Date: Tue, 6 Jan 2004 22:59:57 +0000
From: keir <keir-AT-chumba.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: [postanarchism]-AT-ism & markets/De Landa interview


I've found this a good interview on markets/anti-markets and just how 
silly Delanda gets when he tries to separate Deleuze and Guatarri 
from Marx. Protrevi really nails Delanda for staying on the level of 
exchange and refusing to deal with production. Yet Protrevi is very 
influenced by Delanda's connection of Deleuze to complexity theory.
Protrevi's website is really useful; loads of reading guides. 
http://www.artsci.lsu.edu/fai/Faculty/Professors/Protevi/index.html

All the best

Keir

1000 Years of War:
CTHEORY Interview with Manuel De Landa

Full interview here: http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=383
Here's the relevant extract:


CTHEORY (Protevi): Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy accepts
Deleuze's
use of axiomatics to analyze major or Royal science. Yet you are critical of
Deleuze and Guattari's use of axiomatics as a way to conceptualize
capitalism
(e.g., ATY 331n7), which you see as an example of a top-down positing of a
whole. I certainly would agree with you that far too much Marxist work has
been
simplistic, historical determinist, reductive, totalizing, functionalist,
top-down, etc., but I wonder if you aren't being too harsh with Deleuze and
Guattari's attempts to define a theory of capitalism that avoids each of
these
dangers? They certainly adopt a notion of "machinic surplus value," moving
beyond a simple labor theory of value (machines as "congealed muscular
energy,"
as you put it at ATY 79). Don't they also consistently deny any historical
determinism of stages of development by emphasizing the contingency of
capitalist formations, as well as conduct a sustained polemic against
reductive
base-superstructure models of society? Don't their constant reminders that
the
line of flight is primary prevent any totalizing accounts? Isn't their use
of
axiomatics an attempt to see capitalism as an adaptive meshwork of economic,
state and quasi-state (IMF, WTO, etc.) institutions, rather than as a
homeostatic organismic whole, as in crude functionalist accounts? In other
words, haven't they, at least in principle, given us the outlines of a
bottom-up account of a complex, open-ended, adaptive world capitalist
system?

De Landa: I agree that if I had to choose among all the Marxist accounts of
economic history I would probably pick theirs. It does have all the
advantages
you mention. Yet, I believe they would have benefited greatly from a better
reading of Braudel. They seemed to have read only volume one of his history
of
capitalism and not the other two volumes, which are really the most radical
part. This is clear when in A Thousand Plateus in one page thet quote
Braudel's
stress on the role of cities and yet in the very next page Deleuze and
Guattari
go on to define capitalism as a "market economy", an idea which Braudel
attacks
as historically false. So I wonder what would have happened to their theory
had
they understood the last point: that there is no such thing as "the market"
in
general and no such thing as a "logic of exchange" in general (doesn't the
idea
of an capitalist axiomatic depend on the idea of a logic of exchange?). Once
we
separate oligopolies from the market (they are strategic not primarily
exchangist entities) and identify capitalism with oligopolies (as Braudel
does)
we can still use some of Deleuze and Guattari's ideas since markets have
always
caused "lines of flight" to pass among societies, particularly closed
societies
(it's in the marketplace that we meet outsiders; that foreign objects and
ideas
enter a city; that heterogeneity is injected etc).

CTHEORY (Protevi): Yes, you're completely right that Deleuze and Guattari
overlook Braudel's distinction between market and anti-market and use an
abstract sense of capitalism as a "market economy" whereby "market" means
"any
exchange system whatsoever, whether it is composed of atomic producers and
consumers who must act as price-takers (the Braudelian sense of 'local
market')
or whether it is composed of producers and consumers with varying degrees of
power to be price-setters (the Braudelian sense of 'anti-markets')." Even
though it's sometimes hard to make that distinction clearly all the time
(for
instance, when you say in your answer "it's in the marketplace that we meet
outsiders; that foreign objects and ideas enter a city" I think Braudel
would
attribute this to long-distance trade dominated by anti-market corporations,
even if it occurs in the same physical location as local market exchanges),
I
agree we should by all means incorporate that distinction into our analysis
of
the economies (note the plural) operating today worldwide. Here the
neo-Marxist
notions of formal and real subsumption (roughly speaking, the relations
between
capitalist and non-capitalist economies, and the tendency of the former to
replace the latter) would have to be brought to bear, notions that Hardt and
Negri use often in Empire. (Just to be clear before I continue: I completely
agree with you in everything you say about Marx himself in the 19th century
being wed to equilibrium analyses, about the complete bankruptcy of top-down
and centralized social and economic planning, about the necessity of using
non-linear analyses of economic processes that show the inadequacy of
equilibrium and optimizing models, and so forth.)

Here is my question to you: I wonder if Deleuze and Guattari ignore the
Braudelian distinction because, like Marx, they locate the important element
to
be examined in capitalism to be production rather than exchange?
Recapitulating
what they say in both Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, what they call
in
What is Philosophy? "Marx's concept of capitalism" (97) is the conjunction
of
the deterritorialized flows of labor and capital, and these meet in
production,
not in exchange.

