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J. Moufawad-Paul 2011

Deterritorialization and Imperialism

“Capitalism… is not at all territorial, even in its beginnings.” Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus “Imperialism… has been an intrinsic part of capitalist expansion right from the beginning.” Samir Amin, Obsolescent Capitalism

In Capitalism In The Age of Globalization, Samir Amin lists Gilles Deleuze as a

postmodernist, dismissing him in a general polemic against Lyotard, Foucault, Derrida, and their

ilk.1 It is regretful that Amin, who has also been misread and dismissed as a “dependency

theorist”, would categorically overlook Deleuze’s possible contributions to the marxist canon.

What is most regretful, though, is the fact that Deleuze, together with Felix Guattari, have

developed a theorization of imperialism that partially accords with Amin’s own theories. Rather

than simply “serv[ing] some useful purpose… [by] exposing the metaphysical nature… of post-

Enlightenment bourgeois discourse,”2 as Amin claims, Deleuze and Guattari provide a useful,

though theoretically dense, analysis of capitalism – an analysis that is not, simply, postmodern.

The purpose of this paper, then, is to demonstrate how the concepts of Deleuze and

Guattari can be connected to the work of marxist political economists such as Samir Amin. I

have chosen as my focus their concept of “deterritorialization” that I argue connects to Amin’s

theorization of imperialism. I believe that connecting Deleuze and Guattari to Amin is important

for two reasons: one, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of deterritorialization illuminates Amin’s

theory of imperialism as “actually existing capitalism”; and, two, Amin’s theory reasserts a more

sophisticated reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation of deterritorialization.

The latter point is important due to the fact that the concept of deterritorialization was

most recently popularized due to its use in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire. Since

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Deleuze and Guattari claim that “capitalism is the exterior limit of all societies … [because]

capitalism for its part has no exterior limit,”3 and “is not at all territorial,”4 Negri and Hardt take

this to mean that global capitalism lacks a national centre and that empire has replaced

imperialism. If this is how deterritorialization should be understood (and I argue that it is not),

then connecting Deleuze and Guattari to Samir Amin, who is perhaps the most important living

theorist of imperialism, would seem entirely wrong-headed. In both volumes of Capitalism and

Schizophrenia, however, Deleuze and Guattari cite Amin when they explain deterritorialization,

which indicates a different understanding of the concept than the one maintained by Hardt and

Negri. Although Empire has become less influential since its release in 2000, its claim that a

deterritorialized empire has replaced imperialism is still popular. The idea that capitalism lacks

national centres is common to various anti-globalization and pro-globalization discourses––

Thomas Friedman's recent The World Is Flat (2005) being an example of the latter interpretation

of a centreless capitalism.

What I mainly hope to demonstrate by connecting Deleuze and Guattari to Amin,

however, is that the concept of deterritorialization is extremely useful in understanding

capitalism because it unites three important dimensions of capital: primitive accumulation,

imperialism (not empire), and ruling class ideology. Thus, it not only articulates capitalism at

both a basic and global level, it also demonstrates how capitalism is understood by capitalism

itself.

Deterritorialization and Primitive Accumulation

In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari write:

At the heart of Capital, Marx points to the encounter of two “principal” elements: on one side, the deterritorialized worker who has become free and naked, having to sell his labor capacity; and on the other, decoded money that has become capital and is capable of buying it.5

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Thus, although Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of deterritorialization can be used to describe

“the freeing of ‘schizophrenic’ libido from pre-established objects of investment,”6 I am

concerned here with the subject matter of the above quote. In other words, I am interested in the

concept of deterritorialization that, according to Eugene Holland, “designates the freeing of

labor-power from the seigneurial plot of land, the assembly line, or other means of production.”7

In this sense, deterritorialization is meant to explain what Marx called primitive accumulation,

“an accumulation not the result of the capitalist mode of production, but its starting point.”8

Although discussing deterritorialization in relation to representation and desire is

important (and this is often how analyses of this concept proceed) I am more interested in the

concrete discussion of deterritorialization as primitive accumulation, in examining the concept in

connection with a concrete socio-historical rather than an abstract psychoanalytical (or even

“schizoanalytical”) context. This is not to say that the latter is not important––indeed, I am

aware that the concept of deterritorialized desire and representation are intrinsically connected to

the social. My point, however, is that I believe it is important to examine deterritorialization in

light of what Samir Amin calls actually existing capitalism. That is, I want to demonstrate how

the concept is useful for understanding how capitalism exists and functions as a mode of

production and a global system.

