Marx and “Anti-Oedipus.” On Desiring One’s Own Suppression

Production, Distribution, Consumption

To get a better grasp of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of desire, let us have a closer look at the architectural structure of Anti-Oedipus. Early in the first chapter, Deleuze and Guattari refer to Marx’s Introduction to the Grundrisse, where he discusses the classic economic “distinction of relatively autonomous spheres” (Anti-Oedipus, 3f.) — production, distribution, and consumption. While acknowledging the conceptual differentiation, Marx criticises their strict and “idealist” (Mejat, 114) separation by bourgeois economists, who treat them as a “syllogism” (Grundrisse, 89): First, a thing is produced, then it enters the market, then it is bought and consumed. Instead, he underlines not only their interdependence, but also the effectively productive nature of each sphere.

“Consumption produces production in a double way, (1) because a product becomes a real product only by being consumed. For example, a garment becomes a real garment only in the act of being worn ; a house where no one lives is in fact not a real house ; thus the product, unlike a mere natural object, proves itself to be, becomes, a product only through consumption. […] [F]or the product is production not as objectified activity, but rather only as object for the active subject ; (2) because consumption creates the need for new production, that is it creates the ideal, internally impelling cause for production, which is its presupposition” (Grundrisse, 91).

In the production process, production (in the narrow sense), distribution, and consumption are distinct, but simulatenous, and are intertwined in a productive way. If the bourgeois economists consider them as strictly separate, Marx says — and Deleuze and Guattari explicitly follow him here — it is because under the conditions of capitalism, in wage-labour, labour and capital are strictly separated (cf. Anti-Oedipus, 4). As the producer (worker) no longer owns the products he produces and his means of production, he needs to sell his labour force to the one who owns them both (capitalist). This is what Marx calls the distribution of the means of production. It is therefore the capitalist who decides what is produced, which means that the sphere of distribution takes on an autonomy in regard to the sphere of production. And as the products created under capitalism need to yield profits, i.e. their surplus needs to be absorbed, the sphere of consumption also becomes a separate entity (for example, the economy of advertising). This means that all commodities that are consumed in capitalism have gone through circulation/distribution (e.g. from the farmer’s field to the warehouse to the supermarket, each step involving an economic interaction), which once again confirms the strict separation of the three spheres within capitalism.

Man and Nature

What underlies and precedes the three spheres — production, distribution/enregistrement2placeholder, consumption — is the relation of man to nature. Production — with a capital P as that which encompasses the three spheres — or, as Deleuze and Guattari will rather call it, desire, always consists of these three elements, but they are closely interrelated, simultaneous, and each of them is productive. Instead of the a priori separation into three phases or spheres, as capitalist economy presents it, Production is a process, in which producing and the product are not strictly separated (cf. Anti-Oedipus, 31). In a nomadic shepherd society, the lives of the sheep and the humans are so closely interrelated, that its products — say, milk, wool, and meat — are at the same time that which this society is permanently producing, but also that which shapes the nature of this society. Here, Deleuze and Guattari refer to the young Marx of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Following the reading of Gérard Granel (cf. Anti-Oedipus, 384), Deleuze and Guattari understand the manuscripts as laying out Marx’s ontology, which is one where man and nature share the “same essential reality, the producer-product” (ibid., 5), instead of the “idealist” a priori separation of the two. In this processual understanding,

“the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production or industry, just as they do within the life of man as a species [vie générique]. Industry is then no longer considered from the extrinsic point of view of utility, but rather from the point of view of its fundamental identity with nature as production of man and by man” (ibid., 4).

In this shared reality, the productivity of man is not essentially different from the productivity of nature. What is the product of the apple tree? To say that it is the apple that we eat is to reduce it to an anthropological perspective. Is it not also the leaf that captures the energy of sunlight, but also feeds insect larvae? And the flowers that feed the bee that in turn pollinates it? But also the apple that falls to the ground and turns into fertile earth? The “industry” of nature is one of processual production, where producing and the product are intertwined, but also the life of the individual tree with its species and with the species around it (what Marx calls “Gattungsleben” and that Deleuze and Guattari translate as “vie générique”).

This same reality of production and the product — processuality — also works on the level of species as ‘products’ of nature. In pre-darwinian concepts of evolution, for example as Kant proposes it in the Critique of Judgement, nature has produced all species in the past, and then stopped (“dried out,” as Kant puts it), meaning that we have a clear distinction between a producing phase of nature, and a phase where all species are present as finished products. But Darwin’s concept of evolution has precisely shattered this distinction, so that each current species is not a fixed form, but in constant change. Nature is still producing new forms of life, and its ‘products’ are themselves an inherent part of the process. It was Marx’s own aspiration to apply what Darwin did with natural history to human history.3placeholder In that sense, the different socio-economic structures that divide human history — tribalism, monarchism, feudalism, capitalism, etc. — are not fixed ‘products’ of history, but are themselves constantly produced and reproduced.

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The term that demarcates human productivity is labour, and it is equally processual — “For Marx, the heart of labouring is the process. In exactly the same way that capital is construed as a process of circulation, so labour is construed as a process of making” (A Companion to Marx’s Capital, 117). This evidently contradicts any determinist readings of Marx’s philosophy, as for him, “labour is the formgiving, fluid, creative fire in the transformation of nature that lies at the heart of any mode of production” (ibid., 133). The concept of labour is worth a closer look because it is prone to being misunderstood.

Labour is wealth-producing activity. This brings us quickly to the idea of distinguishing productive labour from unproductive labour — labour that produces wealth, and that which does not, particularly if we reduce wealth to money or ‘useful objects’. Labour would then demarcate only certain kinds of activity — and the tendency might be, regarding Marx’s views of the proletariat — to read it as referring to industrial work. Such readings were rightfully criticised, for example by feminists, who saw that in such an understanding, labour would be elitist — in the form of a vanguard party — and male-centred.4placeholder But in the Manuscripts, Marx refutes such ideas and affirms that Adam Smith was right in understanding labour as an “abstract subjective essence,”5placeholder which means that in principle, any activity can become labour. Yet, if it is to denote a specifically human activity, then it seems that for Marx it is tied to conscious planning, instead of merely instinctive production, as we can see in the quote from the Grundrisse above: “For the product is production not as objectified activity, but rather only as object for the active subject” (Grundrisse, 91). Still, labour is a critical term for Marx, and can thus not merely denote conscious activity as such. The difference is not between productive and unproductive labour (kinds of action), but between alienated (exploited) and un-alienated labour. The critical question pertains to the relation of producing and the product, the processuality of labour. It is tearing these two apart that becomes the precondition of alienated labour; in the capitalist economy this is expressed in the “antithesis of labour and capital” (Manuscripts, 99) that we will discuss later; in other words, labour becomes alienated if labour and capital are separated. It is in that way that labour becomes separated from its productivity, a productivity that, as we have seen, goes deeper than mere conscious activity and pertains to man and nature sharing the same processual reality. The ‘products’ that un-alienated labour thus produces are not merely commodities, as we, living in capitalism, are prone to understand it, but includes ourselves, our social surrounding, and nature itself:

