I've long identified as a Marxist and have admittedly been influenced as much by Marx's gripping rhetorical style as by the clarity of his insights. I think rhetoric is supremely important because we know we're right, but somehow we need to convince the world.

To that end the marriage of affirmative existentialism, post-structuralism, and Marxism created by Deleuze and Guattari (most notably in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Vol 1) has been the most crucial piece recently in the evolution of my own theory.

It's hard to put into few words what this truly insane book is all about. But hopefully it will suffice to say that it, unlike a lot of socialist ideology, tackles human desire head-on and investigates in why the masses may desire their own oppression. It describes the axioms which under pin capital as it exists, and explains how human desire has been inverted much in the same way relations among people are inverted or bewitched through the machinations of commodity fetishism.

Its central tenet is that human desire is trapped, triangulated within reactionary Oedipal formulations, which mirror the political circumstances of their creation. It discusses repressing representations of human desire (and so-called human nature) and how they limit our social and political horizons. In antithesis to the acquisitive orientation of desire, that which fills a lack with subject-object relations, they elaborate a theory of desiring-production, in which we create from fullness rather than emptiness.

It is a beautiful book, and its bizarre language and imagery did much to help me sink my teeth into the significance of alienation, property, commodity fetishism, and the capitalist mode of representation. It is a theory of capitalism, of desire, of the unconscious, and of history. It's hilarious. It's awesome. It's radical. It will make you want to be French and smoke cigarettes.

"This socius may be the body of the earth, that of the tyrant, or capital. This is the body that Marx is referring to when he says that it is not the product of labor, but rather appears as its natural or divine presupposition. In fact, it does not restrict itself mere ly to opposing productive forces in and of themselves. It falls back on (il se rabat sur) * all production, constituting a surface over which the forces and agents of production are distributed, thereby appropriating for itself all surplus production and arrogating to itself both the whole a nd the parts of the process, which now seem to emanate from it as a quasi cause. Forces and agents come to represent a miraculous form of its own power: they appear to be "miraculated" (miracules) by it. In a word, the socius as a full body forms a surface where all production is recorded, whereupon the entire process appears to emanate from this recording surface. Society con- structs its own delirium by recording the process of production; but it is not a conscious delirium, or rather is a true consciousness of a false movement, a true perception of an apparent objective movement, a true perception of the movement that is produced on the recording surface."

-Anti-Oedipus, page 10