Moreover, I recognize that the concept of deterritorialization is not, for Deleuze and

Guattari, simply associated with capitalism. As Holland explains, “[c]apitalism… is not the only

mode of socio-libidinal production that deterritorializes; all power societies do so.”9 In this

paper, however, I want to focus on deterritorialization as it connects to capitalism––both as a

mode of production and a world system. I believe that, deterritorialization and

reterritorialization of despotic power notwithstanding, the concept is most appropriate when

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applied to capitalism. In other “power societies” deterritorialization is a process of “over-coding

via representation,” whereas capitalism, because its power is economic, axiomatizes: “it joins the

deterritorialized and de-coded flow of pure liquid wealth (invested as capital in a means of

production) with another deterritorialized and de-coded flow: pure labor-power.”10 Eugene

Holland compares the process of deterritorialization to Marx and Engels’ notion of the “constant

revolutionizing of production” intrinsic to capitalism.11 Capitalism spills over all limits, codes

and borders; it “is not at all territorial.”12 In order to understand why capitalism is not territorial,

one has to begin with the concept of primitive accumulation.

In the first volume of Capital, Marx explains primitive accumulation in the following

manner:

The capitalist system pre-supposes the complete separation of the labourers from all property in the means by which they can realise their labour. […] The process, therefore, that clears the way for the capitalist system, can be none other than the process which takes from the labourer the possession of his means of production; a process that transforms, on the one hand, the social means of subsistence and of production into capital, on the other, the immediate producers into wage-labourers. The so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.13

The above statement reveals what Deleuze and Guattari mean, in the quote beginning this

section, regarding the “principal elements” at the heart of Marx’s Capital. According to Marx, in

order to produce the free wage-labour necessary for the capitalist mode of production, the pre-

capitalist labourers are separated from the land and transformed into an army of free (as in ripped

free) labourers. Instead of working the land for themselves (and their feudal lord, of course),

they are driven from this means of production and forced to sell their labour power. The

completion of this process is historically most evident in the England land enclosures where

“peasants were deterritorialized from the land only to be reterritorialized onto textile looms in the

nascent garment industry.”14

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Thus it can be said that the process of primitive accumulation is a process of

deterritorialization because the labourer is divorced from the territory that formed his or her

initial means of production, and then cast into the free labour market:

Capitalism… is not at all territorial, even in its beginnings: its power of deterritorialization consists in taking as its object, not the earth, but “materialized labor,” the commodity. And private property is no longer ownership of the land or the soil, nor even of the means of production as such, but of convertible abstract rights.15

Here Deleuze and Guattari remind us that deterritorialization is meant to describe something that

is basic to capitalism––something that produces and regiments desire or consciousness. Thus, to

use the hackneyed marxist lingo, Deleuze and Guattari use deterritorialization to discuss the

“base” of capitalism rather than, simply, the “superstructure.” Capitalism as a mode of

production rests on the class polarization created by primitive accumulation where “the owners

of money, means of production, means of subsistence” are in conflict with “free labourers, the

sellers of their own labour-power.”16

The concept of deterritorialization, then, not only explains primitive accumulation, but

the accumulation/reproduction of capital. As Marx reminds us, “[t]he expropriation of the

agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process [of

capitalism].”17 Furthermore, the capitalist “mode of production pre-supposes parcelling of the

soil, and scattering [or deterritorializing] of the other means of production.”18

This is why, in the quote I used to begin this section, Deleuze and Guattari claim that the

two principle elements that describe capitalism are free labour and capital; deterritorialization is

meant to explain both. On the one hand, deterritorialization indicates the emergence of the free

worker through “the deterritorialization of the soil through privatization.”19 On the other hand,

deterritorialization indicates capital itself:

the deterritorialization of wealth through monetary abstraction; the decoding of the flows of production through merchant capital; the decoding of States through financial capital

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and public debts; the decoding of the means of production through the formation of industrial capital; and so on.20

This second principle element is the concern of the following section.

