Neoliberalism as war machine

and it’s affinities with the neofascist war machine

Abstract

Deleuze & Guattari claim that there is a de juris independence between the war machine and the State apparatus, and that the encounter between these forms is an event with contingent consequences, which may lead to the destruction of the State by the war machine, the capture of the war machine by the State or, the case that interests us, the appropriation of the State by the war machine. If Deleuze & Guattari characterized this last possibility as the fascist case, our hypothesis is to investigate whether neoliberalism, in its anti-State nature, should be considered, in its own way, a war machine, which takes over the State and puts it at the service of its non-state, de jure, ends. It is not by chance, moreover, that there will be affinities between the functioning of the neoliberal war machine and the fascist war machine, indicating the contemporary relationship between neoliberalism and neofascism, which constitutes a secondary aspect of our investigation. Our text, therefore, with a theoretical basis in the work of Deleuze & Guattari and tanking assistance in the contemporary research on neoliberalism, places the hypothesis of neoliberalism as a war machine - therefore, essentially anti-State, but which contingently takes the State and submits it, absolutely diminishing the social axioms, going in the direction of what Deleuze & Guattari called, following Virilio, “anarcho-capitalist totalitarianism”, and which, simultaneously, intensifies the tendency of a constitutive (self-)destruction of the State, called the suicidal State, another echo of the fascist enterprise.

Key words: Neoliberalism; War machine; Neo fascism; Axiomatic; State.