Wars and Capital – <i>after</i> Deleuze and Guattari and Foucault

Territory and population, migration, division of territories and their globalised populations… Re-presenting in this paper Wars and Capital (written with Maurizio Lazzarato, first published 2016), we’ll argue that Deleuze and Guattari’s view on this complex of relations must be reconstructed from their understanding of war’s constitutive relationship with capitalism by taking up the confrontation with Clausewitz to reverse the famous formula that war is/is only the continuation of politics by other means. Except that, as with Foucault, albeit differently, it is not so much a question of reversal but an interweaving of war in politics and politics in war that adopts the movements of capitalism in the twentieth century’s world economy. Politics is not, as in Clausewitz, the politics of the state but the war machine of the financialised economy interwoven in the multiplicity of wars that move and hold together the war of destruction in action with wars of class, race and sex under the auspices of a ‘war amongst the people’ that provide the fractal environment of all the others when war and peace become indistinguishable in a neoliberalism of combat. A transversal and global civil war that is also a war of subjectivity fractures all territories in the North(s) and South(s) since internal and external colonisations are no longer distributed only geographically. As proof, if needed, more than forty years after the publication of A Thousand Plateaus – it is not enough to state that micropolitics has to pass into macropolitics to transform it: both micro- and macropolitics have to be part of the multiplicity of wars that take place, without which both micro- and macropolitics collapse in the ‘becoming-minor’ of the ‘missing people’.