Minor Communism, or Inventing the People

There is a recurring tendency in contemporary debates about communism to oscillate between two unsatisfying positions. On one side lies a melancholic archaeology of lost revolutions: the twentieth century revisited as a graveyard of organizational forms, exhausted strategies, and failed futures. On the other side is a speculative enthusiasm for post-political transformation – networked uprisings, decentralized swarms, and algorithmic collectivities – that sometimes dissolves politics into a metaphysics of circulation. What tends to disappear between these poles is the question of how revolutionary thought mutates as it travels through different historical and geographical conditions. Alex Taek-Gwang Lee’s Communism After Deleuze is a fascinating intervention precisely because it situates itself in that terrain of mutation. The book asks what it might mean to think communism through the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, but it does so by displacing the familiar Euro-American intellectual coordinates through which their thought is usually interpreted. Rather than approaching Deleuze as a theorist of desire, multiplicity, or post-structuralist ontology, Lee frames his project as an attempt to excavate a political philosophy shaped by encounters with non-European revolutionary movements and the intellectual trajectories of the so-called Third World.

The result is a provocative reorientation. Deleuze and Guattari appear not simply as French philosophers reacting to the aftermath of May ’68, but as thinkers grappling with the global crisis of Marxism after decolonization. Lee’s central concept – what he calls “minor communism” – names this reconfiguration: a vision of communism that disperses the centralized authority of the Party into a multiplicity of revolutionary experiments. As Lee succinctly formulates it, minor communism implies “many communisms without the central Party,” a political horizon drawn in part from the decentralized revolutionary movements of the Global South. The claim is deliberately bold. It suggests that the political significance of Deleuze and Guattari’s work lies less in its place within the history of French theory than in its resonance with the experiments and contradictions of postcolonial revolution.

Minor Communism and the Problem of the Missing People
One of the most compelling aspects of Lee’s argument is the way he situates Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minority within the geopolitical dynamics of the Cold War and decolonization. The notion of “a people who are missing” – which appears throughout Deleuze’s writings on literature, cinema, and politics – has often been interpreted as a metaphor for marginalized identities or emergent collectives. Lee insists that this interpretation is insufficient. For him, the missing people are not simply those excluded from representation within existing political systems. Rather, they designate a virtual political subject that does not yet exist within the current division of labor or the structure of nation-states. The point is not to represent these people but to invent them.

Lee suggests that this concept resonates with the historical experience of the Non-Aligned Movement, which sought to articulate a political position outside the bipolar logic of the Cold War. In this sense, Deleuze and Guattari’s political project cannot be easily located within the established traditions of the French Left – whether republican, socialist, or communist. Instead, it intersects with a different geopolitical horizon: the search for new forms of revolutionary subjectivity emerging from the struggles of the Global South. This reframing produces a striking reinterpretation of Deleuze’s political philosophy. Rather than a thinker of abstract multiplicity, Deleuze becomes a theorist of the future proletariat – a collective subject not yet identifiable within the existing social order. The idea is not that such a proletariat already exists somewhere in the world waiting to be discovered. It must be produced through processes of collective invention. The missing people are thus less a sociological category than a political event: the emergence of a collective subject capable of disrupting the dominant systems of communication and control that define contemporary capitalism.

Rethinking Leninism Without the Party
If Lee’s book revolves around a single philosophical puzzle, it concerns the relationship between Deleuze’s thought and the legacy of Leninist political organization. One might assume that a philosophy so associated with multiplicity and decentralization would reject Leninism outright. Lee argues the opposite. According to his reading, Deleuze and Guattari were preoccupied with a specific problem inherited from the twentieth-century revolutionary tradition: how to rethink the Leninist concept of democratic centralism under the conditions of the postwar world system. The question was no longer simply how to seize state power, but how to reinvent the relationship between revolution and the state in a world where revolutionary movements had already transformed the geopolitical landscape.

In this sense, Deleuze and Guattari’s work can be understood as an attempt to repeat the revolutionary condition of Leninism without reproducing its organizational form. The centralized party becomes less a model to be replicated than a historical experiment whose underlying logic must be transformed. Here Lee’s reading intersects with a set of contemporary debates about political organization that have emerged in the wake of the crisis of mass parties and the proliferation of networked movements. One thinks, for instance, of the work of Rodrigo Nunes, who has argued that the dichotomy between horizontal movements and centralized parties obscures the more complex organizational ecologies through which political power actually operates. Rather than choosing between distributed networks and hierarchical structures, Nunes suggests that revolutionary politics involves a dynamic interplay between different scales of coordination – what he calls “the organisation of multiplicity.”

