In the translator's foreword to "A Thousand Plateaus", Brian Massumi tells us that the philosopher Gilles Deleuze felt prompted by the French worker-student revolt of 1968 to question the role of the intellectual in society. Felix Guattari, his writing partner, was a psychoanalyst who identified with R.D. Laing's antipsychiatry movement of the 1960's. Laing created group homes where schizophrenics were treated identically to the sane, sort of like some Internet mailing lists. Guattari also embraced the protests of 1968 and discovered an intellectual kinship with Deleuze. Their first collaboration was the 1972 "Anti-Oedipus". Massumi interprets this work as a polemic against "State-happy or pro-party versions of Marxism". "A Thousand Plateaus", written in 1987, is basically part two of the earlier work. Deleuze and Guattari state that the two books make up a grand opus they call "Capitalism and Schizophrenia".
I read the chapter "1933" in "A Thousand Plateaus" with as much concentration as I can muster. Stylistically, it has a lot in common with philosophers inspired by Nietzsche. I am reminded of some of the reading I did in Wyndham Lewis and Oswald Spengler in a previous lifetime. These sorts of authors pride themselves in being able to weave together strands from many different disciplines and hate being categorized. Within a few pages you will see references to Kafka, American movies, Andre Gorz's theory of work and Clausewitz's military writings.
Their approach to fascism is quite extraordinarily nutty.
Deleuze and Guattari see fascism as a permanent feature of social life. Class is not so important to them. They are concerned with what they call "microfascism", the fascism that lurks in heart of each and every one of us. When they talk about societies that were swept by fascism, such as Germany, they totally ignore the objective social and economic framework: depression, hyperinflation, loss of territory, etc.
Piss on that, I say. Fascism is a product of objective historical factors, not shortcomings in the human psyche or imperfections in the way society is structured. The way to prevent fascism is not to have unfascist attitudes or live in unfascist communities, like the hippies did in the 1960's. It is to confront the capitalist class during periods of mounting crisis and win a socialist victory.
In a key description of the problem, they say, "The concept of the totalitarian State applies only at the macropolitical level, to a rigid segmentarity and a particular mode of totalization and centralization. But fascism is inseparable from a proliferation of molecular focuses in interaction, which skip from point to point, before beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State. Rural fascism and city or neighborhood fascism, youth fascism and war veteran's fascism, fascism of the Left and fascism of the Right, fascism of the couple, family, school, and office: every fascism is defined by a micro-black hole that stands on its own and communicates with the others, before resonating in a great, generalized central black hole."
This is a totally superficial understanding of how fascism came about. What is Left fascism? It is true that the Communist Party employed thuggish behavior on occasion during the ultraleft "Third Period". They broke up meetings of small Trotskyist groups while the Nazis were breaking up the meetings of trade unions or Communists. Does this behavior equal left Fascism? Fascism is a class term. It describes a mass movement of the petty-bourgeoisie that seeks to destroy all vestiges of the working-class movement. This at least is the Marxist definition.
Fascism is not intolerance, bad attitudes, meanness or insensitivity. Otherwise, the B'Nai Brith Antidefamation League would be following me around. It is a violent, procapitalist mass movement of the middle-class that employs socialist phrase-mongering.
I want to conclude with a few words about Felix Guattari and Toni Negri's "Communists like Us". Unlike Deleuze/Guattari's collaborations, this is a perfectly straightforward political manifesto that puts forward a basic challenge to Marxism. It is deeply inspired by a reading of the 1968 struggle in France as a mass movement for personal liberation. Students and other peripheral sectors move into the foreground while workers become secondary. It more dated than Crosby-Stills-Nash-Young.
The pamphlet was written in 1985 but has the redolence of tie-dyed paisley, patchouli oil and granny glasses. Get a whiff of this:
"Since the 1960's, new collective subjectivities have been affirmed in the dramas of social transformation. We have noted what they owe to modifications in the organization of work and to developments in socialization; we have tried to establish that the antagonisms which they contain are no longer recuperable within the traditional horizon of the political. But it remains to be demonstrated that the innovations of the '60s should above all be understood within the universe of consciousnesses, of desires, and of modes of behaviour."
I have some trouble understanding why Deleuze and Guattari are such big favorites with some of my younger friends. My friend Catherine who works in the Dean of Studies office at Barnard was wild about Derrida when I first met her four years ago. She started showing more of an interest in Marxism after Derrida did. But she is not reading the 18th Brumaire. She is reading Bataille, Deleuze/Guattari and Simone Weil. My guess is that a lot of people from her milieu feel a certain nostalgia for the counterculture of the 1960's and in a funny sort of way, Deleuza/Guattari take that nostalgia and cater to it but in an ultrasophisticated manner. They wouldn't bother with Paul Goodman and Charles Reich, this crowd. But French and Italian theorists who write in a highly allusive and self-referential manner: Like wow, man!
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)