Marxists who come from an anti-imperialist marxist tradition (such as myself) are usually

occupied with the reality of global capitalism, or imperialism, and Deleuze and Guattari’s use of

deterritorialization to explain capital is something that dovetails with this tradition––even if it is

not entirely intentional on their part. Actually existing capitalism, as I shall examine in the

following two sections, is not simply a mode of production but also a world system. There are

nations in this world that, though not properly “capitalist” in and of themselves (feudalism and

semi-feudalism, for example, still persist), are still part of the global capitalist market. Deleuze

and Guattari’s concept of deterritorialization, I believe, beautifully connects the concept of

primitive accumulation with imperialism.

Deterritorialization and Global Capitalism

For those of us who study the transition to capitalism from the point of view of its global victims,

it is important to connect free labour and independent capital to “the hegemony of merchant

capital in the dominant Atlantic centres, and [to] the creation of the peripheral zones (the

Americas) whose function involved their total compliance with the logic of accumulation of

merchant capital.”21 In other words, rather than examine the rise of capitalism simply by

focusing on the enclosure of the commons in England (and the subsequent creation of free and

exploitable labour), we take the view that this internal class polarization is also connected to the

world-wide polarization produced by modern colonialism and slavery that affected

the feudal sectors of [Europe], hastening the breakup of feudal relations. In order to obtain the new goods [derived from colonial plunder], the feudal lords were obliged to modernize their methods of exploitation, extracting a larger surplus and converting this

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into money. This modernization led them to drive off the land the excess population, as happened in the English enclosures.22

Marx, of course, has also noted the link between primitive accumulation in England and the

institutions of colonialism and slavery. In the first volume of Capital, for instance, he explains

that the emergence of wage labour in England was, according to the manner in which capitalism

actually developed, dependent on “slavery pure and simple in the new world.”23

My point here is not to contribute to the debate on the transition to capitalism, but to

highlight that Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of deterritorialization can also be read in this larger

context of primitive accumulation. That is, while deterritorialization, in a very basic sense, is

meant to theorize independent capital, it is also meant to theorize independent capital’s global

dimension. When marxists such as Amin focus on the colonial development of capitalism, they

do so in order to give an historical materialist explanation for the current era of global

capitalism––for the development of monopoly capitalism, that is, imperialism. Thus, the class

polarization that marks the capitalist mode of production possesses a global resonance, and

Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of deterritorialization is meant to express this fact. In A

Thousand Plateaus they write that capitalism’s

power of deterritorialization… marks a mutation in worldwide ecumenical organizations, which now take on a consistency of their own: the worldwide axiomatic, instead of resulting from heterogeneous social formations and their relations, for the most part distributes these formations, determines their relations, while organizing an international division of labor. From all these standpoints, it could be said that capitalism develops an economic order that could do without the State. And in fact capitalism is not short on war cries against the State, not only in the name of the market, but by virtue of its superior deterritorialization.24

Here, Deleuze and Guattari are emphasizing capitalism’s tendency to develop a world

market system that, in the words of Marx and Engels, “batters down all Chinese walls.”25 What

makes the concept of deterritorialization insightful is that Deleuze and Guattari connect the

separation of value from the physical territory of the earth, as discussed in the previous section,

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with the separation of value from national territory. In a single word they indicate “the

framework within which the law of globalized value operates.”26

At the same time, however, the concept of deterritorialization becomes tricky. In the

above quote, Deleuze and Guattari speak of capitalism developing “an economic order that could

do without the State.” Indeed, the most rabid capitalist ideologues are always complaining about

state intervention. Even from the early days of capitalism, the ruling class intelligentsia were

attacking reforms such as universal suffrage, public sanitation, and libraries as state interference

with the “natural forces” of the market.27 Since the flows of the capitalist market spill beyond

the borders of the nation-state, it is argued that the state is antiquated and an obstruction to

capital. In the final section of this paper I plan to return to this problem in more detail. At this

point, I am merely highlighting how Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of deterritorialization can be

read to make the claim that capitalism, because it deterritorializes, leads to the obsolescence of

state power. In Empire, for example, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri make use of the concept

of deterritorialization to argue just this. Their reading, in my opinion, is misguided.

