In this explanatory talk, the speaker presents the central thesis of Deleuze and Guattari's early‑1970s work Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The authors argue that capitalism’s true antithesis is not communism but feudalism, a mode of organization that ties both capital and labor to land ownership. Under feudalism, labor and capital cannot be freely moved or recombined because they are bound to specific plots of land and to the serfs or slaves attached to them. Capitalism emerges when sovereign states break these feudal norms by establishing universal jurisdiction and standardized systems—metric measurements, a single time, and a unified currency issued by a central bank. These homogeneous standards free capital and labor to move across borders, allowing them to be recombined in novel ways and generate value at rates far beyond what feudal societies could achieve. The speaker highlights how the creation of sovereign states, the dissolution of religious and aristocratic authorities, and the imposition of uniform norms collectively enable the birth and rapid growth of capitalist economies.
Chapters
I actually brought another book. You came prepared. This is one of the most influential books for me. This is the French version. It's a book by Deleuze and Guattari called Capitalism and Schizophrenia. So it's a book written in the early '70s. They're philosophers, but they're looking at the history of capitalism and the main thesis of that book about capitalism is that the enemy or the antithesis of capitalism is not communism, it's feudalism. And their theory is that what capitalism goes against is not communism as much as it is feudalism, which is a mode of organizing whereby capital and labor, which are the 2 things that you need to recombine to create value, were attached to land ownership, which was part of a feudal system versus bureaucrat, the capitalist bureaucracy, which is concerned with efficiency and rationality. So in a feudal system, you couldn't just take capital and labor and just move it around and recombine it because it was basically stuck to a plot of land. When in the feudal times, in the medieval times, people would sell land, the labor was attached to the land and you would buy not just the land, but labor, serfs or slaves at times. And that the labor was basically not something you could move around, right? And capitalism, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is that moment in time where the norms, the social norms, the political norms that keep labor and capital glued to a piece of land are broken, and now labor and capital can move freely around, including beyond state borders, and they can be recombined. And that is the birth of capitalism according to them. And it basically feeds upon the destruction of the feudal system. And the way it happens is by having the emergence of sovereign states, that emerge against religious authorities, against city-states, against the aristocracy, and create this universal jurisdiction whereby they say, now this territory is our sovereign territory and we get full authority to create norms that will apply equally to everyone. So where we used to have 12 different standards for measuring distances, now We will all use the metric system. Where we used to have 112 different times depending on the town where you live, now there will be only one time and the sovereign will decide that time. Where we used to have multiple coins and currency systems depending on the town where you come from, now we will only use one currency and it will be printed by a central bank that depends on the sovereign. And now that we have this kind of homogeneous sovereign territory that is created, we can take capital, labor anywhere and we can move it around. The standards are there, they're consistent. And so you can start moving things around, recombining it in creative ways, and you can create value in ways that we couldn't before. And when you see the growth rate that starts to be, you know, pumping up in capitalist societies, when that happens, that you really see the contrast with feudalism that where there was very little opportunity for creatively combining capital and labor.