“[H]uman beings can transform the world in radical ways, according to their imagination and with an idea of a purpose, and be conscious about what they are doing. And in so doing, they have the power to transform themselves. We must therefore think about our purposes, become conscious of how and when we intervene in the world, transforming ourselves. We can and must seize hold of that dialectical possibility creatively. There is, therefore, no neutral transformation of an externalized nature in relationship to us. What we do “out there” is very much about us “in here” — This implies that human nature is not a given but perpetually evolving” (A Companion to Marx’s Capital, 115).

Man and nature share, in that sense, the same reality. Marx calls nature “man’s inorganic body” (Manuscripts, 76),6placeholder and Deleuze and Guattari refer to it as “the fantastic factory of Nature and Production” (Anti-Oedipus, 49). The danger here is to read the underlying identity of man and nature, their shared processual reality as overly ‘optimistic’. It is important to note, first of all, that neither for Marx nor for Deleuze and Guattari, were the social conditions for un-alienated work ever given in the past. Human history is the history of exploited labour in various forms, and, in that sense, of alienation of nature (a point that is very important in the Manuscripts). Second, this identity should not be read in a new-age kind of harmonic microcosm-macrocosm relation. Particularly for Deleuze and Guattari, it does not concern the subject, but something pre-individual, more fundamental and even non-organic, and therefore not necessarily pleasant or advantageous for the individual. The death of the individual, for example, is equally part of processual nature, where decomposition feeds myriads of organisms and redistributes its forces. The experience of the schizo, particularly, is marked by “that unbearable point where the mind touches matter and lives its every intensity, consumes it” (Anti-Oedipus, 20), an “experience of intensive quantities in their pure state, […], like a cry suspended between life and death, an intense feeling of transition, states of pure, naked intensity stripped of all shape and form” (ibid., 18).

But in what way can labour, as a specific human activity, be distinguished from purely biological processes, without falling back into idealism that separates consciousness completely from nature? An undifferentiated identity between man and nature would obviously dissolve concepts of human history or the social sphere into purely biological terms.

For Deleuze and Guattari, the unconscious productive processes, which are not exclusive to human beings, and which they call “desiring-production [production désirante],” and “social production,” which concerns the political, and in that sense human sphere, are “the same production, but under two different regimes” (Anti-Oedipus, 380). We can see that this concerns not the ‘classic’ differentiation of the individual and the collective, but rather life of man as a natural being, which Deleuze and Guattari call Homo natura, and life of man as a historic and social being, which they call Homo historia. Labour, in that sense, is part of both. It is a historic category, as it regards different forms of distribution (division of work, distribution of the means of production and of the products, etc.), but it also shapes our bodies, our relation to nature, as much as nature itself, and also our way of thinking and our desires. Nature itself has a history, and people arguing for essentialism on biological grounds make precisely this mistake.7placeholder What we will focus on in the following is the point of convergence between Homo natura and Homo historia, namely what Marx calls the “Gattungsleben,” and what Deleuze and Guattari translate as “vie générique,” “the life of man as a species” (ibid., 4), as it was translated into English by Hurley, Seem, and Lane in Anti-Oedipus. For Marx, this concerns the relation of the individual to its species, which becomes alienated at the same time as labour does.

“In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active functions, his life-activity, estranged labour estranges the species from man. It turns for him the life of the species [Gattungsleben] into a means of individual life. First it estranges the life of the species and individual life, and secondly it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form.

For in the first place labour, life-activity, productive life itself, appears to man merely as a means of satisfying a need — the need to maintain the physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is life-engendering life. The whole character of a species its species character is contained in the character of its life-activity; and free, conscious activity is man’s species character. Life itself appears only as a means to life [Lebensmittel]” (Manuscripts, 76).

This dense passage contains in nuce what we will discuss in the following text. We can see again how labour is inherently connected to productivity, but productivity itself is connected to nature and our life as a species. And what estrangement does is to reduce the productive element of life to mere reproduction, “the need to maintain the physical existence” of the individual. As the species (including society and the whole socio-political sphere) thereby becomes a mere means for the individual’s survival, the relation of the individual to the species obviously changes. This relation is in that sense historically contingent. In the liberal conception of the atomist individual, the rational agent enters society for personal advantages, so that for him, the life of the species becomes a means to an end, namely for individual gratification and survival. But in that way, the productivity of man, which is inherently connected to nature, and, in that sense, to the species, becomes cut off and becomes mere existence. Once labour concerns only individual survival, it becomes unproductive, as it is reduced to reproductive activities — “Lebensmittel” is literally “means to life,” but the more common translation would be “groceries,” and Marx plays with this double sense here. But this does not mean that Marx is arguing for the opposite, namely the submission of individual life to the life of the species. This would amount to a reductive reading of Darwinism, which historically has lead to disastrous socio-political consequences (Social Darwinism). It is, for Marx, consciousness, and therefore the possibility for free action, thanks to which the individual life and life as a species don’t collapse, but also the reason for which it becomes problematic and politically exigent. It is therefore this relation of Homo natura to Homo historia that we will have to discuss.

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Not unlike Freud’s distinction of the ego drives and the sexual drives, the latter of which bring the individual in contact to its species, the “Gattungsleben” leads us to what is maybe the basic concept of Anti-Oedipus: sexuality. If Marx, as much as Deleuze and Guattari, work with a productive and processual concept of nature, then procreation is obviously part of a more expansive productivity. This means that sexuality is not reduced to the mere procreation of the species.8placeholder We can say once again: If for a reductive conceptual frame that strictly separates production and the product, the ‘act’ of sexuality amounts to, well, insemination, and the ‘product’ amounts to the child, then for a processual conception, it includes not only the ‘intimate’ sexual relation between human beings, but also the whole socio-political life into which they are thrown. In this deeper, underlying foundation, we can, together with Deleuze and Guattari, discover a Marx who, while evidently not talking of the unconscious, in his political philosophy goes beyond such concepts as “consciousness” or “class,” to which he is often reduced. Sexuality and the family, then, or, as Marx says, “the relation of man to woman,” is immediately traversed by socio-political forces, and therefore historically contingent, so that “from this relationship one can therefore judge man’s whole level of development” (Manuscripts, 102). The way in which capitalism structures gender relations, and the way it conceptualises and embeds the family in the economy becomes thus a crucial political question.