According to Hardt and Negri, capitalism is no longer mediated through state power.

Where global capitalism was once articulated by powerful central states that exported capital to

the peripheries, and thus locked these peripheries into imperialist dependence, global capitalism

has now moved beyond the centre-periphery relationship of imperialism. State power has

stopped mediating world capitalism because capitalism is ultimately deterritorializing; its flows

have gone beyond the limits of the nation-state. The capitalist market, therefore, mediates the

power of every state. Hardt and Negri call this new global articulation of capitalism “Empire.”

They write:

The concept of Empire is characterized fundamentally by a lack of boundaries: Empire’s rule has no limits. First and foremost, then, the concept of Empire posits a regime that effectively encompasses the spatial territory, or really that rules over the entire “civilized” world. No territorial boundaries limit its reign.28

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Thus, for Hardt and Negri, deterritorialization is a process that ultimately annihilates territorial

power. “In contrast to imperialism,” they explain, “Empire establishes no territorial center of

power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorializing

apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open,

expanding frontiers.”29

While it is true that Hardt and Negri’s use of deterritorialization is probably their own

development of the concept, rather than a faithful reading of Deleuze and Guattari, I believe it is

important to investigate the original concept itself, and compare it with the theories of

imperialism established by political economists such as Samir Amin, to demonstrate that the

original conceptualization was far more complex than its use in Empire. Such an analysis will

not only demonstrate the depth of the concept of deterritorialization, but also reveal the

ahistorical nature of Hardt and Negri’s appropriation.

Deleuze and Guattari’s original conceptualization, however, explains the complexities of

imperialism rather than the simplicity of empire. In A Thousand Plateaus, they write:

When the flows reach this capitalist threshold of decoding and deterritorialization (naked labor, independent capital), it seems that there is no longer a need for a State, for distinct juridical and political domination, in order to ensure appropriation which has become directly economic. The economy constitutes a worldwide axiomatic… Today we can depict an enormous, so-called stateless, monetary mass that circulates through foreign exchange and across borders, eluding control by the States, forming a multinational ecumenical organization, constituting a de facto supranational power untouched by governmental decisions.30

It is tempting to interpret the above claim as meaning that the state form has been subordinated

to the power of a pure international capital. As Hardt and Negri’s use of deterritorialization

indicates, the fact that capital lacks a specific territory––and goes so far as to penetrate other

state territories by subordinating national economies to an international economy – could lead

one to believe that capitalism is ultimately above state power. Therefore, since the movement of

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capital constitutes a “supranational power,” it lacks the direction of a single state. No state or

states act as the central power behind worldwide capitalism, Hardt and Negri claim, because

capitalism has deterritorialized every state and locked them, more or less equally, into one

“worldwide axiomatic.”

Such an intepretation, however, is grossly misleading. First of all, Deleuze and Guattari

claim that this statelessness is so-called, and that it seems as if there is no reason for the

persistence of state power. Secondly, in the paragraph preceding the one cited above, Deleuze

and Guattari foreground their discussion of “a new threshold of deterritorialization” by quoting

Arghiri Emmanuel’s Unequal Exchange.31 This is important because Emmanuel’s theory of

worldwide capitalist exchange is also a theory that, with qualifications, was defended by Samir

Amin in a statement that parallels Deleuze and Guattari’s claims about deterritorialization:

The essential contribution made by Emmanuel is undoubtedly the discovery of the preeminence of international values. Our world no longer consists of juxtaposed national system carrying on external relations with each other (even if these are important)… Rather it constitutes a unity, a whole––the world capitalist system… the system is defined in the abstract by the great mobility of goods and capital and by a relative immobility of labor. This means that commodities are not first of all national commodities and then, exceptionally and marginally, international. On the contrary, it means that commodities are worldwide.32

