Capitalism and the theory of flows: is capitalism a mode of production or the encounter of two decoded flows that has no exterior?

Gilles Deleuze, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Capitalism is not a mode of production identifiable by its forces and relations of production (the standard Marxist reading). It is the encounter of two decoded flows — the flow of naked labor (no longer coded as serfdom or slavery) and the flow of homogeneous capital (no longer coded as landed wealth or merchant money). When and where these two flows conjugate, capitalism appears.1

Marx's analysis must be supplemented by Keynes (theory of flows) and by a typology of three social formations — primitive territorialities (coding), States (overcoding), capitalism (decoding).2 Political philosophy is the analysis of flows, codes, and stocks. Against State philosophy — representational thinking inherited from Plato, the image of thought of identity-resemblance- truth-justice-negation — nomad thought rides difference: the rhizome against the tree, smooth space against striated, the war machine against the State apparatus.3

Sources

  1. And doubt- B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE □ 453 less, these two becomings at least (for other flows also converge) introduce many contingencies and many different factors on each of the lines. But it is their abstract conjunction in a single stroke that constitutes capitalism, providing a universal subject and an object in general for one another.
    A Thousand Plateaus, p. 475
  2. And for capital: the deterritorialization of wealth through monetary abstraction; the decoding of the flows of production through merchant capital; the decoding of States through financial capital and public debts; the decoding of the means of production through the formation of industrial capital; and so on. Let us consider more in detail how the elements come together, with the conjunction of all their processes.
    Anti-Oedipus, pp. 251–252
  3. In effect, in the rich domain of personal relations, what counts is not the capriciousness or variability of the individuals but the consistency of the relations, and the adequation between a subjectivity that can reach the point of delirium and qualified acts that are sources of rights and obligations.
    A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 474–475

Where the argument is made

  • Anti-Oedipus (1972, with Félix Guattari), A Thousand Plateaus (1980, with Félix Guattari, especially the plateaus on the apparatus of capture, treatise on nomadology, the smooth and the striated, micropolitics and segmentarity, geology of morals), What Is Philosophy? (1991, the geophilosophy chapter), Negotiations (1990, "Postscript on the Societies of Control")

How the argument was received

Held throughout the Capitalism and Schizophrenia project and extended in What Is Philosophy?. The 1990 "Postscript on the Societies of Control" gives the additional analytic for the post-disciplinary, network- and-flow-based mode of capitalist power that has since become dominant. Genuinely co-authored with Félix; the analytic is built from his political-clinical experience and my philosophical apparatus working together, neither separable.