The antithesis of labour and capital

In the Manuscripts, Marx introduces the relation of man and woman in his critique of what he calls “crude communism” (Manuscripts, 102). Such a communism, in abstracting from all individual traits, intends to expropriate everyone and have them earn the same salary, thereby seemingly replacing private ownership with collective one. Apart from being driven by “envy and the urge to reduce to a common level [Nivellierungssucht]” (ibid., 101) — and the problem is never about people having more than others, and rather about people having more at the cost of others, which makes all the difference — such a communism, Marx says, does not really do what it promises. Instead of “surpassing” private ownership, it merely takes it to its logical conclusion — to its extreme — thereby not only inheriting its problems, but also showing its inner contradictions more clearly.

What defines the capitalist form of property — private property — is the “antithesis of labour and capital,” which is the “antithesis of propertylessness and property” (ibid., 99). We have seen the former as one of the preconditions for the radical differentiation of the three spheres (production, distribution, consumption), so we are dealing here with the same problem. In the introduction to the Grundrisse, Marx notes that bourgeois economists always begin with property as the fundamental, and in that sense ahistorical, category of the economy (cf. Grundrisse, 87). By doing so they universalise the conditions of capitalist production. But, as Marx notes,

“All production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and through a specific form of society. In this sense it is a tautology to say that property (appropriation [Aneignung]) is a precondition of production. But it is altogether ridiculous to leap from that to a specific form of property, e.g. private property” (ibid.).

Different socio-economic systems come along with different ways of “appropriation of nature”. Many of us do so in the supermarket. If property is a historic category — meaning that different socio-economic forms of societies lead to different concepts of property — then capitalism will also come along with a specific way of organising and distributing property. And, as Marx says, its very nature lies in the “antithesis of labour and capital.” What does that mean exactly? The worker, as he does not own his means of production, needs to sell his labour force to the capitalist, who owns them. For that, he receives a salary, which is claimed to be the value of his labour, but which essentially is the minimum amount of what the worker needs to survive.9placeholder The surplus (profit) goes into the pockets of the capitalist. The worker wouldn’t need to sell his labour force — his time and energy, his body — to the capitalist, if he owned the means of production. At the same time, as the labourer works for someone else, the commodities he produces— and productive activity is reduced to the production of commodities —are not his. In other words, the separation of labour and capital — the expropriation of labour — is a precondition for private property in its capitalist sense.

Now, what “crude” communism, according to Marx, claims to do is to establish collective ownership by stripping everyone from their possessions and letting everyone get the same remuneration. As he remarks, this does not overcome the antithesis of propertylessness and property; instead, every single citizen is now expropriated, while society becomes the owner of everything. While in capitalism, a majority of dispossessed workers is opposed by a minority of owning capitalists, in crude communism, every individual is dispossessed, opposing an all-powerful society or government — “the community as the universal capitalist” (Manuscripts, 101). This only universalises suppression, instead of overcoming it: “Both sides of the relationship are raised to an imagined universality — labour as a state in which every person is put, and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the community” (ibid.).

The “infinite degradation” (ibid.) of this raw communism is most visible in the way it conceptualises the relation of man and woman, “counterposing to marriage (certainly a form of exclusive private property) the community of women [Weibergemeinschaft], in which a woman becomes a piece of communal and common property” (ibid., 100). There is a lot to unpack here. What is paralleled here is the relation between man and woman with the question of property, and, in that sense, the ‘private’ relation of man and woman with their socio-political and economical environment. We are returning to the idea of sexuality being more than a “dirty little secret” (Anti-Oedipus, 49).

Before any misunderstanding arises from the quote above: In equalling marriage with private property — the property of the woman by the man — he is evidently not advocating this view. The point is precisely that it is in marriage of capitalist, of bourgeois society, that the relation of man and woman takes such a form. We will come back to that later. But what’s important to note here is that this is not a metaphor, especially concerning the context of 1844: Women were indeed considered to be the property of man within marriage[10], and the “doctrine of the separate spheres,” banishing the women to their homes (The Women in the Room, 9) does not disappear with changed legislation.

In the parallel of marriage and private property we can observe, once again, the antithesis of propertylessness and property, but this time within the ‘private’ sphere: the propertyless woman who sells her body — see, in that regard, the ‘innate sensual nature’ of women, or her ‘primary task’ of bearing children, of which we will have to speak later — to the man, who in turn owns her means of production by bringing home his salary. In a family constellation, where the man works while the woman stays at home, this antithesis is very obvious. Now, if crude communism intends to replace marriage with a “community of women,” what it obviously does is not liberate women from dispossession, but, quite the contrary, throw them into “universal prostitution” (ibid., 101), as a collective ownership of all women by all men. Within crude communism, the universal dispossession of women is thus equal to the universal dispossession of all individuals by society that we’ve noted above.

But what does that say about the relation between man and woman within capitalism? What is the relation between crude communism and capitalism? Crude communism sees itself as the abolition of private property, and thereby of the ‘vices’ of capitalism. But, as Marx shows, the antithesis of labour and capital, of propertylessness and property, is upheld in both. Even more so, and this is the conceptual ‘advantage’ of crude communism, the latter shows the nature of private property clearer than capitalism, namely in this idea of universal prostitution. Prostitution is, after all, an inherently binary relation, marked by the gesture of “offering my body for sale” (ibid., 120):11placeholder

“Prostitution is only a specific expression of the general prostitution of the laborer, and since it is a relationship in which not the prostitute alone, but also the one who prostitutes, fall — and the latter’s abomination is still greater — the capitalist, etc., also comes under this head” (ibid., 100).

Universal prostitution is in that sense not just an aspect of crude communism, but also of capitalism, namely because they are both based on the antithesis of labour and capital. It is true that Marx speaks here of prostitution as a specific case, instead of a universal fact, namely a specific case for the general situation of the worker within capitalism. But the analogy becomes more complex, if we apply it to the condition of women as such within capitalism, particularly in the classic bourgeois concept of family. This is not a moral argument, but a structural one regarding property: Just like the prostitute/worker is dispossessed of the means of production and needs to sell their body on the market, so does the prostitute/woman, who is equally dispossessed, a “sex commodity,” as Emma Goldman would say (Anarchy and the Sex Question, 40), need to sell her body in marriage. The two are not identical, as the one concerns the ‘public’ sphere and the other the ‘private’ sphere, and the separation between the two spheres, enforced within bourgeois society, is precisely what we need to analyse.

