This is an untimely though not unwelcome book. It is not a scholarly study of Gilles Deleuze's relation to Marx or his politics but, rather, an attempt to disinter some of the layers of Marxist thought that inform Deleuze and Felix Guattari's magisterial contribution to political philosophy, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. It is sometimes forgotten that both of these volumes bore the subtitle Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and Nicholas Thoburn performs a useful task in drawing attention to the nature and the detail of the analysis of capitalism on which Deleuze and Guattari rely. In doing so, he also seeks to contribute to a renewed Deleuze-Marx resonance in these postmodern times. In some respects, this book is a polemic against popular currents within post-Marxist political thought, chiefly Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's “neo-Gramscian Post-Marxism” and certain aspects of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire. In addition to its useful setting out of key elements of Deleuze and Guattari's Marxism, this book serves as an introduction to the 1970s Italian Marxism of operaismo and autonomia as interpreted through Deleuzian concepts. “Operaismo” (“workerism”) refers to the current of Italian Marxist thought and politics that emerged in the 1960s and that became known as “Autonomia” (Autonomy) in the 1970s. Its distinguishing features included an understanding of the current stage of capitalist development as one characterized above all by the real subsumption of labor to capital, and a corresponding political strategy of the assertion of working-class autonomy by a variety of forms of direct action.

Thoburn begins with an account of Deleuze's political orientation, at once anticapitalist and in favor of the invention—as Deleuze and Guattari write in What is Philosophy?—of new earths and new peoples. His focus is the concept of minority, understood not as a status but as a process of deviation from or deterritorialization of the majority. In Chapter 2, somewhat surprisingly in view of the productivist focus of later chapters, he takes Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of Kafka's “minor literature” as the primary source for his account of minor politics. Nevertheless, this does produce some useful formulae that are repeated throughout the later discussion of Marx's proletariat and the forms of resistance to capital: first, that minor politics is not the assertion of an established political identity but, rather, the assertion that “the people are missing”; second, that it begins not in the space of “subjective plenitude and autonomy” but in the “cramped space” typically occupied by oppressed and subaltern peoples (p. 18). In addition to illustrating Deleuze and Guattari's politics by reference to literary figures including Jean Genet, Thoburn surveys Marx's own mode of literary creation, Guattari's analysis of groups, and Deleuze's criticisms of Michel Foucault's politics of “resistance.”

Chapter 3 turns to Marxian concepts of class and argues for a Deleuzian understanding of the proletariat as an open-ended process of engagement with capitalist social relations. Thoburn rejects the postmodern championing of the lumpenproletariat as a site of difference, arguing that it should be understood as a mode of composition oriented toward identity. He follows Etienne Balibar in suggesting that it is rather the “unnamable” proletariat that seeks to overcome identity and deterritorialize the capitalist socius. Understood in this Deleuzian manner, the proletarian is associated with the refusal of work, a theme that Thoburn elaborates in the following chapters with reference to operaismo and autonomia.

Chapter 4 provides an extended account of the methodological approach and concerns of these theoretical tendencies, including their reliance upon Marx's thesis of the real subsumption of labor by capital, and the importance attached to the Grundrisse and Marx's “Fragment on Machines.” Thoburn traces the influence of this body of work on Hardt and Negri's Empire, but also points to the different elaboration of these themes in Deleuze and Guattari's account of capitalism. He effects a surprising reversal of perspective by criticizing Hardt and Negri's abandonment of Marx's and Deleuze's understanding of the manner in which regimes of control remain immanent to productive forces and their apparent discovery of an emerging communist subject. He argues that contrary to “Hardt and Negri's proposition that Empire has overcome the last vestiges of metaphysical thinking in Deleuze, Guattari and Foucault…Deleuze offers a complex and productive conception of contemporary capital, control and production, and one that actually resonates more with conceptual constellation of operaismo and Marx than it does with Negri's tendencies to present an emerging autonomy-in-production” (p. 102).

Chapter 5 considers the political movements and forms of class composition associated with operaismo and autonomia, including the politics of autovalorization, the refusal of work, the demand for wages for housework, and the techniques of cultural creation associated with emarginati, such as those associated with Radio Alice and the Metropolitan Indians. These are redescribed as movements of minoritarian becoming or lines of flight from the contemporary capitalist socius. Consistent with his earlier Deleuzian account of the proletariat, Thoburn presents the political project embodied in these movements as one that sought to disrupt both the nature of capitalist work and the subjectivity of the worker, the open-ended composition of minorities rather than the composition of a majoritarian political identity.

Chapter 6 summarizes the case for a Deleuzian conception of communist political practice. Thoburn presents an all-too-brief and unconvincing account of Deleuze's apparent hostility to democratic politics. He concludes with comments on the affective dimension of minoritarian politics, namely, the peculiar joy that is associated with the affirmation of life under the most cramped and seemingly impossible conditions. Despite his refusal of a “slightly embarrassing utopianism” (p. 147) it is difficult not to see Deleuze and Guattari as embracing a conception of politics as the art of the impossible.