Americans Exist at the Pleasure of the State
As of this point in the ongoing coup, the following things are now true:
The sham of a democracy that the US government was until 2025 is over. Donald Trump's "administration" is puppetry. The billionaire class owns them all. The only question is whether the coup is still ongoing.
The corporate fascist state that is solidifying around us day-by-day already has assumed de-facto power over aspects of the lives of citizens and non-citizens alike that are still technically expressly forbidden by the now-obsolete (and otherwise deeply flawed) US Constitution. We should expect that to change--and by that I mean the Constitution.
The media, financial markets, our courts (there never was a justice system so we won't use that term here), intelligence and military agencies, and virtually all other public institutions are being overtly manipulated by the billionaire corporate class vis a vis their poster-child Elon Musk.
The billionaire corporate class is using the evangelical christian nationalist let's-bring-about-the-rapture delusional nightmare otherwise known as Project 2025 to distract and exhaust anyone with a social conscience, to crush hope, to re-affirm the marginalization of anyone who is not white, christian, straight, cisgendered, and obedient.
Your bank account and any / all of your assets may be frozen / seized at any time by the entity that has usurped the sham of democracy that we had left.
Protesting openly is extremely dangerous and please, if you have the balls to do this -- first of all thank you -- but second of all please protect yourself. COINTELPRO never stopped being a thing.
The FBI, DHS, ICE, etc are now literally deporting people with no criminal records and placing them in concentration camps outside of US borders. And they are inventing new people to deport constantly.
I could go on and on and surely will in the coming days (until they come for the Jews and/or people who loudly and openly support the rights of Trans/Queer/Neurodivergent/Palestinian people to exist), but for now I'm late for my disassociation appointment...
All this adds up to this one fact: In 2025, Americans Exist at the Pleasure of the State. If the state decides you should be in prison or dead or broke or homeless or conscripted or kidnapped -- that is what you will be.
Notes: By "Americans" I mean people residing in America--citizens and non-citizens alike. I used links to illustrate my more concise points but I do not vouch for anything about the linked content or publishers of such content other than it supports my points. Yes, some of it is billionaire-owned corporate media. If you think my sources are bad, please come at me with better ones.
... We are all the water through which fascism flows
Power does not emanate from institutions like the State, but is immanent throughout the entire social network, through different discourses and forms of knowledge. For example, rational and moral discourses, which anarchists believed to be innocent and distant from power, and as tools in the struggle against power, are constituted by power relations and are involved in practices of power: "Power and knowledge directly implicate each other." Power, in this sense, is productive rather than repressive. Therefore, it is absurd and impossible to try to build, as classical anarchists thought, a world outside of power. We will never be completely free from power relations. I agree then, with Foucault, when he said: "It seems to me that... one is never outside of power" ... but, watch out, let's see:
Just because one can never be free from power, it doesn't mean one can never be free from domination. Domination must be distinguished from power in the following sense. For Foucault, power relations become relations of domination when the free and unstable flow of power relations is blocked and ends up crystallizing — when they form inequality and hierarchies, and no longer allow the relations to occur on a plane of reciprocity. These relations of domination form the basis of institutions such as the State. The State, according to Foucault, is nothing more than a set of different power relations that have crystallized in this way. This is a radically different way of viewing institutions like the State. While anarchists see power as originating from the State, Foucault sees the State as an emanation of power. The State, in other words, is nothing more than an effect of power relations that have crystallized into relations of domination.
What is the purpose of this distinction between power and domination? Doesn't it bring us back to the original anarchist position that society and our everyday actions, despite being oppressed by power, are ontologically separate from it? In other words, why not simply call domination "power" again, and return to the original, Manichean distinction between social life and power? However, the goal of this distinction is to show that this essential separation is now impossible. Domination — oppressive political institutions like the State — now come from the same world of power. In other words, the strict Manichean separation of society and power is interrupted. Radical politics and indeed anarchism in general cannot remain in this comfortable illusion that we, as political subjects, are in some way not complicit in this regime that oppresses us. According to the Foucauldian definition of power that I have employed, we are all potentially complicit, through our daily actions, in relations of domination. Our daily actions, which inevitably involve power, are unstable and can integrate and generate the relationships that dominate us.
