This essay focuses on the book Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, which was written by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and published in 1972. More specifically, it focuses on the thesis that “capitalism produces schizophrenia”. Unlike many other “radicals” during this period, Deleuze and Guattari believed that schizophrenia is a real thing. Not only that: it’s a good and “revolutionary” thing. Thus, capitalism produces the schizophrenic, and then represses the schizophrenic because he/she behaves in the wrong way, and “knows truths” which capitalists and the state don’t want to hear.
Note: The single name Deleuze, instead of Deleuze and Guattari, will be used in this essay in order to save space and time.
The book Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, is strongly influenced by Karl Marx. Much within it is filtered through the lens of Marxism. Thus, Deleuze believed (at least in 1972) that almost everything within a capitalist state or society - including schizophrenia - is “produced by capitalism”. That’s not a surprise. If one is a Marxist, then surely this must be the case otherwise Marxism ceases to be the totalist ism its adherents desire it to be.
Despite that, it still often seems as if Deleuze is shoehorning Marxist terms into his philosophy. (Jean Baudrillard often did the same thing.) [See my ‘Jean Baudrillard’s Postmodernist Take on Marxism’.] That’s not a surprise since Anti-Oedipus was published in 1972 when almost every academic (at least in certain departments) was a Marxist, and Marxism generally was in the air.
All that said, there’s little doubt that Deleuze wasn’t a perfect Marxist. That’s mainly because no one is a perfect Marxist — not even communist fundamentalists and those who’ve studied Marxism for thousands of hours.
Deleuze seemed to have made some things clear (more of which in a second) in the following passage:
“The great socialist utopias of the nineteenth century function, for example, not as ideal models but as group fantasies — that is, as agents of the real productivity of desire, making it possible to disinvest the current social field, to ‘deinstitutionalize’ it, to further the revolutionary institution of desire itself.”
So “socialist utopias” are not even “ideal models”: they’re “group fantasies”. However, this isn’t a passage against Marxist socialism as Marx himself often spoke out against what he called “utopian socialists”. Indeed, classing their rivals as “utopians” was a vital means which Marxists used to distinguish themselves from other kinds of socialist. After all, in those days the “scientific nature” of Marxism was stressed very strongly, as it was by Marx himself. [See note 1.]
Still, Deleuze added his own something to the visions of the socialist utopians by arguing that it was really all about “desire”.
Regardless of whether or not Deleuze was a pure Marxist, a “neo-Marxist”, or not a Marxist at all, there are many passages in Anti-Oedipus in which he did indeed write like a pure Marxist. (One can be influenced by some of Marx’s ideas or theories and not be a Marxist.) Take the following passage:
“[T]he objective being of man, for whom to desire is to produce, to produce within the realm of the real.”
And here’s Marx himself:
“In the individual expression of my life I would have directly created your expression of your life, and therefore in my individual activity I would have directly confirmed and realised my true nature, my human nature, my communal nature.”
All this and much more shows Marx’s essentialism, his commitment to ancient philosophical categories, and all those other vices of Marx which postmodernists, poststructuralists, analytic philosophers, writers, journalists, etc. have noted over the years. As Michel Foucault put it, Marxism is a product of the 19th century despite the fact that he’s still quoted left, right and centre today here in 2025.
Capitalism Produces the Schizophrenic
In simple terms, Deleuze believed that capitalism (to use his own term) “produces” the schizophrenic. Thus, here we have a Marxist term — “produces” — used within a psychiatric context. (Of course, the word “produces” isn’t always used in a Marxist manner.)
Importantly, capitalism produces the schizophrenic, and then represses (or “deterritorializes”) the schizophrenic. Deleuze never put it that simply. Instead, he wrote this:
“What we are really trying to say is that capitalism, through its process of production, produces an awesome schizophrenic accumulation of energy or charge, against which it brings all its vast powers of repression to bear.”
There may be a simple logic here.
