De Landa - A New Political Economy

I believe that the main task for today's left is to create a new political economy (the resources are all there: Max Weber, T.B. Veblen and the old institutionalists, John Kenneth Galbraith, Fernand Braudel, some of the new institutionalists, like Douglass North; redefinitions of the market, like those of Herbert Simon etc) based as you acknowledged before, on a non-equilibrium view of the matter? But how can we do this if we continue to believe that Marxists got it right, that it is just a matter of tinkering with the basic ideas? At any rate, concepts like "mode of production" do not fit a flat ontology of individuals as far as I can tell.

- Manuel De Landa

That's about as clear as its gotten so far and I couldn't agree more. Well actually I'm not even sure I'd want to use the term "left", there is a huge need for a new political economy, in general. And Marxism has very little (no?) place in it. Left, right? Tired, of fading use, talk about an excessive use of the binary. We can craft something better. De Landa seems to be the only academic around who has really noticed. The left keeps keeps critiquing Capitalism with varied reiterations of Marx's core, and it just doesn't hold up to any real economic scrutiny.

The quote above is from an excellent and extensive Ctheory interview with De Landa. He has a new book out, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. It's next on my "serious" reading list. Those interested in his move towards a new political economy should check out his essay "Markets, Antimarkets and Network Economics", where he lays some ground work.

Back to the Ctheory interview:

CTHEORY (Protevi): Okay, but even if the shift from an exchangist to a productivist perspective doesn't work for you, does it at least seem to you a fruitful way of explaining Deleuze and Guattari's tenacious loyalty to (some suitably modified) form of Marxist analysis, as well as their insistence on a systematicity to capitalist production? Or do we have to change so much in Marx to reach what Deleuze and Guattari say in analyzing things that their insistence on calling what they do a form of Marxism simply the result of their social position in the "gauchiste" (non-Communist) left of France in their lifetimes? In other words, their Marxism is a way of thumbing their noses both at neo-liberals and at party loyalists?

De Landa: Well, frankly, I think Marxism is Deleuze and Guattari's little Oedipus, the small piece of territory they must keep to come back at night after a wild day of deterritorializing. Who could blame them for needing a resting place, a familiar place with all the reassurances of the Marxist tradition (and its powerful iconography of martyrs and revolutionaries)? The question is whether we need that same resting place (clearly we need one, but should it be the same? Shouldn't each of us have a different one so that collectively we can eliminate them?).

Yes, yes, I have to agree. Its like a weird little twitch throughout A Thousand Plateaus, and its keeping me from enjoying it quite as much as I'd like to. Actually been trying to write out something similar for a few days now. How nice of De Landa to do it for me. Think ATP is going to read a bit nicer now...

[via headmap and Anne Galloway]

Few more choice quotes:

CTHEORY (Jensen): A similar question could be raised in relation to your work on markets and anti-markets. In contrast to Empire by Hardt and Negri, which explicitly hopes to have a political impact, your position is much less straightforwardly normative. If, in a realist vein, you take your analysis to be descriptive, how then do you think people might act to reap the benefits of your description?

De Landa: No, not at all. Remember first of all that a realist never settles for a mere description. It is explanation that is the key and the latter involves thinking about real mechanisms which may not be directly observable (or describable). The disagreement with Empire is over the mechanisms one postulates and the details of their workings. I do not accept the Marxist version of these mechanisms (neither those through which markets are supposed to operate nor those for the State) and believe the Marxist version leads to practical dead ends regardless of how ready to be used in social interventions the analysis seems to be. (To be blunt, any idea for social intervention based on Marxism will be a failure). I do take normative positions in my books (such that decentralization is more desirable than centralization for many reasons) but I also realize than in an ethics of nourishing versus degrading assemblages real-life experimentation (not a priori theorization) is the key. To use an obvious example from environmental ethics: a little phosphorous feeds the soil; too much poisons it. Where exactly the threshold is varies with type of soil so it cannot be known a priori. But the normative statement "do not poison the soil" is there nevertheless. Similarly for society: too much centralization poisons (by concentrating power and privilege; by allowing corruption; by taking away skills from routinized command-followers etc) but exactly how much is to be decided by social experiments, how else?

....

CTHEORY (Protevi): Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy accepts Deleuze's use of axiomatics to analyze major or Royal science. Yet you are critical of Deleuze and Guattari's use of axiomatics as a way to conceptualize capitalism (e.g., ATY 331n7), which you see as an example of a top-down positing of a whole. I certainly would agree with you that far too much Marxist work has been simplistic, historical determinist, reductive, totalizing, functionalist, top-down, etc., but I wonder if you aren't being too harsh with Deleuze and Guattari's attempts to define a theory of capitalism that avoids each of these dangers? They certainly adopt a notion of "machinic surplus value," moving beyond a simple labor theory of value (machines as "congealed muscular energy," as you put it at ATY 79). Don't they also consistently deny any historical determinism of stages of development by emphasizing the contingency of capitalist formations, as well as conduct a sustained polemic against reductive base-superstructure models of society? Don't their constant reminders that the line of flight is primary prevent any totalizing accounts? Isn't their use of axiomatics an attempt to see capitalism as an adaptive meshwork of economic, state and quasi-state (IMF, WTO, etc.) institutions, rather than as a homeostatic organismic whole, as in crude functionalist accounts? In other words, haven't they, at least in principle, given us the outlines of a bottom-up account of a complex, open-ended, adaptive world capitalist system?

De Landa: I agree that if I had to choose among all the Marxist accounts of economic history I would probably pick theirs. It does have all the advantages you mention. Yet, I believe they would have benefited greatly from a better reading of Braudel. They seemed to have read only volume one of his history of capitalism and not the other two volumes, which are really the most radical part. This is clear when in A Thousand Plateus in one page thet quote Braudel's stress on the role of cities and yet in the very next page Deleuze and Guattari go on to define capitalism as a "market economy", an idea which Braudel attacks as historically false. So I wonder what would have happened to their theory had they understood the last point: that there is no such thing as "the market" in general and no such thing as a "logic of exchange" in general (doesn't the idea of an capitalist axiomatic depend on the idea of a logic of exchange?). Once we separate oligopolies from the market (they are strategic not primarily exchangist entities) and identify capitalism with oligopolies (as Braudel does) we can still use some of Deleuze and Guattari's ideas since markets have always caused "lines of flight" to pass among societies, particularly closed societies (it's in the marketplace that we meet outsiders; that foreign objects and ideas enter a city; that heterogeneity is injected etc).