richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

... and Now 139deployed, reminding us of the way in which the nomad appears inan archetypal nightmare of European civilization—galloping in offthe steppes, sweeping away everything that matters: houses, walls,fields, institutions, lives. That the East has fared no better is obviousin China’s monument to state insecurity, the Great Wall. Thus wemight say that what the state form tries to do, the war machine triesto undo. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the best way toavoid the formation of a state is through war—an observation thatmakes sociological sense when we remember Max Weber’s famousdictum that the state is that entity which seeks a monopoly on theuse of force in a given territory. Break that monopoly and you breakthe state, or at least that particular state.But this relation of exteriority to the war machine does not exhaustthe possibilities of the state form. In keeping with their tendencyfirst to posit, then to split ‘essences’, Deleuze and Guattari are carefulto show how these two modes exist in relation to one another. Thestate not only can, but must capture a war machine for itself, itmust have its own warriors, which it turns into soldiers. Workingfor a particular state, a ‘tamed’ war machine captures subjects andobjects and destroys other states, so that its components becomeavailable for integration. Once again, examples from current worldaffairs are easy to find. The soldiers sent by the western powersto Afghanistan and Iraq are carrying out the task of suppressing/destroying local war machines (‘warlords’/’tribal chieftains’) andforms of community (‘Islam’) that resist integration into the globalcapitalist system on the terms preferred by the western powers.Without the realizable threat of violent death (that is, without acaptive war machine), the United States would not be able to bring‘peace’ to anyone, and thus would not be able to fulfil its role as acentral node of state/capitalist power in the neoliberal world order.Thus a paradox: the war machine and the state form are always atodds and always intermixing: ‘it is not in terms of independence, butof coexistence and competition in a perpetual field of interaction,that we must conceive of exteriority and interiority, war machinesof metamorphosis and State apparatuses of identity, bands andkingdoms, megamachines and empires’ (360–1).Let us think, once again, about Kropotkin’s thesis in Mutual Aid.He argues that ‘the States, when they were called later into existence,simply took possession, in the interest of the minorities, of all thejudicial, economical, and administrative functions which the villagecommunity already had exercised in the interest of all’ (1989/1902: