Summary of Chapter 13: 7000 BC: Apparatus of Capture
In this chapter they continue the series of propositions (but not of axioms?) from the previous chapter. The date refers to the flourishing of Çatalhöyük. The cover image is of a method for trapping partridges in a net using bait and an artificial cow, which the trapper manipulates “afin d’amuser les Perdrix” before capturing them in the net (Chomel 1767: 881-3). Kishik (2009) gives an interesting discussion of the source, though he refers to a different image of the same net without the cow and partridges.
Proposition X: The State and its poles.
D&G begin the chapter reiterating the Mitra-Varuna distinction from Dumézil, the two poles of the state being those of the “Binder-god,” or conqueror, and the “jurist-god,” or legislator. These can both conduct war according to their own principles, but this is only the captured war machine; the war machine is always represented by a third god or force [cf. Vaneigem’s “third force.”]. There is a “tempting three-part hypothesis” (426), whereby the war machine becomes a mediator between the two poles, in a 1 (binder god), 2 (war machine), 3 (jurist god) relationship. However, this does not in fact explain the origin of the State, as the first term of the conquering binder god remains presumed as somehow originary (and this remains eternal as the third jurist-god or republic aspect remains in “resonance” with the first (427)). Thus war can not be called on as an explanation for the existence of the state (because it presupposes the existence of the state), similarly to how “private property presupposes public property,” and “money presupposes taxation.” [They are here arguing against Engels’ theory of the State from his Origin of the Family; yet while the second and third points can be taken as well established (cf. Proudhon, Graeber), the first still seems a bit circuitous imho. Nevertheless they will make the case in the following proposition.]
Proposition XI: Which comes first?
On one level, the answer to this question is the aforementioned imperial pole of the state; yet at the same time they are framing the discussion to avoid a first-this, then-that series which could imply a social evolutionism. Smith (2019) gives a good overview of D&G’s sources and interlocutors in this section: they are arguing specifically against the evolutionism of Childe and Engels, as well as (behind them) Morgan and Spencer; key authors they draw on for support are Jane Jacobs, Fernand Braudel, and of course Clastres.
They begin with a discussion of the Urstaat, or originary State, which Smith argues “does not refer to a supposed first state, but rather functions as an Idea (in the Deleuzian sense) that is present, throughout the social field, as a virtuality or problem” (Smith 2019: 150). At the same time, they want to avoid the error made by Clastres, of imputing mechanisms in pre-State societies which counter the emergence of hierarchy to an “overmysterious presentiment of what they warded off and did not yet exist” (429). Thus, the Urstaat has to be in some sense always-already present, more literally in the sense of “tendencies that ‘seek’ the State” through incipient hierarchy (430; and I feel Clastres had made this argument as well); but also in terms of this “immemorial” “Idea of a completely captured and coded flow” (Smith, ibid., quoting from A-O); “it was already acting before it appeared, as the actual limit these primitive societies warded off, or as the point toward which they converged but could not reach without self-destructing” (431). Toscano notes that D&G “revive the Hegelian intuition that the state has always been there – not as an idea or a concept, but as a threshold endowed with a kind of virtual efficacy, even when the state as a complex of institutions and as a system of control is not yet actual” (Toscano 2010: 44).
Everything is not of the State precisely because there have been States always and everywhere. Not only does writing presuppose the State, but so do speech and language. (430; emphasis original)
This argument links back, one presumes, to their early discussion of language founded on the order-word (as opposed to “communication”); here they talk about translation as opposed to “communication:”
Speech communities and languages, independently of writing, do not define closed groups of people who understand one another but primarily determine relations between groups who do not understand one another: if there is language, it is fundamentally between those who do not speak the same tongue. Language is made for that, for translation, not for communication.
They elaborate an important distinction between the roles of cities and states in the ancient world. Towns are always in a network of other towns, the individual town is a “circuit-point” in this network. This means the urban network has “egalitarian pretensions, regardless of the form it takes: tyrannical, democratic, oligarchic, aristocratic” (432) (in much the same way as the State remains at heart hierarchical, although taking differing, even democratic and “socialist” forms, which D&G assert are “not façades” (436)).
Expanding on Clastres’ thesis, then both cities and states become thresholds or potentials which primitive societies ward off, and which thus to some degree preëxist in these societies without overcoming them:
Primitive societies do not lack formations of power; they even have many of them. But what prevents the potential central points from crystallizing, from taking on consistency, are precisely those mechanisms that keep the formations of power both from resonating together in a higher point and from becoming polarized at a common point: the circles are not concentric, and the two segments require a third segment through which to communicate. This is the sense in which primitive societies have crossed neither the town-threshold nor the State-threshold. (433)
Neither city nor State preceded the other, as both are in “reciprocal presupposition” (434). Both are forms of, or form through, deterritoralization of the previous “primitive” societies. It would be an error to see them, as imagined in a certain 20th century free-market mythology, as opposed poles of statist order on the one side and free-market capitalism on the other: “the towns did not invent capitalism,” which depends on the State in particular.
They come to a central argument, which is they they will define social formations in terms of machinic processes rather than by the modes of production favored by Marxists and social scientists in general (435). (Modes of production, they argue, are merely dependent on these machinic processes).
Social Formation | Machinic Process |
primitive societies | prevention-anticipation |
State societies | apparatus of capture |
urban societies | instruments of polarization |
nomadic societies | war machines |
ecumenical organizations | “the encompassment of heterogeneous social formations” |
Proposition XII: Capture
In this section they continue what is essentially their own critique of political economy, updating Marx with some insights from later economists and twentieth century anthropology. They begin with Jevons’ marginalist theory of value, applied to traditional society’s prevention-anticipation of the State. This leads them to a distinction between limit and threshold, such that “the limit designates the penultimate marking a necessary rebeginning, and the threshold the ultimate marking an inevitable change” (438). “Exchange is only an appearance” (439) in the economic relations between pre-state groups; it is really about evaluation in relation to desire: “The issue is one of desirability as an assemblage component: every group desires according to the value of the last receivable object beyond which it would be obliged to change assemblage.” And “it is the evaluation of the last as limit that constitutes an anticipation and simultaneously wards off the last as threshold or ultimate (a new assemblage)."
The threshold comes “after” the limit, “after” the last receivable objects... (440)
The Archaic State, having passed the threshold, engages in stockpiling; the argument regarding stock is derived from V. Gordon Childe, though Smith (2018) traces it back further to Marx in Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, relating to primitive accumulation. The State absorbs the previously existing traditional societies which had coded the land, by overcoding them:
In solely descriptive terms, we therefore distinguish between serial, itinerant, or territorial assemblages (which operate by codes) and sedentary, global, or Land assemblages (which operate by overcoding).
The land as the object of agriculture in fact implies a deterritorialization, because instead of people being distributed in an itinerant territory, pieces of land are distributed among people according to a common quantitative criterion (the fertility of plots of equal surface area). (441)
They return to the previous chapter’s distinction between work and free action, with Massumi occasionally translates travail as “work,” and other times as “labor.” Smith (2018), (who consistently uses “labour”), notes that the distinction is derived from the work of Martial Gueroult.
In this section they lay out their “trinity formula,” an adaptation of Marx’s trinity of capital-profit, land rent, and labor-wages; their trinity is land, work, and money, with “money” replacing and subsuming(?) Marx’s “capital,” by bringing the state and its taxation into the concept.
They distinguish between four “regimes of violence”: struggle, war, crime, and policing. In particular the distinction between war (even when captured by the state) and legal violence (aka policing) underscores their difference from the “war is the health of the state” argument which would equate the two: “State overcoding is precisely this structural violence that defines the law, ‘police’ violence and not the violence of war” (448).
Proposition XII: The State and its forms.
The question now becomes: Once the State has appeared, formed in a single stroke, how will it evolve? What are its factors of evolution or mutation, and what is the relation between evolved States and the archaic imperial State?
Smith succinctly summarizes the issue, and how it relates to the above “trinity:”
the archaic state cannot overcode and capture without at the same time freeing up a large quantity of decoded flows that escape from it. It cannot create large-scale public works without a flow of independent labour escaping from its hierarchised bureaucracy of functionaries, notably in the mines and in metallurgy. It cannot create coinage without flows of money escaping, and nourishing or giving birth to other powers (notably in commerce and banking). It cannot create a system of public property without a flow of private appropriation growing up beside it, and then starting to slip through its fingers. Finally, it is with the rise of private property that classes appear, since the dominant classes are no longer part of the state apparatus, but become distinct determinations that make use of a now-transformed apparatus. (Smith 2018: 236)
"[T]he state is at once capture and the impossibility of complete capture, since the state can only overcode by decoding (abstraction)” (ad loc.) The archaic state overcodes, but this releases “decoded flows” which escape from it. D&G clarify that by “decoding” they do not mean “deciphering,” but de-coding, [“un-coding” could have been the more felicitous term]: “the state of a flow that is no longer contained in (compris dans) it own code, that escapes it own code” (448-9). The varieties of state have to do with how this relationship to both overcoding and decoding is organized.
