The capitalist socius

Capitalism is presented as initially a philosophical structure, in that it works by defining the categories and the material for categorisation, and then using them as the schemas for synthesis. However, with sufficiently accumulated resources, capitalism performs an ontological inversion, where the world gets re-created in the image of the abstract value-form (165).

This is explained through Deleuze and Guattari’s (D&G) capitalist socius on the one hand, and Negri and Hardt’s (N&H) multitude on the other.

1. D&G: The socius is a unity of the disparate social practices that capitalism puts together acting as its own cause. As explained in D&G’s Anti-Oedipus, in capitalism production is solidified as a “surface upon which the forces and agents of production are distributed” — with all the consequent relations emanating from it as a quasi-cause. In other words, capitalism functions to organise the productive and cooperative practices, — including the subjectivities such as workers of current neoliberalism, — it emerged from. They produce the mode of production even prior to its appropriation by the capital (think software startups before the IPO).The outcome is that capital is not something we encounter; it is rather something that defines what we encounter (175, citing Shaviro, 2008). This can be a definition of radical immanence — capitalism has no outside.
   
   Therefore, there’s no possibility of resistance, apart from non-philosophy which Francois Laruelle offers as an explanatory framework for the forces of self-sufficiency — either in philosophy or in capitalism.
2. N&H: The multitude is a “political body both produced from common cooperation and productive of the common” (176). This is developed from D&G, so we also encounter here the tendency of self-sufficiency. Capital and surplus-value are “produced by the labour of the multitude, yet at the same time responsible for … creating the multitude”, including ‘free time’ (176).

The result of this is that the multitude, despite of what people working in the cafeteria on open source projects might think, offers not a relief from capitalism, but rather a creative power to capitalism to self-perpetuate (177).

References

• Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Toni, Negri. 2002. “Towards an Ontological Definition of the Multitude.” multitudes. https://www.multitudes.net/Towards-an-Ontological-Definition/ (July 20, 2022).
• Steven Shaviro, ‘Monstrous Flesh’, The Pinocchio Theory, 2008 <http://www.shaviro.com/ Blog/?p=639> [accessed 26 June 2008 — currently inaccessible]