Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

In sharp contrast, Guattari focused his attention on the planetary

integration of capitalism:

The great crisis of this end of millennium appears to be announced

as the conjunction of all possible convulsions. There would be no

end in enumerating the fields that are adrift or that are evolving

in catastrophic ways (energy, employment, ecology, demography,

international relations ...). Without any doubt, there is no reason to

expect a nuclear holocaust, but perhaps we are now already engaged

in a kind of new Hundred Years War ... (Piano sul pianeta, 91)

These are the opening words in the conclusion of a little book that was

first produced through a militant network in Paris, and was published

in Italy in 1982 with the title Piano sul pianeta. Capitale mondiale inte-

grato e globalizzazione, and republished by Ombre corte in 1997.^3

The concept of integrated world capitalism at that time had a quasi-

scandalous ring to it. At the very moment that the fracture, the opposi-

tion, and the threat of war seemed the most acute, Guattari focused his

attention on a process that today is easy to recognize and understand,

but that then seemed counter-intuitive: the process of globalization, of

the integration of markets and circuits of production. Many current

discussions about globalization were anticipated by this small book,

starting with the prediction of a crisis in the social-authoritarian field.

*******

A truly progressive workers’ perspective never deemed real socialism

to be an alternative to capitalism. The entire experience of the social-

authoritarian regime was based on substantial acceptance of the hier-

archical rules of capitalist economic theory, and the social basis of

this regime was the conservative resistance of feudal, military and ideo-

logical bureaucracies to the expansive and progressive dynamic of global

capital.

Both in the Soviet and in the Chinese empires the retrograde defence

of a system of privileges has been valorized for decades, rather than the

experimentation with forms of collective property. After the decline

and collapse of these tyrannical regimes, it is becoming evident today

that their function was essentially conservative and bureaucratic in

nature.

The end of this authoritarian model freed up enormous productive

and market potentialities, ushering in an extended phase of instability,

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