The Greek city-states exist at the periphery of the Egyptian, then later the Persian world-economy and feed off of/benefit from the wealth it has generated. Flows are overcoded in the Orient, then decoded in Europe. “Surplus value is no longer surplus value of code (overcoding) but becomes surplus value of flow” (451). Split into public vs. private sphere [in state space], slavery changes from communal workers to private property. “[T]he State apparatus is faced with a new task, which consists less in overcoding already coded flows than in organizing conjunctions of decoded flows as such.”
Thus the regime of signs has changed: in all of these respects, the operation of the imperial "signifier" has been superseded by processes of subjectification; machinic enslavement tends to be replaced by a regime of social subjection.
The point is to draw out the relationship between capitalism and the state, how they are dependent on each other, while also articulating their differences in relation to territory, coding, etc. They clarify the difference between axiomatic and coding/codes:
axiomatic deals directly with purely functional elements and relations whose nature is not specified, and which are immediately realized in highly varied domains simultaneously; codes, on the other hand, are relative to those domains and express specific relations between qualified elements that cannot be subsumed by a higher formal unity (overcoding) except by transcendence and in an indirect fashion. (454)
Toscano expands on this:
Originating in the discourse of science and mathematical set theory in particular, axiomatic denotes a method that need not provide definitions of the terms it works with, but rather orders a given domain with the adjunction or subtraction of particular norms or commands (axioms). Axioms thus operate on elements and relations whose nature need not be specified. They are indifferent to the properties or qualities of their domain of application and treat their objects as purely functional, rather than as qualitatively differentiated by any intrinsic features. Axioms are in turn accompanied by theorems, or models of realisation, which apply them to certain empirical or material situations. (Toscano 2010: 21-2)
[Thus axiomatic refers to the non-specifying, discretizing and [extensive rather than intensive “disembedding” aspect of capitalism]. Per D&G the imminent axiomatic is effectuated in models of realization [thus the axiomatic of the Urstaat is realized in specific forms of the state? Though they state later that the archaic state is characterized by a transcendent formal unity, distinct from capitalism’s immanent axiomatic. It is more that the archaic State plays a role of primitive accumulation and creating uncontrolled decoded flows, clearing the way for the axiomatic of capitalism to emerge; one it does it becomes a “megamachine,” a world system within which existing states are models of realization of said axiomatic]. The relation of state and capital in terms of De/Re/Te:
It is thus proper to State deterritorialization to moderate the superior deterritorialization of capital and to provide the latter with compensatory reterritorializations. (455)
So States are not at all transcendent paradigms of an overcoding but immanent models of realization for an axiomatic of decoded flows.
They assert that models of realization are “supposed to be isomorphic” with the axiomatics they effectuate; but how can this be so when so many differing models of the State effectuate the axiomatic? They discuss this with three points:
1. There is really just one (capitalist) world market, even the [so-called] socialist states are part of it, like it or not;
2. The real capitalist market tolerates polymorphy for two reasons: a) [articulation] of capitalism with non-capitalist modes of production, b) the bureaucratic socialist states are able to “conjugate with capitalism;” “there is only one world market, the capitalist one.”
3. The axiomatic encompasses the diversity of existing state forms, and while they are not all equivalent or interchangeable, they are interconnected, for instance the western democracies install and support dictatorships in the third world.
It is in the form of the nation-state, with all its possible variations, that the State becomes the model of realization for the capitalist axiomatic. (456)
A key difference in operation of the archaic state and modern states is the distinction between machinic enslavement and social subjection. Machinic enslavement means the individual becoming part of a vaster machine composing other people, animals, materials, and so on: a “constituent piece” (457) [this is presumably distinct from the mere fact of being part of an assemblage; likely having to do with the organization of the machine towards the Face of the Despot in the signifying regime of the Archaic State].
But there is subjection when the higher unity constitutes the human being as a subject linked to a now exterior object, which can be an animal, a tool, or even a machine. The human being is no longer a component of the machine but a worker, a user. He or she is subjected to the machine and no longer enslaved by the machine.