This ‘ideal’ of the working man and the housewife is realised mostly in middle class families of the 19th century. But as capitalism, in constant need for additional labour, started ‘pulling in’ women and children into the factories (cf. Capital), it seemed that this structure would quickly be broken down by working class women.12placeholder Yet, “a sexual division of labour in industrial production” was quickly established (The Anti-social Family, 70), where women were excluded from certain industries and only used for unskilled labour or work that was “nothing other than domestic labour in a different context” (ibid., 29), for example maintenance or secretary work. And as they were exploited even more than men, the price for independence for many working class women was too high, and many of them turned to staying at home after all, something that was encouraged by their education.13placeholder The chances of earning a decent living on one’s own are still unequal.14placeholder In that sense, the antithesis of propertylessness and property concerns not only the time when women were directly considered the man’s “chattels,” but concerns broader socio-economic dynamics; the need to ‘save herself’ from exploitation by marrying, the inherently economic nature of marriage, is precisely what the concept of universal prostitution denotes.

As women were used by employers to undercut salaries, there was an effort from working class men to exclude women from the labour force in general15placeholder — but the fact that men rather advocated for exclusion instead of equal pay shows that the working class was at least up to a certain time supporting the division of the working man and the housewife, just like the bourgeoisie.16placeholder In general, the expectation of young working class women was that their entering the labour force would only be temporary until marriage.17placeholder The family structure of the working man and the non-working woman can therefore be seen as fundamental to the classic capitalist economy, and something that persists, at least on an ideological level, until today (cf. The Anti-social Family, 31).

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We could see that the analogy prostitute/worker and prostitute/women is shifted, as the former regards the public sphere, while the latter regards the private sphere. But there is a further difference. The situation of the salary-worker who sells his body to the capitalist is class based, and is, in theory, not gendered, even though, practically speaking, as we’ve seen above, it often is, and concerns mostly the man. But the dispossessed status of the woman is, in the ideology of the “separate spheres,” universal. This also means that in both cases, even though their situation is analogical, not the same people are affected, and they are not affected equally. This might prompt us to ask naively, all too naively, why the massive exploitation that resulted from this configuration did not lead to a unified front of resistance. Not only did the labour movement and the feminist movement not reinforce each other, but each movement was itself full of reactionary tendencies.18placeholder It was certainly not the case that the masses were ‘too stupid’ to realise their situation, as the history of the working class and of feminism, where organisation began immediately, shows. It might therefore be that it is here that we should pose the question of the origin of reactionary desire, where the dispossession of women within the familial sphere, instead of building an alliance with the workers, served to stabilise an economic system that is built on the antithesis of labour and capital.

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Let us have a closer look at the relation of the two elements in the analogy prostitute/worker and prostitute/woman. In the public sphere, we have the working man who, being dispossessed of the means of production, needs to sell his body to earn a salary. But the very same man, once he returns home after the working day, becomes the one who dispossesses his wife, who in turn needs to sell her body to ‘earn’ her participation in that salary. Personally, there can be much love and affection between the two, but structurally, the hierarchical relation will remain. In other words, while in the socio-economic sphere, the male worker is ‘prostituting’ himself for the capitalist, in the private sphere, at home, it is the very same man, who, becoming the patriarch, ‘plays’ the capitalist owning everything (“my house, my rules”). While the man, therefore, is in a powerless situation ‘outside’, at home he finds himself in a situation of power. And he finds himself in a situation of power, because the woman is excluded from work and ownership, not because he works. As many women workers witnessed, entering the labour force did not lead to an improvement of their situation, rather, it essentially meant being exploited as well. But the exclusion of women from the work force was the condition so that the inclusion of men into the work force under the conditions of capitalism appears as a position of power. The man was the ‘rightful’ patriarch at home because he earned the salary, even though he earned the salary by himself being disempowered. To uphold the position of power at home, the worker needed to uphold his position of powerlessness in the economic sphere, and therefore became invested in upholding the status quo.

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It seems that the salary is attaining a double function here. On the one hand, it consists of the minimal wage, barely enough money for the worker to survive and buy the things he needs, a result of his dispossession; on the other hand, it is a source of power for his ‘reign’ at home. We are here coming to Marx’s theory of money not only as the general equivalent but concerning its circulation.

Capitalism, according to Deleuze and Guattari, consists of the “conjunction” of two flows [flux]. Regarding money, this means the salary on the one hand, and capital on the other. This basically coincides with Marx’s two forms of circulation as he elaborates them in Capital: The circulation C-M-C (commodity-money-commodity) and the circulation M-C-M’ (money-circulation-money + surplus value). The worker sells his labour (force) as a commodity with a certain value (price) (C) for money that is his salary (M), and buys food and clothes with it to survive (C). Once this money runs out, he needs to go work again, so the cycle starts over again. The capitalist, on the other hand, invests his money (M) into the production of certain commodities (C) and in the end, once he’s sold them on the market, gets the money he invested plus a certain profit he made (M’), which he can once again reinvest in further production, so this cycle starts over as well.

In a certain way, it is the same money that flows in both circulations, for what the worker receives as his salary is what the capitalist writes off as production costs.19placeholder At the same time, the labourer works more hours than is necessary for him to produce the value of his salary, meaning that his working day is split into necessary labour (the amount of hours he needs to produce the value of his labour) and surplus labour, which, as surplus value, not only flows into the pockets of the capitalist, but is the only source of his profits.20placeholder Yet, during the working day, the worker cannot distinguish, what part of his work (which hours) will be what he’ll get back as salary, and what part will be part of the profits. In that sense, during production, the two flows of money are indistinguishable.

On the other hand, there is a “fathomless abyss” between the two flows (Anti-Oedipus, 238). For what the worker can do with his salary, is nothing but buying the things that he needs to survive. And even if he earns more than he needs, the only ‘power’ that his money will give him, is to buy more things. It is, in that sense a “truly impotent” flow (ibid.), as it amounts to choosing from a given selection. The capitalist, on the other hand, by circulating his capital, decides on what is produced, how it is produced, where it is produced, he invests into technology and science:

“In the one case, there are impotent money signs of exchange value, a flow of means of payment relative to consumer goods and use values, and a one-to-one relation between money and an imposed range of products (“which I have a right to, which are my due, so they’re mine”); in the other case, signs of the power of capital, flows of financing, a system of differential quotients of production that bear witness to a prospective force or to a long-term evaluation, not realizable hic et nunc, and functioning as an axiomatic of abstract quantities” (ibid., 228).

