In Anti-Oedipus, Delueze wrote
“[T]he fundamental problem of political philosophy is
that it is stupid shit. Still, sycophants of a regime or propagandists for a bunch of paranoid nutjobs or virtue signalling cretins may be able to make a modest living writing that shite. But they face the same problem as alchemists or astrologers or assholes on Twitter.
still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly,
he saw nothing clearly. Politics was about how not to get conquered. This meant focusing on collective action problems involving the acquisition of money and military might. The Wars of Religion weren't won by theologians. They were won by Princes with fat purses. True, a particular Prince might be quite liberal and tolerant of other sects, but his successor might not be. Holland and England were relatively tolerant of Jews but they were oppressive to Catholicism and certain 'Dissenting' Protestant sects.
and that Wilhelm Reich
who was as crazy as a bed-bug.
rediscovered: ‘Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?’
Sometimes it is safer to be a slave. Salvation is all very well but if it involves dying now rather than later on, few are keen on it.
How can people possibly reach the point of shouting: ‘More taxes! Less bread!’?
If the alternative is being conquered and enslaved by Hitler, it is the rational thing to do- unless, obviously, you are a cheese-eating surrender monkey.
As Reich remarks, the astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike:
If you steal all the time, you will soon get a knife in the guts. This is because some people object very strongly to losing their possessions. If you are on strike all the time, you never get paid. You are simply unemployed.
after centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate being humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and slavery not only for others but for themselves?
If the alternative is starving to death, the answer is obvious. People will put up with what others call 'humiliation' or even 'slavery' so their kids or grandkids have better life-chances.
Reich is at his profoundest as a thinker when he refuses to accept ignorance or illusion on the part of the masses as an explanation of fascism,
The truth is Fascism was better than Communism more particularly in countries where the Liberals just kept shitting the bed.
and demands an explanation that will take their desires into account, an explanation formulated in terms of desire: no, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for.”
This is easily done. People choose the lesser of two evils. What's more, their choices are not on the basis of the conatus of physical bodies, but on the genetic level in a manner explained by the Price equation or even Dawkins' 'extended phenotype'. Deleuze could have read up on this so as to up date Spinoza. Instead he read and wrote stupid, ignorant, shit.
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