“what matters is not ideology, not even the "economico-ideological" distinction or opposition, but the *organisation of power*.” Deleuze, in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium

“One finds the old trick being played everywhere again and again: a big ideological debate in the general assembly and questions of organization reserved for special commissions. These questions appear secondary, determinded by political options. While on the contrary, the real problems are those of organization, never specified or rationalized, but projected afterwards in ideological terms.” Guattari, in Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium

“a simple dilemma: either one finds a new type of structure that finally moves toward the fusion of collective desire and revolutionary organization: or one continues on the present path and, going from repression to repression, heads for a new fascism” Guattari, ibid.

“we cannot be content with these analogies and affinities; we must also try to construct a social practice, to construct new modes of intervention, this time no longer in molecular, but molar relationships, in political and social power relations, in order to avoid watching the systematic, recurring defeat that we knew during the '70s, particularly in Italy with the enormous rise of repression linked to an event, in itself repressive, which was the rise of terrorism. Through its methods, its violence, and its dogmatism, terrorism gives aid to the State repression which it is fighting. There is a sort of complicity, there again transversal. So, in this case, we are no longer only on the theoretical plane, but on the plane of experimentation, of new forms of interactions, of movement construction that respects the diversity, the sensitivities, the particularities of interventions, and that is nonetheless capable of constituting antagonistic machines of struggle to intervene in power relations.” Guattari, in Pragmatic/Machinic .

From Dan Smith’s paper: Guattari-

“Why have revolutions gone badly? Because, until now, there has not existed within the revolutionary field a social machine that did not produce something else—namely, an embryonic State apparatus, or a party apparatus, which is the very institution of repression. Until now, revolutionary parties have constituted themselves as synthesizers of interests, rather than functioning as analyzers of mass and individual desires. The question of revolution has to be pushed to the level of desire: if it is desire that organizes power, is desire capable of organizing a social machine that does not reproduce a State apparatus? It is not enough simply to say that escape, resistance, and deterritorialization is primary in any social system. What is necessary is an organization of power that is capable of organizing and uniting these modes of escape without reproducing a State apparatus. This is why, for Deleuze, it is the concept of the war-machine that poses the true problem of revolution: “How can a war machine account for all the escapes that happen in the present system without crushing them, dismantling them, and without reproducing a state apparatus?”

[from the discussion following “Five Propositions on Psychoanalysis,” in Desert Islands, pp. 279-280: “Today, we’re looking for the new mode of unification in which, for example, the schizophrenic discourse, the intoxicated discourse, the perverted discourse, the homosexual discourse, all the marginal discourses can subsist, so that all these escapes and discourses can graft themselves onto a war-machine that won’t reproduce a State or Party apparatus.”] [in Smith, p19]

D&G gesture toward “a war machine that does not necessary have war as its object, but it led to war only when it encounters a State apparatus that attempts to appropriate it […]the war-machine, which has its own objects, its own space, its own composition” [smith, p20]

“the analysis of the war machine as an organization of power […] we need to recover this idea of the war machine in our thinking of resistance—but that, of course, is a topic for another paper” [smith, p20]

[Two Concepts of Resistance: Foucault and Deleuze, Daniel W. Smith, presented at the SEP conference in August 2004]