In the doubling of the function of salary between the economic and the familial spheres, we can see the very same structure: The salary is on the one hand a powerless flow — in the socio-economic sphere — and, at the same time, a powerful flow — in the private sphere. The salary, which on the one hand is a sign of exploitation, becomes also a source of power — within the confines of the family. This essentially changes the concept of productivity, and thereby the relation of the producer and the product.

Feeding the Family as Productivity

We have seen that for Marx, labour, in the emphatic sense, is a productive and creative activity, the externalisation and exertion of human creative powers — of planning, inventing, constructing — a productive relation of the individual to its surrounding, of man to nature. As a process, labour encompasses all three “spheres” of Production — production, distribution/enregistrement, consumption. But in the separation of labour and capital, of dispossession and ownership, the producer is violently separated from his products. The only thing that the worker has left is his labour force — which he is forced to sell on the market for a given price, being now “indifferent” to the activity he will realise.21placeholder He is thereby limited in the scope of his productivity, as he can choose only the kind of work that is “available,” where a position is open. At the same time, the only activity as such that is open to him is having a job, so that he can keep earning a salary. His productivity is thereby essentially cut from influencing and shaping the social sphere. What he receives for his work, is an abstract and fixed amount of money, and he needs this money to reproduce himself and his kin — to survive. The nature of labour thus becomes completely powerless and uncreative.

If that was the end of the story, it would be virtually impossible to understand, why a majority of people agreed to such a life of disempowerment. There was certainly, as Marx shows in Capital, a lot of violence involved in the initial dispossession of peasants, and in disciplining those that became literally ‘deterritorialised’, the vagabonds etc., into wage-labour.22placeholder Yet, the labour movement was not the straightforwardly progressive force that one might expect. Trade unionists in the UK were often “actively hostile towards socialism” (The Women in the Room, 131), and, as women started entering the proletariat, instead of fighting with them for equal pay, they first attempted to exclude them. On the level of “rational interest” — with which we return to the question from the introductory passages of this essay — this makes no sense. One motive for the emergence of a properly reactionary desire — not only in the middle class, but also in the proletariat — might therefore be precisely that notions of productivity and power have not disappeared, but merely shifted to the private sphere.

We could see that Marx’s concept of the relation of man and nature is one of processual productivity. This means that productivity lies not only in the creation of products as a certain type of activity, but concerns the totality of human life, including the active shaping of one’s social sphere. But in the separation of labour and capital, where labour is cut not only from its products through wage-labour but is generally subsumed under economic laws, the man’s productivity concerns exclusively the feeding of one’s family, which has now become ‘the fruit of his’s labour’. As the ‘breadwinner’, the man becomes the autocrat sustaining his family, thereby becoming it’s owner’. The hardship that comes along with this, especially for lower-class families, instead of serving as a reason to improve the condition of the workers, will potentially serve as a legitimation of his autocratic status. The man ‘earns’ this ownership by working on several jobs at once, whereby the perpetuation of the hardship becomes part of its legitimation. But, as feeding one’s family in the end amounts to keeping them alive, productivity, understood in that sense, becomes purely reproductive.

As the man’s productivity now lies in sustaining the family, his desire also shifts, from the active shaping of his social surrounding and the creative exertion of his abilities to upholding his autocratic status at home. This does not concern merely married men, and is expressed in the general demand for the access to the woman’s body. His dispossession in the social sphere, where his labour serves only the profits of the dominant class, is replaced by his ‘ownership’ as the ‘breadwinner’. And to uphold this status, he needs to work, i.e. sell his labour force and earn a salary. This means that he is invested in upholding the capitalist order of things, even if he ends up being the one exploited — not as an economic interest, but a desire for dominance, which becomes a necessity, as it compensates for an initial disempowerment. The ‘interest’ of the worker to fight against his own exploitation, is ‘overwritten’ — re-encoded — by signs of power at home and in the sexual sphere. The institution of marriage, including its puritan morals and enormous sexual repression, becomes a means to uphold the patriarchal family model so as to perpetuate the workers’ desire for their own suppression. The double dispossession of women — at home and in the social sphere — becomes a stabiliser of the capitalist order. The salary as powerless money becomes powerful within the family as the only means to keep it alive. The man becomes a pseudo-owner and a pseudo-producer, even though, of course, the effects of these power relations are very real and often violent.

In clan-like or tribal societies, the patriarch is in a position of direct social power. One could say that his power ‘at home’ is in direct analogy — and stems from — his power in the social sphere. But even more than that, there is an immediate interpenetration of the two spheres, so that there is a distinction between powerful and powerless families. Belonging to or marrying into a particular family, being attached to its name, reflects one’s position within the social sphere. Surely, then, the patriarch owned the women the way he owned the land, the cattle, and the slaves…

But in the patriarchal structure of capitalism, the analogy is replaced by a contrastive relation: The power at home is a compensation for the disempowerment in the social sphere. Evidently, this also changes his status as an ‘owner’, as he becomes closer to the suitor, who ‘owns’ the prostitute only as long as he can pay — just like the capitalist, who loses his labour force once he’s bankrupt. The notion of “universal prostitution” also regards this primarily economic basis of ownership, instead of being inscribed into a social code, as in the clan system. The status of the family changes as well, as it is cut from its socio-political relevance, indeed “privatised” (Anti-Oedipus, 303), thus becoming an abstract unit in the production of additional labour force — children. As the living costs of these children, as much as the living costs of the family, appears on the balance sheets as production costs, the spending of the family is put under strict asceticism, as much as other spending, like education. Measures to keep living costs as low as possible — for example with cheap supermarkets that import goods from poorer countries (outsourcing) and maximally exploit their own employees and suppliers — are therefore a must. At the same time, the privatisation of the family, which is thereby presented as a ‘safe haven’ from economic forces, is dependent on the free labour of women in the household, which once again helps keeping the production costs — the survival of the family — as low as possible.23placeholder The de-economisation of the relationship within the family — which on the surface is evidently a good thing — therefore covers an underlying exploitation. The privatisation of the family, nurturing new concepts of romantic and ‘unconditioned’ love has also disempowered the family as a social unit. Secondary signs, in this case family values or concepts of love, once again ‘overwrite’ a primary dispossession.

