I am now calling my political-economic approach Libertine Mercantilism to distinguish it from Capitalism and old statist mercantilism. Cap-italism is as the root of the word refers – head or cap – an artificially propped up, top-down, hierarchical co-opting of the original form of market exchange developed by artisan entrepreneurs and collectives to escape the feudal monarchy. Kevin Carson’s book The Homebrew Industrial Revolution details the history of this development. And Emmet Grogran’s Ringolevio is a manual, casebook, memoir and manifesto for the method.

This is as they say a micropolitics. And it was my encounter with Guattari that made me decisively choose this path back in the 80s after being disappointed by the limitations of both institutions and institutional revolt. It is sad to me that so few have taken up this approach. It is as if people needed to continue to play out the psychodynamic baggage of Parent and Child, approval and revolt: deconstruction rather than construction. The resistance that remains to mediated techno-capitalism is empty with an antiquated approach. But those who did learn from the 60s to Construct are often easily co-opted by subtle means back into the bourgeoise comfort of pseudo-mastery/pseudo-slavery. Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia remains the prescient manual of how this happens and is the addendum to Kojeve’s lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Kojeve details the failure of Hegel to witness the end of history and the perpetual deferral of post-historical man. Hegel’s prescription for the end remains correct: the bourgeoise revolutionary. Note that I stress this term rather than revolutionary bourgeoise to highlight that it is an internal or psychodynamic revolt, not a class war. Marx misread Hegel because he was a strict atheist materialist who could not grasp the Romantic Spiritual in Hegel and the undivided nature of Geist or Psyche. By joining Freud and Marx – and a thousand other plateaus – Deleuze and Guattari reconstruct a mode of “desiring production” in which the fluidity of Will, Drive, Spirit is sublimated into the construction of objects and practices of Desire, Love and Faith.

The game goes on. We waver between dark nihilism, tragic melancholy, powerful battle-cry, and eruption of joy..