Therefore, for Amin, the world is not defined by competing territories but by the larger dynamics

of global capitalism. At the same time, however, the fact that commodities are worldwide does

not mean that the state form has been neutralized by their deterritorializing movement. Both

Amin and Emmanuel believed that the movement of these international commodities could only

be understood within the context of imperialism. That is, the worldwide market is mediated by

the ruling class at the center of capitalism––by the world’s most powerful states. This is why,

for Emmanuel, the nature of the world market is one of unequal exchange. The central powers

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set the terms of the exchange and the peripheries, lacking their own economic and political

power, are forced to concede to these terms.

Deleuze and Guattari share the above position; their concept of deterritorialization does

not mean that worldwide capitalism is some nebulous and stateless system. In Anti-Oedipus, in

fact, they explicitly connect deterritorialization to Amin’s theory of imperialism:

As Samir Amin has shown, the process of deterritorialization here goes from the center to the periphery, that is, from the developed countries to underdeveloped countries, which do not constitute a separate world, but rather an essential component of the world-wide capitalist machine.33

In other words, while there is a “world-wide capitalist machine”, or a world capitalist

system, global capitalism is also defined by central and peripheral nations. The former nations

(capitalist modes of production such as America, the European states, Japan, etc.) control the

world market; the latter (capitalist social formation marked by the preponderance of other modes

of production) are the victims of this market. Deleuze and Guattari further explicate the

imperialist dimension of deterritorialization when they write:

as capitalist deterritorialization is developing from the center to the periphery, the decoding of flows on the periphery develops by means of a “distarticulation” that ensures the ruin of traditional sectors, the development of extraverted economic circuits, a specific hypertrophy of the tertiary sector, and an extreme inequality in the different areas of productivity and in incomes.34

That is, as I shall examine at the conclusion of this section, the peripheral nations are mutilated

by the exported capital controlled by the central nations of world capitalism.

Thus, when Deleuze and Guattari write that capitalism “is not at all territorial”35 they are

not making the point that Hardt and Negri would make in Empire. They are not claiming that

some nebulous and supranational market replaces the state (or that the world market constitutes

one giant mode of production, a concept touted by some Trotskyists). Rather, they are claiming

that there is something about capitalism that defies territorial value––that is not bound to land,

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soil, or national borders––and that transforms the world structure of nation-states. Or, in Marx

and Engels’ words, “[a]ll old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily

being destroyed.”36

In capitalism, “materialized labor” is the commodity and not the earth tilled by the

peasant; and “private property is no longer ownership of the land or the soil… but of convertible

abstract rights”37 such as the right to sell one’s labor on the capitalist market. More importantly,

however, is the fact that the commodity––a value not tied to the soil, to territory––can be

plugged into the worldwide market created by capitalism. Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that

capitalism was not territorial from its very beginning can thus be likened to Amin’s claim that

imperialism, loosely defined, “has been an intrinsic part of capitalist expansion right from the

beginning.”38

Deterritorialization, then, has nothing to do with the obsolescence of the nation-state.

Rather, it has to do with the axiomatic of capitalism within which the state (or states) is locked.

Deleuze and Guattari claim:

we can join Samir Amin in saying that the axioms of the periphery differ from those of the center. And here again, the difference and independence of the axioms [of differing states] in no way compromise the overall axiomatic [of the capitalist world system].39

In global capitalism, the different national territories are united and, to some extent,

homogenized by the logic of the world market. This is the meaning of deterritorialization in this

global sense: the coding of a specific culture, while still present in a specific nation, is ultimately

subordinate to the decoding of capitalism. Or, to use traditional marxist terminology, use-value

is subordinated to exchange-value. The latter lacks any specific meaning or code except for what

is commanded by profit. “If culture can exist only where there is the direct, complete

apprehension of all use-values, material and immaterial, in their simultaneous totality,” writes

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Amin, “then capitalism [in an abstract sense] has no culture. The destruction of culture spreads

from one sector to another, the commodity gradually debasing the non-commodity.”40

This homogenization, though, spreads from centre to periphery, mediated by the interests

of those states that command capital. Therefore, every peripheral nation’s culture, while still

persisting in the national formation (with the residue of past modes of production), is dominated

by the imperialist market that often renders cultural values insignificant in comparison to

exchange-value. What does it matter, for example, if a landmark possesses an important

historical or cultural significance for a nation if there is a wellspring of oil beneath? The

territorial importance of the landmark will be subordinated to the interests of capital that are

shared by the ruling classes of world capitalism’s imperial centres, and the comprador classes of

the dominated peripheries.

