Fascism in Deleuze and Guattari

Below is an excerpt from one of my favorite chapters in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the chapter entitled "1933: Micropolitics and Segementarity."  Even though I find Deleuze and Guattari's work in these volumes occasionally naive or overly confident, I cannot overstate how helpful their work has been in providing tools and a framework for thinking about our socio-political context.  In the excerpt below, D&G address the difference between totalitarian States and fascism: the former imposing order and oppression from above through force (maybe through legislative power, police action, or military regimes), the latter produces repression and order on the "molecular" levels of family, neighborhoods, schools, etc.  D&G remind us that it's easy to protest against the State (and also against corporations), but it's more difficult to recognize that we tend to reaffirm the same repressive power of the State in our intimate relationships, communities, our languages, our habits, our casual interactions and the infinitesimal negotiations of power that accompany them--in our micropolitics.  Unlike totalitarianism which oppresses from without and from above, fascism is a cancer that permeates down in our daily and mundane lives.  Totalitarian forces act from without, but fascism infects the veins and crevices of the daily lives of the people, thereby laying the foundation for death-oriented powers to find a joyful welcome among the masses.  Fascism, in shaping the micro-forces and micro-machines which produce desire (yes, desire is socially produced), gives rise to desires which desire nothing else but their own repression.  I find in this a great reminder that the political (and therefore also acts of political resistance) are not to be found merely in large aggregate bodies (courts, executive branches, voting booths, etc), but in our local communities and daily relationships--with our neighborhoods, our coworkers, our families, etc.

"The concept of the totalitarian State applies only at the macropolitical level, to a rigid segementarity and a particular mode of totalization and centralization.  But fascism is inseparable from a proliferation of molecular focuses in interaction, which skip form point to point, before beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State...

...What makes fascism dangerous is its molecular or micropolitical power, for it is a mass movement: a cancerous body rather than a totalitarian organism.  American film has often depicted these molecular focal points; band, gang, sect, family, town, neighborhood, vehicle fascisms spare no one.  Only microfascism provides an answer to the global question: Why does desire desire its own repression, how can it desire its own repression?  The masses certainly do not passively submit to power; nor do they "want" to be repressed, in a kind of masochistic hysteria; nor are they tricked by an ideological lure.  Desire is never separable from complex assemblages that necessarily tie into molecular levels, from microformations already shaping postures, attitudes, perceptions, expectations, semiotic systems, etc.  Desire is never an undifferentiated instinctual energy, but itself results from a highly developed, engineered setup rich in interactions: a whole supple segementarity that processes molecular energies and potentially gives desire a fascist determination.  Leftist organizations will not be the last to secrete microfascisms.  It's too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective."

-Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 214-15.