Fascism, in this context, is not just an authoritarian political regime that comes from an external source of power. Rather, fascism can be understood as the crystallization of power into a rigid system of domination that produces inequality, hierarchy, and the suppression of the free flow of power. It emerges when power relations become stabilized and consolidated into oppressive institutions, which actively block the reciprocal, fluid nature of power. In fascist systems, the relationships of power are no longer dynamic but fixed in ways that produce and enforce social structures that benefit certain groups while oppressing others.
Fascism also involves a process where individuals and groups are complicit in these systems of domination, even if they do not consciously support the regime. As Foucault argues, we are all potentially complicit in relations of domination through our everyday actions, whether we are aware of it or not. Fascism, then, doesn't only manifest through the direct coercion of a centralized state, but also through the ways in which power permeates our everyday interactions and societal norms, reinforcing oppressive structures.
In Deleuze's terms, fascism arises when power stops flowing freely and instead becomes captured, rigid, and totalizing. This is the moment when the multiplicity of power relations collapses into a singular, oppressive force. The goal of political resistance, then, is to undo this crystallization, to allow power to flow again freely and prevent its fixation into domination.
Thus, fascism is a dynamic force that does not merely come from the State or from an external enemy but is embedded in the structures and relationships of power that form our society. It requires an active awareness of how these systems operate and how individuals are complicit in them, even through mundane actions. By recognizing this, radical politics can avoid the illusion of being outside of power and instead focus on disrupting these entrenched systems of domination. So... we are all the water through which fascism flows?
From this comes the three adversaries with which Anti-Oedipus (book) is confronted: Three adversaries that do not possess the same strength, that represent different degrees of threat, and that the book combats with different means.
The political ascetics, the sluggish militants, the terrorists of theory, those who would like to preserve the pure order of politics and political discourse. The bureaucrats of the revolution and the officials of Truth.
The lamentable technicians of desire – the psychoanalysts and semioticians – who record every sign and every symptom and wish to reduce the multiple organization of desire to the binary law of structure and lack.
Finally, the greatest enemy, the strategic adversary (since the opposition of Anti-Oedipus to its other enemies constitutes more of a tactical struggle): fascism. And not only the historical fascism of Hitler and Mussolini – who knew so well how to mobilize and use the desire of the masses – but also the fascism that exists in all of us, that dwells in our minds and is present in our everyday conduct, the fascism that makes us love power, desire that very thing that dominates and exploits us.
I would say that Anti-Oedipus (I hope its authors forgive me) is a book of ethics, the first book of ethics written in France in a long time (and perhaps that is why its success is not limited to a specific “audience”: being anti-Oedipus has become a lifestyle, a way of thinking and living).
How to avoid becoming a fascist even when (especially when) one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant? How to erase from our discourse and actions, from our hearts and pleasures, that very thing? How to uproot that fascism embedded in our behavior? Christian moralists searched for traces of the flesh that had entered the folds of the soul. Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, stalk the most infinitesimal particles of fascism in the body.
Paying a modest tribute to St. Francis de Sales, it could be said that Anti-Oedipus is an introduction to a non-fascist life.
This art of living against all forms of fascism, whether established or close to being so, is accompanied by a certain number of essential principles, which I would summarize as follows if I had to turn this great book into a manual or a guide to everyday life:
– Free political action from any form of unitary and totalizing paranoia.
– Increase action, thought, and desires through proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, rather than by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization.
– Free yourselves from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, gap) that Western thought has sanctified for so long as a form of power and a way of accessing reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over units, mobile dispositions over systems. Consider that what is productive is not sedentary, but mobile.
– Do not imagine that one must be sad to be a militant, even if what is fought against is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its escape into forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary strength.
– Do not use thought to give political practice the value of Truth; nor political action to discredit thought, as if it were nothing but pure speculation. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains of political action.
– Do not demand that politics restore the "rights" of the individual as they have been defined by the philosopher. The individual is the product of power. What must be done is to "deindividualize" through multiplication and displacement, by the sum of different combinations. The group should not be the organic bond that unites hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of "deindividualization."
– Do not fall in love with State.









