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and hierarchized, in the religious sense of the terms. Russia, Mother Russia, the people, folklore,
dances, customs, and costumes, baba and little father, all that comes from "savage" Slavic
communities is kept up, preserved and transferred to the figure of the Secretary General, to the
despot who appropriates all production.
If one wonders what can effectively destroy bourgeois society, it is clear that the answer can be
found neither in socialist revolution nor in Marxism. The "dialectics" of history not only belies
speculative dialectics, but it must be admitted that there is no dialectics at all. Configurations and
vast networks dispute energies; the way to tap, transform and circulate them varies completely,
depending on whether the configuration is capitalistic or despotic. They may combine, producing
no contradictions, no totalization of history leading to other configurations, only effects of
compromise on the social surface, unexpected monsters: the Stakhanovist worker, the proletarian
company head, the Red Marshall, the leftist nuclear bomb, the unionized policeman, the
communist labor camp, Socialist Realism... In this economic-libidinal mixing, it is surely the
despotic configuration that dominates. But in any case, if the outcome were different, it cannot be
seen how and why this machinery would be a result of dialectics, even less why and how the
libidinal configuration of capitalism might "lead to" this kind of arrangement as a "result of its
intrinsic organic development." In fact, capitalism leads only to itself: there is no transcresence to
expect, no limit in its field that it does not cross. On one hand, capitalism leaps over all the pre-
capitalist limitations; on the other, it draws along and displaces its own limit in its movement.
What if this idea of an impassable economic, social, "moral," political, technical, or whatever, limit
were a hollow idea? - this is where Deleuze and Guattari begin. What if instead of a wall to breach
or transgress, it were capitalism's own wall that always passed increasingly farther inside itself (this
kind of set-up was already established in the old idea of the expansion of the "internal" market)?
Not that it would thus suppress itself by simple extension; but neither would the question of its
overthrow be found to be obsolete and necessitate joining the ranks of revisionists and reformers
promoting development, growth and a little more "democracy," or nothing more than a 3% increase
in the GNP and better distribution. But there is no exteriority, no Other of Kapital - no Nature,
Socialism, Festival, whatever - only in the very interior of the system there are the regions of
contact and war ceaselessly multiplying between what is both the fluidity and near indifference of
capital, and what is "axiomatic," repression, plugging up of flows, "reterritorialization," and mapping
back of energy onto a body supposed to be its origin but only drawing energy from it, whatever the
name it assumes; Nation, Civilization, Freedom, Future, and New Society have only one Identity:
Kapital.
There is no dialectics in the sense that one or several of these conflicts should one day result in
the breaching of the wall, that one day the energy should find itself freed, dispersed, fluid, on the
"other side." Rather there is a kind of overflowing of force within the same system that liberated it
from its savage and barbaric origins. Any object of exchange can enter Kapital. From the moment it
is exchangeable (according to the law of value), what can be metamorphosed from money into
machines, from merchandise into merchandise, from workforce into labor, from labor into salary,
from salary into work-force, is an object for Kapital. And thus nothing is left but these enormous
movings around. Objects appear and disappear like fins of dolphins on the surface of the sea, and
objectness gives way to sheer obsolescence. What is important is no longer the object, a
concretion inherited from the codes, but metamorphosis, fluidity. Not a dolphin, but a trail, an
energetic trace inscribed on the surface. It is perhaps in this liquidity, in these lukewarm waters,
that the capitalist production relationships will sink, in the simple rule of equality of exchangeable
values, in the whole set of "axioms" that Kapital keeps on creating to make this rule compulsory
and respectable at the same time it unceasingly derides it.
ENERGUMEN CAPITALISM
At once very deep and superficial, a Marxist subversion never stated.... This configuration of
Kapital, the circulation of flows, is imposed by the predominance of the point of view of circulation
over that of production in political economics. (Production, for Deleuze and Guattari, is the
branching on and breaking off of flows, a gush of milk sucked from the breast and cut off by the
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