This second form is also exploitative, it just treats the individual as a subject and not a mere object, along the way to extracting labor value. It seems that capitalism then introduces an even stronger version of social subjection which recreates some aspects of ancient enslavement, but this is in relation to technical machines:
One is not enslaved by the technical machine but rather subjected to it. It would appear, then, that the modern State, through technological development, has substituted an increasingly powerful social subjection for machinic enslavement.
But the naked or “free” worker of capitalism takes subjection to its most radical expression, since the processes of subjectification no longer even enter into partial conjunctions that interrupt the flow. In effect, capital acts as the point of subjectification that constitutes all human beings as subjects; but some, the “capitalists,” are subjects of enunciation that form the private subjectivity of capital, while the others, the “proletarians,” are subjects of the statement, subjected to the technical machines in which constant capital is effectuated. The wage regime can therefore take the subjection of human beings to an unprecedented point, and exhibit a singular cruelty, yet still be justified in its humanist cry: No, human beings are not machines, we don't treat them like machines, we certainly don't confuse variable capital and constant capital …
[I was recently reading about the controversial Hart and Risley (1995) study of how parents of three groups (professional class, working class, and “welfare”) speak to their children, and how well the children go on to perform in school. Long story short, the higher the class the better the children are treated, and thus they go on to do better in school. Besides all sorts of methodological issues, the study clearly is of the “culture of poverty” sort of argument, ignoring all sorts of socioeconomic context to blame children’s adult social status on how they were raised by their parents. Nevertheless, in terms of D&G’s terminology, we can also see it as an illustration of how class identity is replicated. The professional class parents treated their students as subjects of enunciation, asking them questions, and expecting them to grasp a wider variety of words and concepts, which is precisely how the parents themselves are treated in their work and by capitalism, i.e., as subjects of enunciation. In turn, the working and “welfare” class parents, according to the study, asked fewer questions and issued more commands, treating the children like subjects of the statement, precisely as they in turn are treated in this economic system.]
Capitalism’s new machinic enslavement “in no way represents a return to the imperial machine since we are now in the immanence of an axiomatic, and not under the transcendence of a formal Unity” (458).
But it is the reinvention of a machine of which human beings are constituent parts, instead of subjected workers or users. If motorized machines constituted the second age of the technical machine, cybernetic and informational machines form a third age that reconstructs a generalized regime of subjection: recurrent and reversible “humans-machines systems” replace the old nonrecurrent and nonreversible relations of subjection between the two elements; the relation between human and machine is based on internal, mutual communication, and no longer on usage or action.
Automation reduces human workers to parts in the machine, and supplants variable capital (labor) with a larger proportion of constant capital (machinery).
But with automation comes a progressive increase in the proportion of constant capital; we then see a new kind of enslavement: at the same time the work regime changes, surplus value becomes machinic, and the framework expands to all of society. It could also be said that a small amount of subjectification took us away from machinic enslavement, but a large amount brings us back to it.
The technical machine thus involves both enslavement and subjection, not as opposing forces but “two simultaneous parts that constantly reinforce and nourish each other.” They provide the example of television:
For example, one is subjected to TV insofar as one uses and consumes it, in the very particular situation of a subject of the statement that more or less mistakes itself for a subject of enunciation (“you, dear television viewers, who make TV what it is . . .”); the technical machine is the medium between two subjects. But one is enslaved by TV as a human machine insofar as the television viewers are no longer consumers or users, nor even subjects who supposedly “make” it, but intrinsic component pieces, “input” and “output,” feedback or recurrences that are no longer connected to the machine in such a way as to produce or use it. In machinic enslavement, there is nothing but transformations and exchanges of information, some of which are mechanical, others human.
[Needless to say, the case for the new machinic enslavement with our current communication and entertainment technology is far stronger than it was with television in D&G’s day! In a footnote (570n57) they reference Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451in which television has moved from being a mere device in the room, to “forming the walls of the house” [and metaphorically, the boundaries of the imagination. Has not VR made this dystopian fantasy a [virtual] reality?]
Social subjection proportions itself to the model of realization, just as machinic enslavement expands to meet the dimensions of the axiomatic that is effectuated in the model. (459)
They now delineate three historical forms of the state:
1) archaic States or Empires, machinic enslavement and overcoding of already-coded flows (that is, conquest of traditional “pre-State” societies);
2) diverse States existing in relation to the archaic State empires, “which proceed instead by subjectification and subjection, and constitute qualified or topical conjunctions of decoded flows”;
3) modern nation-States, “which take decoding even further and are models of realization for an axiomatic or a general conjugation of flows” and rely on both social subjection and the new machinic enslavement.
