More than ever before, the global economy is dangerously reliant on the acceleration in bank credit flows, driven almost entirely by massive U.S. borrowing tied to artificial intelligence expansion, which now effectively holds both the stock market and the real economy hostage. This credit surge generates an increasingly fragile setup where any sudden halt in AI-related lending would reverse the global credit impulse and trigger a deep and widespread recession, especially as excess liquidity indicators have just turned negative for the first time since 2021 – signalling tighter conditions ahead that may force central banks back toward quantitative easing.

This is not a temporary glitch but the latest expression of capitalism’s axiomatic logic – a system that, as Deleuze and Guattari argued back in the 1970s, survives by perpetually converting its internal contradictions into external problems to be managed through new financial patches, of which the current AI-driven credit boom is the most recent and precarious example.

An Encounter That Could Have Been Otherwise

In Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari offer a radical re-reading of capitalism. They argue that the system is not driven by a dialectical logic but by what they call an axiomatic: an open, flexible set of abstract principles that organizes social life by managing the conjunction of two primary decoded flows: abstract labour (the dispossessed worker) and money-capital.

The origin of this system is not a necessary historical law but an aleatory encounter (“the only universal history is the history of contingency”, they muse in Anti-Oedipus). Following Balibar and Althusser’s work in the late 1960s, Deleuze and Guattari insist on a crucial point: that the historical meeting of “free labour” and “money-capital” was purely contingent – a chance crystallisation that could have been otherwise (which opens history to its veritable abyss). From this “materialism of the encounter”, the capitalist axiomatic emerges out of feudalism and proceeds to subordinate all social relations to its imperatives.

Value, in this framework, is no longer tied solely to human labour, as in the original Marxian account (only commodity-producing human labour creates surplus value for the capitalist). Instead, capitalism increasingly captures and organises productive capacities that exceed the factory: scientific knowledge, technical systems, communication, social cooperation, and information flows all become moments within what Deleuze and Guattari call the “capitalist assemblage”. In contemporary capitalism, you are no longer just a worker outside a machine; you are a component inside the machine. From a Marxian perspective, these developments would be understood less as the production of a new source of value than as the expanding capture and realisation of value generated through increasingly social forms of labour.

What is particularly noteworthy in their critique is the claim that capitalism’s own internal limit – whose classical Marxian expression is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall – is not treated as an insurmountable contradiction but as a problem to be managed by “adding one more axiom.” Rather than resolving crises, capitalism continually modifies the rules governing its own operation: new financial mechanisms, state interventions, debt securitisation, emergency powers, and regulatory innovations are introduced to keep decoded flows in circulation. This is precisely where contemporary capitalism appears to have arrived: less a stable economic order than a permanent regime of crisis management and crisis deployment. Although Deleuze and Guattari never formulate the argument in these terms, one implication of their analysis is that financialisation functions as an additional axiom that defers, redistributes, and partially offsets the effects of capitalism’s internal limit, thereby extending the resilience of the capitalist axiomatic. An axiom, in this sense, functions rather like a software patch: it enables the system to continue operating by modifying its own rules without ever resolving the contradiction that necessitated the modification in the first place.

Internal and External Limits

Deleuze and Guattari draw on a key distinction between the internal limit and the external limit of the capitalist mode of production. The interpretation of this distinction is central to their understanding of how the system reproduces itself.

• The internal limit is the barrier immanentto the system. For Marx, this is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall – the point at which the organic composition of capital (machinery relative to labour) reaches a threshold where surplus value can no longer be extracted at a sufficient rate. Today, following Robert Kurz and the Wertkritik tradition, I would argue that the fall in the rate of profit is best understood as an increasingly hard-to-offset tendency, one that is more difficult to stabilise through the traditional countervailing tendencies of capital identified by Marx (increased labour exploitation, wage depression, cheapening of constant capital, expansion of the relative surplus population, foreign trade development, and the growth of stock capital). For Kurz, the automation of production, starting from the Third Industrial Revolution in the 1970s, progressively and irremediably erodes the labour substance on which value production depends, turning a tendential into an absolute fall in the rate of profit. Deleuze and Guattari recognise this as the point at which the capitalist axiomatic continually approaches its own limit. Yet rather than allowing this limit to become terminal, the axiomatic continually displaces it through new mechanisms of regulation, control, and financial expansion. As technology advances and labour becomes increasingly “adjacent” to production, the traditional basis of valorisation begins to erode, forcing capital to seek profitability through increasingly indirect mechanisms – financial expansion, intellectual property, rent extraction, debt, and the capture of social cooperation – even though, in the Marxian sense, value itself remains dependent upon labour. If the internal limit is the crisis of the system’s own logic, the axiomatic character of capital means that the latter finds a way to compensate for its loss of labour substance and continue reproducing itself.
• The external limit, by contrast, is a barrier that comes from outsidethe system; something that, in principle, capital cannot absorb or integrate. Pre-capitalist societies had external limits: the earth, tradition, the sacred, the despotic state. For Deleuze and Guattari, however, capitalism has no external limit in this sense. It is a system of universal decoding that dissolves all external barriers, deterritorialising everything in its path. The genius of capitalism, for them, is that it constantly transforms its internal limit into an external one – it projects its own limit outward, converting it into obstacles to be overcome rather than symptoms of its own exhaustion. Thus, the falling rate of profit becomes a problem of “labour market flexibility” or “regulatory burden”: external factors to be managed, rather than the system’s own internal undoing.