Just like with the abstraction of the concept of labour as an “abstract subjective essence,” the abstraction of family or gender relations itself is not the problem, as it is definitely a progress that the old patriarchy, as old signs of power have disappeared. In that sense, the discovery of the abstract essence of labour can be seen as a chance to surpass the gender-based division of labour, and a ‘positive’ historical role of capitalism (cf. Darmangeat, 41). But abstraction in its capitalist form, was but a new form of repression: “Production as the abstract subjective essence is discovered only in the forms of property that objectifies it all over again, that alienates it by reterritorializing it” (Anti-Oedipus, 259).

This happens under what Deleuze and Guattari call “neoterritorialities” (ibid., 257). In clan-like societies, the patriarch-at-home and the patriarch as a socio-political figure were united in one person who assumed a double role. Disempowered socio-politically, capitalist individual is reduced to the former as the ‘breadwinner’. But that does not mean that the patriarchy has disappeared from the social sphere, it is just no longer a function fulfilled by the ‘breadwinner’ — in a certain way, it is not fulfilled by an individual at all. Indeed, through a nationalist and imperialist discourse, an analogy is made between the father at home and the ‘father state’ — and even if the latter is personified in a despot, he is now merely the personification of an idea. Instead of the double role of a single individual (the patriarch of the clan), an analogy is made between an individual (the ‘breadwinner’) and an idea (the Nation). The discovery of the abstract, and, in that sense, non-gendered essence of labour, was therefore not only subsumed under private property, but also ‘overwritten’ along gendered lines, in which the patriarchal structure persisted, albeit not unchanged.24placeholder

‘Sustaining one’s family’ thus receives another, reactionary and political function: namely as ‘sustaining the nation’, not only through war and personal sacrifice, but also in terms of segregation and race, and population control in general. It is known that reforms to improve the condition of the workers were motivated not by humanitarian reasons, but because the malnourished workers turned out to be bad soldiers.25placeholder The task of the family is thus not just to continue providing new members of the labour force, but also members of the army. At the same time, as the workers themselves become part of the ‘superior nation’, their children are to sustain its purity, creating alliances of power with the dominating class that continues exploiting them. Thus imperial population policies come into being, which, for example, prohibit contraceptives and birth control ‘at home’ and promote it in poor, i.e. non-white countries based on nationalist and racist reasons (cf. Françoise Vergès’ Les ventres des femmes and this interview).

On such grounds, the family is dispossessed of its children, and this concerns the woman more than the man in the sense that it’s not just her children that are no longer hers, but also her body: “Pregnancy does not belong to the woman herself” (Young, 46). The Grand Crime of abortion reflects this double dispossession. In regard to the woman, we can therefore see a similar dynamic at work regarding productivity and disempowerment. On the one hand, her productivity as a human being — consisting, once again, in the active exertion of her creative forces and the active shaping of the social sphere — is reduced to a purely biological task: bearing and raising children. As with the man — but in an even more radical and literal sense — her production is reduced to reproduction. And just like the man with his products — and once again, even more deplorably — she is dispossessed of her ‘products’, her children, who are no longer her own, but the nation’s, as much as her productive capacities, her body, which is reduced to its reproductive functions and therefore sexualised.

This pseudo-productivity — the bearing and raising of children, domestic work26placeholder — is once again re-encoded with a sign of power, with a pride of raising the children of the nation, of the superior race, but also a fear of losing the only productivity she is still allowed to have. Fertility becomes a reactionary category in the “tyranny of motherhood” (The Anti-social Family, 61), as an endless flow of children, an infinity of virtual human capital, takes the appearance of the ‘powerful flow’, associated in the antithesis with capital, rather than labour. Taking away the position of (pseudo-)power at home would mean taking away all she has. As the range of experiences of feeling useful shrinks, its last territory, the family, becomes the last refuge of sense. The metaphysical experience of absurdity amounts to the experience of factual superfluity. The destruction of the family, an apparent threat from socialists and feminists, becomes an existential threat. The reactionary desire to uphold the system of one’s own suppression is once again marked by the emergence of a pseudo-power that is dependent on an initial disempowerment.

It seems that the more the proportion of disempowerment and pseudo-empowerment skews to the former — in other words, the more intense the dispossession, the more the system is stabilised through direct violence. This regards not only domestic violence, but also, for example, police brutality against minorities. On its peripheries, where the atmosphere of interiorisation becomes thin, it is reinforced through subjugation. It might be for that reason that the dynamics that are discussed here apply more to the parts of the world’s population that can be pacified with pseudo-empowerments, instead of those for whom violence is part of the daily struggle (cf. Fanon’s concept of violence or C.L.R. James’s concept of revolution).

We could see, how the mere survival of the family — for both men and women — becomes the new productivity within the constellation of the bourgeois family. As productivity is not only reduced to the familial sphere, but also to purely reproductive tasks, it is compensated by a re-encoding that gives it the appearance of empowerment, but on the grounds of one’s role within the family, so that the “empowerment” remains within the familial sphere, amounting to a “familialized” society (The Anti-social Family, 8). This creates the condition for an enormous libidinal investment into this form of family, the potential loss of which appears as the ultimate catastrophe. But as this form of the family is born from capitalist economy, libidinal energy is also invested into the capitalist economy.

A reactionary rhetoric can claim to stand in defence of the family because it universalises this structure, but the efficacy of this rhetoric lies in the nuclear family having become a last bastion of productivity and power. They both are reduced to the familial sphere and to its reproduction, but the position of disempowerment, both of men and women, is re-encoded so as to imbue them with a reactionary desire to uphold a suppressive order, which continues exploiting them. This double dynamic is the fertile ground on which essentialist concepts of masculinity and femininity can spring; the sexualisation of the female body, as we’ve seen, goes hand in hand with the reduction of her productive powers to procreation. At the same time, the mere belonging to the ‘superior race’, ‘religion’ or ‘nation’ becomes a sign of belonging to the powerful group, and this magnificent order is eternalised, if only everyone ‘knows their place’.

The Capitalist and his Pleasure

We have now focused on the changed concept of productivity on the side of the wage-earners, and how the antagonism of labour (propertylessness) and capital (ownership) is applied to the proletarian family, or, rather, those families that depend on surviving on a salary. But as the binary relation between “prostitute” and “the one who prostitutes” is played out in the social sphere as the difference between labourer and capitalist, we will need to have a closer look at the capitalist’s side as well. More than the male worker, often barely making ends meet, the capitalist was able to ‘keep the woman at home’. But why was the dispossession of the woman here necessary, if the man was not compensating for his dispossession in the economic sphere by playing the patriarch at home?