The reason why deterritorial homogenism is not even near the extent indicated by Empire

is due to the persistence of the state formations that make up the capitalist world system. Amin

notes that “[d]espite powerful tendencies of capitalism to shape everything, everywhere, to the

same mold [or to deterritorialize], complexities continue to exist.”41 Furthermore, Amin notes

that this complexity of the world system––or, to borrow from the Deleuze and Guattari lexicon,

of the “lines of flight” that escape deterritorialization––provides people, especially in the

peripheral states where the contradictions are obvious, “opportunities for resistance and revolt.”42

Deterritorialization and Imaginary Capitalism

Hardt and Negri’s interpretation of deterritorialization, though, can be used to illustrate another

aspect of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept. Deterritorialization not only explains primitive

accumulation and imperialism, but it is also the logic of capitalist ideology. As mentioned

earlier, apologists for capitalism demand deterritorialization; Deleuze and Guattari remind us that

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“capitalism is not short on war cries against the State.”43 Therefore, the term

“deterritorialization” explains the way capitalists conceptualize capitalism: a pure

deterritorialization, where all state interference bows to the “natural laws” of the market, is the

permanent dream of every capitalist. Or, to borrow again from the Deleuze and Guattari's

terminology, the belief in a completed deterritorialization is the “delirium”, the true

consciousness of a false reality, of the capitalist. Therefore, Hardt and Negri’s concept of empire

is, in many ways, simply a presentation of an ideal-type capitalism, not capitalism as it actually

exists. They have used deterritorialization in order to theorize the capitalist world system in the

way, though from a different position, capitalist ideologues theorize capitalism.

Once again, the work of Samir Amin is useful for understanding this aspect of

deterritorialization by drawing on his distinction between “imaginary capitalism” and “actually

existing capitalism.” The former represents Adam Smith’s theory of the invisible hand where

“an imaginary system governed by ‘economic’ laws (the ‘market’)… would tend, if left to

themselves, to produce an ‘optimal equilibrium’.”44 Imaginary capitalism, then, is an idealist,

and thus unreal, view that capitalism is nothing but economic laws––that capitalism possesses an

economic telos resulting in a fully capitalized world system where governments have been

transcended by the mystical force of the market, and where no nation-state can possibly form an

economic centre.

To examine capitalism as actually existing capitalism, however, is to look beyond

capitalism as pure economics and view it as a social-historical formation composed by human

beings. In Amin’s analysis of imperialism, this point possesses another significance:

real-world capitalism is the opposite of the imaginary market… capitalism does not actually function through systematic competition on the part of those who hold the monopoly of property… but requires the intervention of a collective authority representing capital as a whole. The state, then, cannot be separated from capitalism. The policies of capital, and hence of the state in so far as it represents capital, are driven by distinctive [social] logics.45

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The view that capitalism can transcend its state form, becoming completely deterritorialized, and

exist as a pure system of economic competition between individuals and corporations is the

ideology of the system itself. But capitalism, if it is to continue to exist, requires a political

form. This political form, according to Amin, is imperialism, “the permanent state of

capitalism.”46 Capitalism, then, is not the invisible hand, as Smith would have it, but the

sometimes visible, sometimes invisible gun.