De Landa: Well, no, not really. I agree that the dichotomy
"market/antimarket"
does give that impression, hence I probably won't use it again. But the same
distinction applies to production: it's the difference between economies of
scale and economies of agglomeration. That is, between oligopolies using
managed prices, routinized labor, hierarchical structure, vertical
integration
etc. and networks of small producers using market prices, skilled labor,
decentralized structure and functional complementarities. You must remember
the
study that compares Silicon Valley and Route 128 as production systems
(mentioned in A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History) or what I have written
about Emilia-Romagna. Braudel (and Jane Jacobs following in his steps)
places a
great emphasis on this distinction (though he does not use the terms) and
views
it as applying across history for at least a millennium (hence economies of
agglomeration would not be a late stage of capitalism as some Marxists have
tried to argue using the term "flexible specialization" or the ridiculous
one
of "post-Fordism") but an alternative to economies of scale (also much older
than the Industrial Revolution) which has been there for a while.

CTHEORY (Protevi): What about the emphasis on production as the key
ontological
concept in Anti-Oedipus (the whole world, nature and humans together, is
composed of interlocking series of connected machines that produce materials
that are fed into other machines)?

De Landa: This is correct. I myself add to this when I attack the Humean
notion
of causality (as perceived constant conjunction) and define it as a real
connection in which one event produces another event. And more generally,
when
I stress that to get rid of essences one must always give the intensive
process
of production that yields any individual entity (atoms, organisms or
commodities). Intensive thinking in general is about production.

CTHEORY (Protevi): From this productivist perspective (which I think is
amenable to a nonlinear dynamics analysis of the material and energy flows
that
keep the open production systems far-from-equilibrium), the key issue is the
productive conjunction of capital and labor (here machinic surplus value
vitiates a pure labor theory of value), whether or not the products of that
labor flow into markets or anti-markets. And the key to coercing labor into
exploitative production processes is to threaten the production of labor
power
with interruption of the flows that sustain it.

De Landa: Well, but the same point applies here: the conjunction of capital
and
labor can take place in different forms (scale, agglomeration) and it is
clear
that only the economic power of the former allows the kind of threat of
withdrawal you are talking about: only if a firm is very capital intensive
(large machines, large start-up costs functioning as barriers to entry) and
if
the process is based on routinization (the less skills a worker brings the
less
bargaining power he/she will have when it comes to set wages) can this form
of
coercion work. I am not saying that power relations are absent from networks
of
small producers but there the ability of workers to bargain for a fair wage
(particularly if unions exist) is much greater and the permeability of the
division between classes is greater too (if a typical firm has less than 100
employees and it is not capital intensive, it's much easier for a motivated,
creative worker to start his/her own business). The point is that all of
this
is obscured (if not made invisible) by the blanket concept of "capitalism."

As to theories of value: we need to go beyond the very notion of surplus
value.
(It's not enough to simply add the "machinic" type to escape the labor
theory).
Why just adding machines to "abstract labor" (read, routinized labor)? Why
not
also fossil fuels, starting with coal? And what of knowledge, skills and
organizational procedures? And then, the main defect of labor theory here is
to
include supply factors and not demand factors, but the latter also matter,
and
so marginalist approaches to this side of the equation must be added. (Over
the
objections of Marxists who would rather die than include bourgeois
marginalism
in a theory of value).

CTHEORY (Protevi): Okay, but even if the shift from an exchangist to a
productivist perspective doesn't work for you, does it at least seem to you
a
fruitful way of explaining Deleuze and Guattari's tenacious loyalty to (some
suitably modified) form of Marxist analysis, as well as their insistence on
a
systematicity to capitalist production? Or do we have to change so much in
Marx
to reach what Deleuze and Guattari say in analyzing things that their
insistence on calling what they do a form of Marxism simply the result of
their
social position in the "gauchiste" (non-Communist) left of France in their
lifetimes? In other words, their Marxism is a way of thumbing their noses
both
at neo-liberals and at party loyalists?

De Landa: Well, frankly, I think Marxism is Deleuze and Guattari's little
Oedipus, the small piece of territory they must keep to come back at night
after a wild day of deterritorializing. Who could blame them for needing a
resting place, a familiar place with all the reassurances of the Marxist
tradition (and its powerful iconography of martyrs and revolutionaries)? The
question is whether we need that same resting place (clearly we need one,
but
should it be the same? Shouldn't each of us have a different one so that
collectively we can eliminate them?).

I believe that the main task for today's left is to create a new political
economy (the resources are all there: Max Weber, T.B. Veblen and the old
institutionalists, John Kenneth Galbraith, Fernand Braudel, some of the new
institutionalists, like Douglass North; redefinitions of the market, like
those
of Herbert Simon etc) based as you acknowledged before, on a non-equilibrium
view of the matter? But how can we do this if we continue to believe that
Marxists got it right, that it is just a matter of tinkering with the basic
ideas? At any rate, concepts like "mode of production" do not fit a flat
ontology of individuals as far as I can tell. But then, this is the part of
my
reconstruction of Deleuze that I am the least sure he would accept: in
Difference and Repetition he cheerfully talks about the "virtual
multiplicity
of society" (using Marx as his example, of course) a term I would never use
(since my ontology explicitly rejects totalities like "society as a whole").