violent transformation, and the fear of aggression and violence. At the
same time, we know well today that the end of social-authoritarian
regimes did not mean in any way the start of the reign of democracy,
as the Reagan apologists had proclaimed. Democracy did not enter in
any way into the end of social-authoritarian regimes which, in the
1990s, acquired characteristics of Nazi-Communistic regimes.
After 1989, with an exception made for marginal cases like Poland
and the Czech Republic, in the Soviet-bloc countries and even more
patently in China, a totalitarian regime was put in place that was even
more ferocious, more corrupt, more arbitrary and more bloodthirsty
than the ones that previously had proudly brandished the hammer-
and-sickle on a red background.
The empire of Evil is succeeded by the empire of even Worse.
But for the West, none of this matters. The only thing that really
matters is the collapse of the feudal-bureaucratic barrier, the military
weakening of the feudal empires of the Orient and thus the opening of
immense markets, and the creation of new, gigantic divisions of pro-
duction in the international system: divisions in which manpower has
minimal costs and social peace is guaranteed by the criminal violence
of the Nazi-Communists in power.*******Precisely when Western intellectuals and an infantilized European public
opinion brought about a form of nervous exhaustion through fear of
nuclear holocaust, Guattari went straight to the point and spoke about
integrated world capitalism.^4
Twenty years after this little book’s publication, Guattarian intuition
proved itself to be the order of the day. We must return to this reason-
ing and develop it.
What differences are there between world-wide markets and global-
ization? The two terms do not define the same thing, or the same
process.
The process of creating a world-wide market is defined by an increas-
ing exchange of goods through different zones of the planet, by an
increasing integration of markets, and consequently by lifestyles that
are linked to consumption. The increasing rates of national outputs of
producer nations are consumed in geographical areas quite distant
from those in which they are produced.
The process of globalization includes an integration of cycles of pro-
duction. Increasing rates of production are the result of a planetaryIntegrated World Capitalism 199780230_221192_04_cha03.pdf 10/3/08 11:32 AM Page 19