Neither, however, is capitalism empire. Although Hardt and Negri do not wish to claim

that the capitalist market leads to equilibrium, they still reduce capitalism to the market and thus

confuse the world market with capitalism:

As the world market today is realized ever more completely, it tends to deconstruct the boundaries of the nation-state. In a previous period, nation-states were the primary actors in the modern imperialist organization of global production and exchange, but to the world market they appear increasingly as mere obstacles.47

While a fanatical apologist of the free market would, indeed, claim that national borders are

“obstacles” to the pure, economic laws of the market, this does not mean that this market is

actually some supranational force that is doing what the capitalist ideologue desires. To claim,

as Hardt and Negri do, that capitalism is developing “ever more completely” towards national

transcendence is to not only make the same claim as the capitalist, but to misunderstand the class

nature of capitalism.

Hard and Negri’s capitalism-as-empire is an imaginary capitalism because it imagines a

capitalism without people. If the market is not controlled by an organization of capitalist class

power (that is, a state) then what enforces capitalism? Hardt and Negri would argue that the

ruling class is everywhere, captaining the world from their transnational ships. And yet the

world market is not at all some deterritorializing deluge upon which the deterritorialized

bourgeoisie sail.

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“[O]ur conception of capitalism,” writes Amin, “does not reduce it to a ‘generalized

market’ but locates its very essence in powers beyond the market.”48 This conception of

capitalism––actually existing capitalism––is imperialism. Capitalism does not exist as a pure

system of individual competition where the market becomes a natural force. Rather, the market

is managed by nation-states and their ruling classes. The Hardt and Negri world of pure

deterritorialization, however, is an imaginary and ahistorical world where the market has the

supernatural power to mediate states. Amin’s critique of their position is apt:

In order to justify their thesis, Negri and Hardt need to give a strictly political definition of the imperialist phenomenon (“the projection of national power beyond its frontiers”), without any relation to the requirements for the accumulation and reproduction of capital. This definition, which stems from vulgar university political science, particularly of the North American variety, eliminates from the start the true questions. Their discourse deals with a category “empire” placed outside of history and thus happily makes no distinction among the Roman, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, British colonial, and French colonial empires. No care is taken to consider the specificities of these historical constructions without reducing them to one another.49

Actually existing capitalism, then, is inseparable from state power, and it has articulated

itself historically through state power. Moreover, the nation-states that compose world

capitalism are organized in a system where central states require the dependency of peripheral

states. As Deleuze and Guattari point out, "central capitalism needs the periphery constituted by

the Third World, where it locates a large part of its most modern industries."50 For Deleuze and

Guattari, the persistence of nation-states does not contradict their theory of deterritorialization.

Indeed, they explicitly claim “the States, in capitalism, are not canceled out but change form and

take on a new meaning: models of realization for a worldwide axiomatic that exceeds them.”51

The nation-state does not disappear, even if the market is deterritorializing. In some ways this

market exceeds the nation-state, but this excess is realized by the nation-state itself. The state,

then, becomes the motor of deterritorialization.

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Thus, on one hand capitalism is a world system because the deterritorializing logic of its

market is extended everywhere, “battering down all Chinese walls.” On the other hand, though,

the culture of consumption and wealth, the manic technological progress, and the liberalism

promoted by capitalism is exclusive to the centre (with the exception of those classes in the

periphery––gangsters, warlords, dictators, compradori––who help with the exploitation of their

own people). The exploited periphery, therefore, is unable to develop its own autonomous

economy as long as it remains part of world capitalism. “Complete, autonomous capitalism is

impossible in the periphery.”52

Since capitalism possesses a deterritorializing identity, however, the ideology that it is

actually a pure force of deterritorialization makes sense. Typically lacking an historical class

analysis, apologists for capitalism misunderstand the transnational characteristic of the world

market as being, by itself, the fundamental logic of capitalism. From their emergence as the

ruling class, the bourgeoisie, in its analysis of market forces, “easily makes the assumption that

‘the market’ by itself is self-regulating.”53

This is because, as Deleuze and Guattari have pointed out, “it seems that there is no

longer a need for a State.”54 Therefore, the surface and ahistorical seeming of capitalism––the

reduction of capitalist social relations to the market––results in a mystification of capitalism.