This is why the axiomatic dimension is crucial. The capitalist system is “always ready to add one more axiom” to restore its functioning. Each crisis is met with a new axiom: a new financial instrument, a new state intervention, a new mode of control, a new state of emergency. The system thus appears to have no inherent limit because it can perpetually push its contradictions outward, reterritorialising them as new problems to be solved within the existing framework. The same logic applies to political opposition itself. Radical demands are not simply repressed; they are selectively absorbed, commodified, and reintegrated into new circuits of accumulation. What initially appears as an external challenge becomes another internal variable to be managed.

Read in this way, Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the capitalist axiomatic acquires a renewed historical significance. Their theory does not by itself explain the transformation of capitalism since the 1970s, nor do they develop a critique of the erosion of labour as the substance of value in the manner later proposed by Robert Kurz. Yet their concept of the axiomatic offers an extraordinarily powerful way of understanding how capitalism has responded to precisely this historical predicament. Financialisation, debt expansion, and increasingly sophisticated forms of state intervention can be understood as successive axioms through which capital compensates for the growing difficulty of extracting surplus value from productive labour. Read through the lens of Wertkritik, Deleuze and Guattari become not an alternative to Marx, but an account of the adaptive mechanisms through which capitalism prolongs its own reproduction despite the progressive erosion of its value-producing foundation.

Banking and the Dissimulation of Money

At the heart of this axiomatic is Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of money, which in their view has a strict, qualitative duality. They argue that the two forms of money are fundamentally incommensurable:

• Finance Money / Credit Money: This is a flow of pure, creative power. It is money created ex nihilo(as they explicitly put it) by banks, a flow of financing that represents a “prospective force” not immediately realisable. It is money as absolute power, the capacity to posit value without prior labour; to create purchasing capacity independently of prior production.
• Wage Money / Payment Money: This is a flow of impotence. It is the money allocated to factors of production (wages) and used for everyday consumption. It is segmented, quantifiable, and subordinated to the first flow. It represents the “absolute impotence” of the wage earner.

The crucial element of this system is the objective “dissimulation” it carries out unbeknownst to its participants. This is the process by which the fundamental incommensurability of these two money flows is hidden, making them appear equivalent and convertible. The wage earner is invited to believe they can access the power of finance money through their labour – that by working hard and saving, they can participate in the creative power of capital. This illusion is essential for the functioning of capitalism; it secures the desire of the most disadvantaged, who invest their psychic and libidinal energy in a system that structurally subordinates them. The key institution governing this dissimulation is the bank (as they argue in Anti-Oedipus by drawing heavily on economists like Suzanne de Brunhoff and Bernard Schmitt).

Banks are the “power centres” that orchestrate the conversion between credit money and payment money: “what banks govern is the conversion of the credit money that has been created into segmentary payment-money that is appropriated, in other words, coinage or State money for the purchase of goods that are themselves segmented.” The bank is not a neutral intermediary but the active agent of the system’s fundamental illusion – the site where the power of finance is made to appear accessible to the impotence of labour. In Anti-Oedipus, they explicitly point out the irony of the banking structure: the working class is kept on a tight leash by wages, while the banking system generates infinite, abstract debt, and credit lines to keep capital expanding. (Where Anti-Oedipus analyses banking primarily as an economic mechanism within the capitalist axiomatic, A Thousand Plateaus situates financial networks within a broader assemblage of state power, communication, logistics, and control.)