Whereas for the second kind of state, the Empire or Urstaat was on the horizon, with the modern capitalist state system it has been brought back to the center of political economic reality. “Capitalism has reawakened the Urstaat, and given it new strength” (460).
Proposition XIV: Axiomatics and the presentday situation.
“Politics is by no means an apodeictic science” (461); it is experimental, fumbling, grasping, a posteriori. Naturally, this is praise from D&G’s point of view. Capitalism and the State are axiomatic and we want to get them out of our heads! Axiomatics is not the cutting edge of science, it is rather a capturing of flows:
The great axiomaticians are the men of State of science, who seal off the lines of flight that are so frequent in mathematics, who would impose a new nexum, if only a temporary one, and who lay down the official policies of science. They are the heirs of the theorematic conception of geometry.
To the axiomaticians, D&G contrast the intuitionist school of mathematics, more interested in problems than in theorems. The remainder of the chapter will be a “summary sketch” of seven “givens” which Adkins clarifies are “currently informing the creation of axioms in capitalism” (Adkins, 228)
1. Addition, subtraction.
Here they go into more detail on how axioms work in capitalism – there are competing tendencies within capitalism to add, and to subtract, the number of axioms in operation. [These seem to be related to the question of how capitalism survives crises? It does not seem to be clearly stated, but they have been making references to the composition of capital (variable vs. constant) throughout this chapter, and this is linked to the theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.] These also have to do with capitalism’s relationship with the state; social democracies increase the number of axioms, while totalitarian ones reduce them [Exhibit A, the reduction of axioms in Trump’s current retooling of state power to more efficiently suit the interests of the wealthiest]. They reiterate their distinction between totalitarianism and fascism and discuss it in this regard.
2. Saturation.
“Saturation” sounds like a reference to Simondon, but he is not mentioned, and the concept itself is only invoked in passing:
Can we express the distribution of the two opposite tendencies by saying that the saturation of the system marks the point of inversion? No, for the saturation is itself relative. (463)
They invoke Marx on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (this is proof that capitalism is an axiomatic), [and hence the relation of axiomatics to crisis], and link the subtraction of axioms to totalitarianism, and the addition of axioms to social democracy; however, these are two opposed but linked parts of the modern state/capitalist axiomatic [and linked to the two poles of the State?] They go on to denounce the “disenchanted” concept of recuperation and talk about worker’s struggles.
3. Models, isomorphy.
“In principle, all States are isomorphic; in other words, they are domains of realization of capital as a function of a sole external world market” (464). Nevertheless, there are actually three bipolarities organizing the variety of existing states:
1) the isomorphy of the social democratic and totalitarian states at the center of the [world system];
2) an East-West heteromorphy between the capitalist West and the bureaucratic socialist East; and
3) a North-South polymorphy, between center and periphery.
4. Power (puissance).
This section treats of the operation of war in the contemporary [i.e., late Twentieth Century] world system.
On the one hand, war clearly follows the same movement as capitalism: In the same way as the proportion of constant capital keeps growing, war becomes increasingly a “war of materiel” in which the human being no longer even represents a variable capital of subjection, but is instead a pure element of machinic enslavement. On the other hand, and this is the main point, the growing importance of constant capital in the axiomatic means that the depreciation of existing capital and the formation of new capital assume a rhythm and scale that necessarily take the route of a war machine now incarnated in the complexes: the complexes actively contribute to the redistributions of the world necessary for the exploitation of maritime and planetary resources. (466)
They derive five points from Virilio (separated here for clarity):
[1] that the war machine finds its new object in the absolute peace of terror or deterrence;
[2] that it performs a technoscientific “capitalization”;
[3] that this war machine is terrifying not as a function of a possible war that it promises us, as by blackmail, but, on the contrary, as a function of the real, very special kind of peace it promotes and has already installed;
[4] that this war machine no longer needs a qualified enemy but, in conformity with the requirements of an axiomatic, operates against the “unspecified enemy,” domestic or foreign (an individual, group, class, people, event, world);
[5] that there arose from this a new conception of security as materialized war, as organized insecurity or molecularized, distributed, programmed catastrophe.
