christian-socialist democrat, the anarchist rules only himself, delivers himself the ultimate power, and derives ethics from life, dictating that both those who attempt to dictate his life are negating life, and those who dictate the lives of others.

“The great are only great because we are on our knees. Let us rise!” (PJ Proudhon)