We have seen that as labour is dispossessed from the means of production, the worker needs to sell his labour force to the capitalist. The capitalist, as the owner, commands the labouring masses and extracts and realises the surplus that their work creates, thereby accumulating capital. All seems to work well for him. But he has a problem.

“If […] industrial wealth appears at first to be the result of extravagant fantastic wealth, its motion, the motion inherent in it, ousts the latter also in an active way. For the fall in the interest on money is a necessary consequence and result of industrial development. The extravagant rentier’s means therefore dwindle day by day in inverse proportion to the increasing possibilities and pitfalls of pleasure. Consequently, he must either consume his capital himself, thus ruining himself, or must become an industrial capitalist” (Manuscripts, 126).

Simply speaking, the feudal lord’s treasures lie in his vaults, and when he ornaments his castle with expensive luxuries, he only raises his status. But the capitalist’s money keeps flowing and circulating, and it grows only as long as it circulates. Once he takes his money out of the circulation and starts spending it on commodities, it magically transforms, and becomes as powerless as the proletarian’s salary. Only if the capitalist reinvests his money — which means leaving as little as possible for himself — does it remain within the “powerful flow”. It can be said, in that sense, that the capitalist is himself employed by his money.27placeholder

“The diminution in the interest on money […] is really and immediately, therefore, only a symptom of the total victory of working capital over extravagant wealth — i.e., the transformation of all private property into industrial capital. It is a total victory of private property over all those of its qualities which are still in appearance human, and the complete subjection of the owner of private property to the essence of private property — labour” (ibid.).

As much as he is the owner of the means of production, the capitalist, in a certain sense, is just as dispossessed. He himself is subjected to the flow of capital, the movements of the market, and his property — as a ‘static’ accumulation of things — must be transformed into capital, which remains capital — instead of mere salary money — as long as it keeps flowing (as long as it remains in the circulation M-C-M’, and doesn’t fall into C-M-C).

“To be sure, the industrial capitalist also takes his pleasures. He does not by any means return to the unnatural simplicity of need; but his pleasure [Genuss] is only a side-issue — recuperation — something subordinated to production: at the same time it is a calculated and, therefore, itself an economical pleasure” (ibid., 126f.).

No less than the worker, the capitalist is subordinated to a strict asceticism. The enjoyment of his wealth — as they say, it is nicer to cry in a Mercedes — becomes a function of capital. In a certain way, the flux of profits passes not only the worker, but also the capitalist. His shares, stocks, dividends might stem from the circulation of capital, but this also means that he loses his power as soon as he moves too far away from this flow.

“[S]omething new occurs with the rise of the bourgeoisie: the disappearance of enjoyment [jouissance] as an end, the new conception of the conjunction according to which the sole end is abstract wealth and its realization in forms other than consumption. The generalized slavery of the despotic State at least implied the existence of masters, and an apparatus of antiproduction distinct from the sphere of production. But the bourgeois field of immanence […] institutes an unrivaled slavery, an unprecedented subjugation: there are no longer even any masters, but only slaves commanding other slaves; there is no longer any need to burden the animal from the outside, it shoulders its own burden” (Anti-Oedipus, 254).

To say it bluntly: Jeff Bezos’s wealth is undoubtably enormous, and it is powerful money in as far as (and as long as) Amazon controls and decides upon the market, as long as the money that investors inject into it keeps circulating. If he cashes it in, or lets Amazon go down the drain to hide the money under his (gigantic) mattress, it’d still be enormous, but it would be powerless in the sense that all it could do is buy lots of consumer products. Except, of course, if he started investing it again, which means if his money was circulating again. This asceticism of pleasure, which is replaced with a production for production’s sake, a circulation for circulation’s sake, and its submission to the function of capital, concerns not only the capitalist. The popular anecdotes of poor people winning the lottery and spending it all in a few weeks is a classic moral tale of capitalism — their failure is that they didn’t interiorise the asceticism, that they should have invested the money instead, and that they have thus turned potentially powerful money into powerless money. In short, their pleasure should have been economic, instead of blindly trusting the lavish world of consumption that the media daily bombard them with.

The products that capital produces have no inherent value, as they realise their surplus only once they are sold. The goal are the profits, but the profits stand once again at the beginning of new investments. The capitalist is indifferent to what specific commodities these investments will produce, what matters is how these commodities (or company stocks) perform or are expected to perform on the market. The capitalist produces for production’s sake, and his activities are reduced to buying and selling stocks, of moving money around, of perpetual reinvestment. He will not necessarily complain, and there is an Eros of seeing one’s money flow and grow. Even though, then, he is on the one hand closer to the processual nature of productivity than the worker, as his products and his money keep circulating in an endlessly productive stream, he is equally alienated from it, as he needs to submit to economic laws and forces.

As the capitalist needs to be economic in his pleasure, and as the commodities he consumes are equally powerless, he needs to compensate for it in a different way. Thus, his commodities acquire importance of status, appearing as signs of power. Within the world of universal prostitution, the expensive woman — the beautiful wife — becomes also a status symbol. Ornated in luxury items like a Christmas tree, her productivity is reduced as well, reduced to the status of a valuable commodity that can solace itself by considering herself to be part of the ‘superior class’. But as there’s never enough of such luxury items, as someone always has a bigger boat, lack is once again introduced into the dynamic and productivity is reduced to ‘protecting one’s interests’.

Yet, the capitalist has another option to do so and to oppose the volatile nature of the flows of capital, thereby softening the blow of asceticism. And this lies in the alliance between capital and the state. The latter stabilises and surveils the flows through laws, bailouts, and the protection of interests, and it helps absorb surplus value (cf. Anti-Oedipus, 235). It regulates the labour force and protects the capitalist’s property. It also helps him to protect his profits through imperial adventures to forcefully open up new markets and break resistances. The disempowerment and reduction of human beings within capitalism is, in that sense, far from ‘democratic’. But we can also see that the antithesis of labour and capital is not the confrontation between individuals — the labourer and the capitalist — but a division, in which the individual will always find itself on the side of labour — of dispossessed labour, at that. Capital, on the other hand, remains abstract, a gigantic flow that englobes the whole planet.

Identity Politics and Intersectionality

We can see Marx’s critique, as much as Deleuze and Guattari’s, as a case for intersectionality. The overcoming of the antithesis of labour and capital concerns both the political struggle and the ‘private’ gender relations, but also questions of race, as all these play into the questions of productivity, enjoyment, and violence.