5. The included middle.
This section discusses the intrication of center and periphery in the modern world-economy [hence the contrast with the “excluded middle”]. D&G identify unequal exchange as one of the most important axioms of capitalism, and briefly restate some of the language on overcoding and decoding which has run through this and the previous chapter:
The more the archaic empire overcoded the flows, the more it stimulated decoded flows that turned back against it and forced it to change. The more the decoded flows enter into a central axiomatic, the more they tend to escape to the periphery, to present problems that the axiomatic is incapable of resolving or controlling (even by adding special axioms for the periphery). (468)
The four principal flows that torment the representatives of the world economy, or of the axiomatic, are the flow of matter-energy, the flow of population, the flow of food, and the urban flow.
They discuss how the center becomes involved in the periphery and vice versa, giving the example of a Third World social democracy which establishes power through a “class rupture” [incorporating part of the working class as voting, represented subjects, and excluding others as an underclass who are left to fend for themselves in an informal economy]. “And the States of the center deal not only with the Third World, each of them has not only an external Third World, but there are internal Third Worlds that rise up within them and work them from the inside.” Here they draw on Negri and the operaists in a discussion that ties back to their previous invocations of the composition of capital.
These phenomena confirm the difference between the new machinic enslavement and classical subjection. For subjection remained centered on labor and involved a bipolar organization, property-labor, bourgeoisie-proletariat. In enslavement and the central dominance of constant capital, on the other hand, labor seems to have splintered in two directions: intensive surplus labor that no longer even takes the route of labor, and extensive labor that has become erratic and floating.
6. Minorities.
“Ours is becoming the age of minorities” (469). They reiterate that minorities, like majorities, are not constituted by number but “by the gap that separates them from this or that axiom constituting a redundant majority”. They invoke the concept of multiplicities from “One or Many Wolves”:
What distinguishes them is that in the case of a majority the relation internal to the number constitutes a set that may be finite or infinite, but is always denumerable, whereas the minority is defined as a nondenumerable set, however many elements it may have. What characterizes the nondenumerable is neither the set nor its elements; rather, it is the connection, the “and” produced between elements, between sets, and which belongs to neither, which eludes them and constitutes a line of flight. The axiomatic manipulates only denumerable sets, even infinite ones, whereas the minorities constitute “fuzzy,” nondenumerable, nonaxiomizable sets, in short, “masses,” multiplicities of escape and flux. (470)
It does not help or further the cause of minorities to simply be incorporated into majorities, or even to flip the system and constitute new majorities of their own. “What is proper to the minority is to assert a power of the nondenumerable …. Woman: we all have to become that, whether we are male or female. Non-white: we all have to become that, whether we are white, yellow, or black.”
The remark on the inability of the axiomatic to accommodate even modest demands by majorities, as a sign of “the gap between two types of propositions, propositions of flow and propositions of axioms” (471).
The power of the minorities is not measured by their capacity to enter and make themselves felt within the majority system, nor even to reverse the necessarily tautological criterion of the majority, but to bring to bear the force of the non-denumerable sets, however small they may be, against the denumerable sets, even if they are infinite, reversed, or changed, even they if imply new axioms or, beyond that, a new axiomatic. The issue is not at all anarchy versus organization, nor even centralism versus decentralization, but a calculus or conception of the problems of nondenumerable sets, against the axiomatic of denumerable sets. Such a calculus may have its own compositions, organizations, even centralizations; nevertheless, it proceeds not via the States or the axiomatic process but via a pure becoming of minorities.
7. Undecidable propositions.
Of course the axiomatic does marshall the war machine, which is also nondenumerable and all that, but this is limited by the way coöptation by the state has changed the objects of the war machine, as discussed in the previous chapter. They go into more about the particular politics of minorities, how integration does not really achieve anything, while the “final solution" extermination is impossible. “The minorities issue is instead that of smashing capitalism, of redefining socialism, of constituting a war machine capable of countering the world war machine by other means” (472). They reiterate that at the same time as capitalism organizes denumerable sets into stable forms, it also creates nondenumerable sets which escape beyond it: “It does not effect the ‘conjugation’ of the deterritorialized and decoded flows without those flows forging farther ahead; without their escaping both the axiomatic that conjugates them and the models that reterritorialize them.”
The result is that “undecidable propositions” proliferate:
Every struggle is a function of all of these undecidable propositions and constructs revolutionary connections in opposition to the conjugations of the axiomatic. (473)
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