The process of deterritorialization that describes primitive accumulation, imperialism, and their

connection, is also a process that produces a false consciousness (or a delirium) of

deterritorialization. Unfortunately, this consciousness of deterritorialization has also

“profoundly penetrated… the ‘historical left’,”55 as is evident in Hardt and Negri’s Empire.

Reading Deleuze and Guattari in connection with Samir Amin is not without its

difficulties. At the beginning of this paper I indicated that Amin dismissed Deleuze as a

18

postmodernist. Conversely, Deleuze and Guattari, despite their use of Amin’s centre-periphery

distinction, also severely misread Amin’s theory of de-linking as a “revival of the fascist

‘economic solution’.”56 Furthermore, while in both volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia,

Deleuze and Guattari are relatively cautious of Leninism and Maoism,57 Amin is the type of

marxist who believes that any marxist analysis that does not accept the theoretical developments

of Lenin and Mao is dogmatic.58

At the same time, as this paper has argued, the fact that Deleuze and Guattari referenced

Amin in the context of their theory of deterritorialization should not be ignored. Their explicit

citation of Amin should lead us to read deterritorialization in connection with his theories. Such

a reading, I think, both provides a further layer of comprehension to Amin and allows us to

understand deterritorialization in a more concrete manner.

By reading Deleuze and Guattari against marxist theorists such as Amin, we can

appreciate the marxist depth of many of their concepts––something that is all too often ignored

due to their incorporation into the so-called “postmodern” canon. We can come to a better

understanding of Deleuze and Guattari, therefore, if we deterritorialize their theory,

reterritorializing it with the codes of the marxist canon.

19

End Notes

1 Samir Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization (London: Zed Books, 1997), 136.

2 Ibid.

3 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 231.

4 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1998), 454.

5 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 225.

6 Eugene W. Holland, "Deterritorializing 'Deterritorialization': From the 'Anti-Oedipus' to 'A Thousand Plateaus',"

SubStance 20, no. 3-66 (1991): 55-65, 57.

7 Ibid.

8 Karl Marx, Capital, volume 1(New York: International Publishers, 2003), 667.

9 Holland, 57.

10 Ibid., 58. In order to explain how deterritorialization functions in a non-capitalist sense, Eugene Holland gives the

example of despotic Christianity that “over-codes ritual pagan observances of the winter solstice and the vernal

equinox with celebrations of Christ’s birth and resurrection.” (58)

11 Ibid.

12 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 454.

13 Marx, 668.

14 Holland, 57.

15 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 454.

16 Marx, 668.

17 Ibid., 669.

18 Ibid., 713.

19 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 225.

20 Ibid.

20

21 Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization, 1.

22 Samir Amin, Unequal Development, trans. Brian Pearce (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1976), 34.

23 Marx, 711.

24 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 454.

25 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin Classics, 2002), 224.

26 Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization, 5.

27 Jeff Noonan, Democratic Society and Human Needs (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press,

2006), 31-42.

28 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), xiv.

29 Ibid., xii.

30 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 453, emphasis added.

31 Ibid.

32 Samir Amin, Imperialism and Unequal Development, trans. Alfred Ehrenfeld and Joan Pinkham (New York:

Monthly Review Press, 1977), 181.

33 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 231.

34 Ibid., 232.

35 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 454.

36 Marx and Engels, 223.

37 Ibid.

38 Samir Amin, Obsolescent Capitalism (London: Zed Books, 2003), 57.

39 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 465.

40 Amin, Imperialism and Unequal Development, 79-80.

41 Ibid., 80.

42 Ibid.

43 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 454.

44 Samir Amin, The Liberal Virus, trans. James H. Membrez (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), 13.

45 Amin, Obsolescent Capitalism, 153.

21

46 Ibid., 57.

47 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 150. 48 Amin, Obsolescent Capitalism, 2.

49 Amin, The Liberal Virus, 23.

50 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 465.

51 Ibid., 454, emphasis added.

52 Samir Amin, Class and Nation, trans. Susan Kaplow (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980), 131.

53 Amin, The Liberal Virus, 41.

54 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 453.

55 Amin, The Liberal Virus, 41.

56 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 239.

57 see, for example, Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 375.

58 see Amin, Class and Nation, 206.