Read through the lens of Wertkritik, this distinction between finance money and payment money acquires renewed significance. As productive labour becomes a progressively weaker source of valorisation, capitalism becomes increasingly dependent upon the autonomous expansion of credit, debt, and fictitious capital. Banking therefore ceases to be merely one institution among others and becomes the central mechanism through which the capitalist axiomatic postpones its own internal limit. Finance does not abolish the contradiction identified by Marx; it continually redistributes it across time and society.

Lines of Flight and the System’s Blind Spot

Crucially, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the axiomatic can never totalise the social field. Every apparatus of capture necessarily produces residues, excesses, and new lines of flight (ligne de fuite) that exceed its own organisation. Capitalism constantly deterritorialises – breaking down old hierarchies, traditions, and identities – but it simultaneously reterritorialises, rebuilding new forms of control (the nuclear family, the consumerist state, the debt economy, the state of exception). This double movement means that the system remains structurally open, incomplete.

And this incompleteness, or ontological openness, grounds what might be called Deleuze and Guattari’s “strategic optimism”. Rather than seeking to restore older forms of social organisation, they ask how processes of decoding might be carried beyond the point at which they can be reterritorialised by capital. This brings us to the vexed question of accelerationism. Deleuze and Guattari’s famous line from Anti-Oedipus – “Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to ‘accelerate the process’, as Nietzsche put it” – has been seized upon by thinkers like Nick Land as a call to turbocharge capitalism itself: to unleash financial flows, technology, and market forces until the system collapses under its own weight.

However, a careful reading reveals that Deleuze and Guattari were not advocating for an intensification of capitalist forces as a whole. Instead, they called for an intensification of only the decoding and deterritorialising aspects of capital – the forces that break down old hierarchies, traditions, and identities. The key point is that this must happen, in their view, to the detriment of capitalism’s other, equally vital function: its constant reactionary practice of recoding and reterritorialising (rebuilding new hierarchies to channel and control social flows).

Their “acceleration” is thus a strategic intervention, not a naïve faith in capital itself. They were acutely aware of the dangers involved: every line of flight has a dark twin, a “paranoiac counterescape” that can lead to fascism, microfascism, and reactionary politics. The line of flight is not automatically good; it is a site of intense struggle. The goal was never to simply “become schizophrenic,” but to analyse and connect the molecular flows of desire to create a new, collective possibility. Their accelerationism, if we must call it that, is a diagnostic rather than a prescriptive one: a recognition – at the heart of Marx too – that capitalism’s own dynamic produces the conditions for its overthrow, but that these conditions must be actively seized and redirected.

Yet this also reveals the limit of Deleuze and Guattari’s account. They demonstrate brilliantly that capitalism never succeeds in fully capturing the social field, and their concept of the line of flight remains one of the most powerful ways of thinking about political novelty. But why must capture fail? Their answer ultimately rests on an ontology of desire and becoming: life itself continually exceeds every apparatus that seeks to organise it. What remains insufficiently explained is why every attempt at totalisation is structurally doomed from the outset. If capitalism’s incompleteness is not simply a consequence of the vitality of desire but of a constitutive impossibility internal to every symbolic order, then a different theoretical framework becomes necessary. It is here that Lacan and Hegel enter the picture.

The Supplement: the Subject of the Unconscious

While Deleuze and Guattari correctly identify the axiomatic’s inability to totalise the field, they do not provide a fully structural account of why this is so. I argue that the axiomatic cannot totalise the field because the field is constituted by the subject of the unconscious (Lacan). The subject is not a substance or a unified agent but a gap in the symbolic order – a lack that belongs in the Real of jouissance (unconscious modes of enjoyment). Viewed from this angle, then, the system’s incompleteness is not an ontological property of flows but a structural effect of the subject’s irreducible division. Every attempt to axiomatize, to totalise, is foiled by the subject’s constitutive blind spot. The subject is what escapes capture while also constantly validating it.

This insight transforms Deleuze and Guattari’s vitalist optimism into a dialectical wager. If the axiomatic cannot close because of the subject’s unconscious, then the subject is not merely a victim of the deterministic system but is the very mark of the system’s constitutive incompleteness, and therefore the point at which it becomes vulnerable. The subject can exploit this gap through the act of retroactive naming – a Hegelian Setzung der Voraussetzungen (the positing of presuppositions).