If people exist in a “capitalist state” (or “capitalist society”), then almost everything bad that happens in that state can be deemed to be capitalism’s fault simply by virtue of the fact that everyone and everything exists within that state or society. The same goes — if to a lesser degree — for pre-capitalist (or non-capitalist) states or societies too. And, yes, surely the same must go for a communist state or society. Thus, if a man in a communist state or society rapes a woman, or kills someone for disagreeing with him, then communism is to blame.
Yet not everything which occurs in a society that’s run on capitalist principles (whatever that may mean) happens because of capitalism. Obvious examples would be gravity, the seasons, etc. Less obvious ones would be someone being violent or getting angry, theft, using a prostitute, developing depression, etc.
Deleuze believed that capitalism produces the schizophrenic. This is clear because he stated that many times. However, Deleuze did attempt to offer his readers a little sophistication on this when he wrote the following:
“When we say that schizophrenia is our characteristic malady, the malady of our era, we do not merely mean to say that modern life drives people mad.”
Deleuze then added his Marxist (or neo-Marxist) angle:
“It is not a question of a way of life, but of a process of production.”
In other words, to say that schizophrenia results from “modern life” isn’t specific enough. After all, the phrase “way of life” (or “modern life”) doesn’t give us much. Similarly, Marxists can say that, for example, the psychiatrist R.D. Laing was also vague (or didn’t go far enough) when he argued that schizophrenia is often a “response to social systems” (i.e., rather than a biological aberration).
No. Schizophrenia results from the capitalist “process of production”.
So stressing the ins and outs of capitalism isn’t vague. Indeed, Deleuze became even more of a purer Marxist (even though many commentators stress that he wasn’t a Marxist) when he also argued that blaming capitalism is itself still too vague. More accurately, it’s the extraction of surplus value from workers which produces schizophrenia.
In more detail. Deleuze boiled schizophrenia down to the “extraction of surplus value [from] persons”. Later, he called schizophrenics the “surplus product” of capitalism. This means that if workers kept the surplus value for themselves, then none of them would ever come to suffer from schizophrenia.
As a person who was profoundly influenced by Marx and Marxism, it’s not a surprise that Deleuze claimed that “schizophrenia is the product of the capitalist machine”. And, because Marx analysed things in terms of historical eras, Deleuze too went on to state that “manic-depression and paranoia are the product of the despotic machine, and hysteria the product of the territorial machine”. Indeed, Deleuze basically substitutes Marx’s terms for his own. Basically, then, “despotic machines” include some pre-capitalist states, nations or societies. And “territorial machines” were pre-despotic societies (which were based on localism, kinship-based codes, etc.).
False Desires
Now take the case of Herbert Marcuse and the fact that Gilles Deleuze himself seemed to entirely replicate the former’s position on the (capitalist) “consumer society”. Deleuze wrote:
“The deliberate creation of lack as a function of market economy is the art of the dominant class. This involves deliberately organizing wants and needs amid an abundance of production; making all of desire teeter and fall victim to the great fear of not having one’s needs satisfied….”
That passage could have been written by Marcuse in his One-Dimensional Man of 1964. And, after Deleuze, it could have been written by many others, from academic theorists to punk bands. (The prose style wouldn’t be the same, but the ideas would be.) The only thing which seems original to Deleuze is the introduction of the word “desire”, and even that word might have been used by many other theorists before him.
Not that what Deleuze says is entirely wrong. Capitalists (or businesses) do attempt to create new “desires”. There’s no question about that in the simple sense that, for example, at one point no one had a smartphone or access to the Internet, and now politicians and even activists say that access to the Internet and a smartphone are needed and even a human right.
All that said, it’s Deleuze’s grand claims that are suspect.
Has any of this really to do with the “dominant class creating a lack”?
That depends on what Deleuze meant by dominant class.
Is the dominant class made up of those companies and businessmen who create smartphones, the Internet, dildos, the New York Times/the Washington Post/the Guardian, etc? Do they all conspire together or even work together? Do all politicians support all businesses blindly, or do they pick and choose?
Is there even an abstract system that works regardless of these complexities and the multiple players involved? Is there a System — almost a Platonic system — which has autonomy, and which plays by the rules Marxists say it plays by? (Louis Althusser believed in the abstract system — the Ideological State Apparatus, in which “subjects” are but cogs in a wheel.)