So, to return to our original question, how are subjects produced that desire their own suppression? First, there is a thrust of dispossession, disempowerment, “deterritorialisation” — a reduction of productivity and enjoyment to the familial sphere, an abstraction and economisation — which is then “re-encoded,” “re-territorialised,” attributed with secondary characteristics of power — the “patriarch,” the “mother,” the “patron”. This secondary encoding is charged with an enormous libidinal investment, as these instances of pseudo-productivity and pseudo-ownership are the only thing that is left to the individual — and this little residual territory — our “interior colony” (Anti-Oedipus, 170) — is constantly under threat from the outside, from the “socialist,” the “feminist,” the ”anarchist”. And as we have seen, the individual is not just reduced to the familial sphere — as a father or mother — but the family itself is disempowered as a social unit. It becomes a purely private affair, with the sole social task of producing human capital.35placeholder

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Identity politics — in its ‘official’ version sanctioned by contemporary capitalism — ironically reproduces the violent split of (private) identity and (public) politics. Women and minorities are allowed “expression” within the cultural industry, with signs of “empowerment” — but “empowerment” in the secondary sense, as the one that is preceded by dispossession. “Production is reduced to mere fantasy production, production of expression. The unconscious ceases to be what it is — a factory, a workshop — to become a theater, a scene and its staging“ (Anti-Oedipus, 55). Expressions can evidently be politically efficacious, like Kaepernick taking a knee, but they are quickly transformed into images — for example, into a Nike campaign. “In this way capitalism fills its field of immanence with images: even destitution, despair, revolt — and on the other side, the violence and the oppression of capital — become images of destitution, despair, revolt, violence, or oppression“ (Anti-Oedipus, 264). Any attempts to campaign for real political change — against police brutality, mass incarceration, economic exploitation — immediately activates the whole apparatus of suppression in all its violence.

The liberal rhetoric of appeasement and reform quickly assumes control of the discourse, making sure that protests are reduced to the concern about single issues, instead of encompassing different forms of exploitation. Violence is presented as an exception, an ‘excess’ — in the documentary 13th, for example, the metaphor of “cancer” is used in several occasions to refer to the mass incarceration of black people and police brutality. But cancer is foreign to the organism and can be removed without essentially affecting it. Neither mass incarceration nor police brutality are the result of an unchallenged past or an unfinished reform. They are inherent to the functioning of the system itself, to perpetuate disempowerment, to affirm the domination of the ‘superior race’, to keep minorities in their place, and to keep the supply of cheap labour — for example, in prisons — steady. They are ‘only’ a continuation of economic violence.36placeholder Making sure that protests remain “single issue” thus makes sure that they don’t turn left or revolutionary, as they are “territorialised” on liberal grounds.

In Marx’s analogy of the woman and the labourer we could see an alternative form of critique: Uncovering the structures that perpetuate and legitimise exploitation, showing the interrelation between different forms of violence by analysing singular cases.37placeholder For even if the antithesis of labour and capital is one of the fundamental underlying structures in capitalism, it is applied differently to different groups of people. Similarly, expressions of empowerment are efficacious only if they help uncover the structures that lead to the experiences of violence and suppression, and show possibilities to undo them. It is important to show the dynamics that create reactionary desire that pits different exploited groups against each other — in short, if gaining a voice is transformed into making change. Critique needs to expose the rhetoric of pseudo-empowerment, of “re-encodings” that legitimise the dispossession and the disempowerment of individuals.

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What role does the presented model of the nuclear family play nowadays? Has it lost its hegemonial status? There is certainly no global answer to that question. While many of its dynamics certainly persist, other, alternative models of family seem to become accepted. If, as the above line of argument indicates, the family is an important factor in the stabilisation and interiorisation of capitalism, the question arises of how such alternative models can be integrated and in what way they uphold the antithesis of labour and capital.

One might argue in that regard that the concept of productivity has once again, at least partly, shifted. The focus, then, would no longer lie in feeding one’s family or giving birth to the nation’s children. Instead, libidinal energy is invested directly into the sphere of consumption. Instead of a standardised ideal image of the perfect home — 1950’s style — the subject has now become its own entrepreneur. But this kind of self-realisation — far from what Marx aimed at with his concept of passion — is a self-realisation as a consumer subject, and thus reduced to self-expression — expressed through one’s consumer choices, but also through one’s CV and career, through sexual identification and cultural niche. The product is the self-image. The theatre of disempowerment and of the signs of power is no longer performed within the family — between the man and the woman, and maybe the child — but as a one-man show of the narcissist individual. As entrepreneurs of themselves, men and women’s “empowerment” is no longer realised at the expense of each other. Instead, the antagonism between labour and capital is shifted within the individual: Disempowerment in the social sphere and dispossession of one’s productive forces, but “re-empowerment” within the sphere of consumption, through choice and expression. One can observe nowadays how the tasks of raising children, instead of being confined to the familial sphere, are more and more transferred to institutions. Family, while still held up as an ideal, becomes more and more economically superfluous, as children become hindrances to one’s career. Taking care of one’s family, be it the kids or the grandparents, is economically unproductive and can’t be put on one’s CV — except if they are transferred to institutions. Indeed, motherhood and fatherhood have a rather awkward situation within the economy, between necessity and superfluity. As production is not even reduced to the familial sphere, but the individual, the confinement of productivity has reached its apogee.

Yet, even if such tendencies can be observed, there is no clean-cut “change of paradigms”. The way male and female work is organised makes it still more economically viable for the woman to give up on her career.38placeholder The normative powers of the ‘normal’ family are still strongly at play. Alternative family models can be accepted, as long as they find their expression within the sphere of consumption — and as long as they are strictly seen as alternatives. In general, the overall function of keeping the private and the public spheres separated — even if the former is not the family, but the individual — remains in place. Individual self-expression and self-realisation are a private matter and cannot ‘get out of line’ and develop any revolutionary aspirations. From time to time, therefore, the individual still needs to be reminded of ‘its place’ and that its purpose is not merely to absorb surplus — consume commodities — but to be part of its extraction. For this, it needs to continue producing human capital, and the most efficient way to do so is still the traditional family. Marx and Deleuze and Guattari’s critique, that the core problem lies in the antithesis of labour and capital, of propertylessness and ownership, that the individuals are cut from their own productive powers, still holds as strong as before.

“The identity of desire and labour” — the overcoming of the antithesis — “is not a myth, it is rather the active Utopia par excellence that designates the capitalist limit to be overcome through desiring-production” (Anti-Oedipus, 302).

For a further discussion of the traces of Marx in Anti-Oedipus, particularly regarding the relation between production, distribution, and fetishism in capitalist economy, click here. To learn more about the spinozist sources of the notion of voluntary servitude in Anti-Oedipus, click here.