The difference is therefore not over whether capitalism can totalise the social field – we agree that it cannot – but over why this impossibility exists. For Deleuze and Guattari, every apparatus of capture necessarily leaves behind a surplus because reality itself is characterised by becoming, multiplicity, and productive desire. My claim is different. The impossibility of totalisation is not primarily ontological but structural. Every symbolic order necessarily fails because it is constituted around the irreducible gap of the subject. What escapes capitalism is therefore not simply the excess of life over its capture, but the constitutive impossibility that inhabits every order of meaning from within. It is the subject’s very division that prevents the system from closing. This moves us from a vitalist hope to a political strategy. The subject is not just over-determined by the system; it is the system’s inherent rupture. And it is from this position that the most powerful act becomes possible: naming the system unworkable, and thereby making it so.

These are not two competing explanations operating at the same level. The economic contradiction explains why capitalism repeatedly enters crisis: why debt expands, why financialisation proliferates, and why ever more elaborate and manipulative mechanisms are required to sustain accumulation. The subjective contradiction explains why no crisis-management (or crisis-deployment) strategy can ever finally close the system. The first concerns the reproduction of capital; the second concerns the impossibility of totalisation. They are two sides of the same coin. Capitalism is driven towards crisis by its own economic logic, yet every attempt to resolve that crisis encounters the constitutive gap introduced by the subject. The system is therefore both economically unstable and structurally incomplete.

The Unworkable and the Act of Naming

Contemporary capitalism has become a hyper-financialised system running on debt created out of thin air that can never be repaid in full, while depending on the continuous expansion of future claims on surplus-value. This is not a malfunction but the system’s most advanced expression: a financialised economy where labour remains the source of value in Marxian terms, yet finance increasingly dominates the circulation, anticipation, and command of value claims, and the axiomatic is cannibalising itself. The internal limit – the fall of the rate of profit – is “managed” through the financial axiom of debt creation and credit circulation, but this management has only intensified the contradiction rather than overcoming it. The system is now unworkable: it cannot sustain itself without perpetual crisis and emergency deployment, and it cannot escape crisis without increasingly authoritarian measures.

We are therefore witnessing not simply another cyclical crisis but the exhaustion of a historically specific form of social reproduction. In Hegelian terms, this is the moment when “a form of life has grown old”, as he put it at the end of the Preface of the Philosophy of Right: not the end of history, but the point at which an existing order can no longer reproduce itself without increasingly contradicting its own principles. The task, then, is to name this unworkability. To say: this is what the aleatory encounter has become; this is what capitalism retroactively reveals itself to have been all along; this is the abyss from which capitalism itself emerged. Naming here is not a description but a performative act – a retroactive positing of new presuppositions. It opens a space for a future that cannot yet be fully known but can be glimpsed in fragments.

Contemporary capitalism survives not because it has solved its contradictions but because it has become extraordinarily effective at managing them. Debt, financial engineering, emergency interventions, and increasingly sophisticated systems of control do not overcome the system’s internal limit; they defer its consequences. What appears as stability is the continuous administration of instability. The result is a social order that asks individuals to adapt endlessly to conditions that are themselves becoming increasingly unsustainable.

The political challenge, then, is not simply to denounce capitalism’s injustices but to identify and articulate its growing unworkability. This means refusing the injunction that every crisis is merely a technical problem awaiting a technical solution. Housing shortages, debt dependence, stagnant wages, collapsing public services, and pervasive insecurity are not isolated failures. They are symptoms of a social order whose mechanisms of reproduction are becoming increasingly detached from the conditions of collective life.

To name this situation is already a political act. Not because words magically transform reality, but because every social order depends upon the naming of itself, through which it acquires symbolic consistency. Capitalism persists in part because its crises are presented as temporary disruptions within an otherwise rational system. The moment those crises are recognised as expressions of the system itself, a different horizon becomes visible. New forms of cooperation, institutions, habits, and collective experimentation cease to appear utopian and begin to appear historically necessary.

This is where Deleuze and Guattari’s lines of flight and the Lacanian-Hegelian notion of the act converge. A line of flight is not an individual escape from society but the collective emergence of practices, modes of enjoyment, and ways of living that cease to reproduce the logic of the existing order. The act is the moment when what previously appeared impossible becomes conceivable and therefore politically available. The future cannot be predicted in advance. It can only be constructed through collective experiments that begin from a simple proposition: that the present order is neither natural nor necessary, but the contingent result of a historical encounter that can, under new conditions, be superseded by another.

The post Marginalia on a Burning System: Rereading Deleuze and Guattari in the Age of Financial Axiomatics appeared first on The Philosophical Salon.

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