So one can agree with Deleuze’s claim about individual companies and persons “deliberately organizing wants and needs amid an abundance of production” without also committing oneself to an abstract system that’s personified above and beyond all its variables (so far mentioned). In other words, Deleuze and Marxists work at a level of abstraction, generalisation and theory that may not replicate how things really are. However, talk of Das System is needed in order to fire up “the people”. (There’s a big difference between academic Marxism as found in journals, etc., and the Marxism found “on the street”.)
So, yes, some desires are indeed created. They aren’t genetic or rigid. (They are what Deleuze called “fluid”.) There is a natural/biological “flow” that can point in multiple directions, and which may well be harnessed by capitalists for their own ends.
Still, does Das System so much as exist?…
But wait!
All my words above may well be due to me suffering from “false consciousness”.
False Consciousness
Every single word written in this essay, then, may be a product of me suffering from false consciousness. And if that’s the case, then my essay simply mustn’t be taken seriously.
It can be argued that the notion of false consciousness is absolutely vital to Marxism. (Marx himself never used this term.) It can also be found all over the place, and it’s rendered into different forms (such as “media brainwashing”, “sheeple”, “shills”, Chomsky’s “the manufacturing of consent”, etc.) More relevantly, Deleuze himself can be brought into all this when he wrote:
“[A]s Marx has demonstrated [ ] not only the existence of capital and the division of labor, but also the false consciousness that the capitalist being necessarily acquires.”
The modal adverb “necessarily” is very strong. It’s also odd. In theory, it means that, for example, an 18-year-old student who converted to Marxism two weeks after becoming a student is suddenly deemed free from false consciousness. Yet, on the other hand, non-Marxist academics and intellectuals in their 30s, businessmen in their 40s, and other professionals in their 50s, etc. all suffer from false consciousness.
On a technical note. It’s hard to work out if the mental condition of false consciousness only applies to the workers. After all, on Deleuze’s accounts, it’s stated that “the ruling class takes advantage of the false consciousness of the working class”. Yet Deleuze also stated that “the capitalist being necessarily acquires false consciousness” too.
So does all this mean that literally all non-Marxists suffer from false consciousness?
Did Deleuze Free Us From Categories?
Commentators have said that the anti-psychiatry movement and Deleuze himself were against all “diagnostic categories”. Was that really the case, or were they just against certain diagnostic categories?
What about categories more generally?
What about “fascism”, “racism”, “Nazism”, “reactionary”, etc?
Indeed, what about Deleuze’s own categories: “rhizome”, “desiring-machine”, “body without organs”, “deterritorialization”, “reterritorialization”.
More relevantly, what about “schizophrenia” and “capitalism” themselves?…
Except that Deleuze might well have argued that even though “rhizome”, etc. are indeed categories, they still aren’t rigid categories.
Who knows, perhaps Deleuze would have even denied that they’re categories at all.
Desiring-Machines
It’s very hard to see how “desiring-machines” would have faired any better under socialist or communist regimes. In fact, in many cases, they’ve suffered worse things.
Take the Soviet Union, which made a fatal link between being a political dissident and “sluggish schizophrenia”. But, of course, Deleuze might have done what many Marxists and other radicals still do: deny that any of these regimes were “truly socialist”.
In addition, will the process of deterritorialization break down or circumvent the fixed codes, boundaries and structures which are very likely to exist after the revolutionary violence and chaos has died down? Indeed, Deleuze recognised this in that his paired notion of reterritorialization refers to the new (revolutionary) boundaries and structures which will be created after deterritorialization.
Will these boundaries and structures be as rigid and deadening as the old ones?
Note:
(1) One way Marxism was deemed to be “scientific” was the claim (or theory) that Marxists and/or the vanguardists weren’t driven by morality or by emotion. Instead, they were just oiling the wheels of history toward the inevitable revolution.
Marx’s own often rhetorical and angry writings show this to be false.
*) Next: ‘Gilles Deleuze as a Romantic Rousseauian’.
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