From this perspective, the idea of minor communism begins to look less like a rejection of party organization and more like an attempt to rethink the conditions under which it might operate. The party is no longer imagined as the singular locus of revolutionary consciousness but as one component within a broader assemblage of political forces. A different but complementary perspective can be found in the work of Jodi Dean, whose arguments for the necessity of the communist party have been among the most forceful attempts in recent years to rehabilitate Leninist organization. For Dean, the fragmentation of contemporary movements makes some form of centralized coordination indispensable if revolutionary energies are to be sustained over time. The party functions not simply as an organizational structure but as a mechanism for transforming dispersed grievances into a collective political project.

Reading Lee’s notion of minor communism alongside these debates suggests an interesting tension. On the one hand, Deleuze and Guattari’s suspicion of centralized authority appears to distance them from the revival of party politics advocated by Dean. On the other hand, their emphasis on the production of new collective subjects resonates with the idea that revolutionary organization must operate at multiple levels simultaneously. The concept of “molecular Leninism,” proposed by Gary Genosko, captures something of this hybrid logic. Revolution is neither the spontaneous eruption of decentralized networks nor the mechanical execution of a party line. It emerges through the interaction between molecular processes of subjectivation and the molar structures that give those processes strategic coherence. Seen from this angle, minor communism might be understood as an attempt to imagine what a communist politics would look like if the party were no longer the singular centre of revolutionary organization but part of a heterogeneous ecology of struggles.

Capitalism and Schizophrenia as Political Manual
Lee’s most provocative claim is that the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia – Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus – should be read not simply as philosophical texts but as a political manual for the creation of new forms of communism. At first glance, this interpretation might appear surprising. These works are usually approached as theoretical explorations of psychoanalysis, linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy rather than as guides to political practice. Lee insists, however, that their conceptual architecture is deeply connected to the historical problem of revolutionary transformation. He suggests that the project of Capitalism and Schizophrenia can be understood as a theoretical analysis of what Deleuze and Guattari call the “Urstaat” – the primordial form of state power associated with the so-called Asiatic mode of production. By tracing the ways in which capitalism simultaneously dismantles and reproduces these archaic structures of authority, Deleuze and Guattari seek to identify the conditions under which new forms of collective life might emerge.

In this context, the concept of schizophrenia functions less as a clinical diagnosis than as a metaphor for the capacity of desire to escape the rigid coding imposed by capitalist and state institutions. The schizophrenic process represents a force of deterritorialization capable of disrupting the established order of representation. Lee links this analysis to the work of the anti-psychiatrist David Cooper, whose reflections on madness as a revolutionary force influenced the intellectual milieu in which Anti-Oedipus was written. Cooper’s notion of the “inner Third World” – the zones of underdevelopment within the psyche that resist the normalization imposed by capitalist society – becomes a key reference point for Lee’s interpretation. Through this lens, the critique of psychoanalysis in Anti-Oedipus appears as part of a broader project: the attempt to liberate desire from the familial and institutional structures that confine it. The political stakes of this critique become clearer when one considers the role of subjectivity in revolutionary transformation. If new forms of collective life are to emerge, they require the production of new modes of subjectivity capable of resisting the capture of desire by capitalist institutions.

Communization and the Immediate Abolition of Capitalist Relations
Lee does not explicitly situate his argument within the debates around communization that have circulated in recent decades, but the affinities are difficult to ignore. Writers associated with communization theory – such as Théorie Communiste or Gilles Dauvé – have argued that the traditional model of socialist transition, centred on the conquest of state power and the management of a transitional economy, has been historically exhausted. Instead of a prolonged phase of socialist construction, communization proposes that revolutionary movements would immediately begin to abolish capitalist social relations – wage labour, private property, and the separation between political and economic spheres. Communism would not be the distant result of a transitional period but the immanent process unfolding within the revolution itself.

From this vantage point, Deleuze and Guattari’s emphasis on the production of new social relations begins to look strikingly compatible with communization theory. If communism is understood as a continuous differentiation of social relations rather than a fixed institutional model, then the revolution becomes a process of transformation unfolding in real time. Lee’s discussion of the “virtual” dimension of Marxist politics resonates strongly here. The idea of communism as a virtual potential embedded within capitalist society parallels the communization thesis that revolutionary transformation must emerge from the contradictions of everyday social relations rather than from the implementation of a pre-designed plan.

Yet the differences are also significant. Communization theory often emphasizes the abolition of mediation – political parties, unions, transitional states – in favour of immediate forms of collective self-organization. Deleuze and Guattari’s approach, by contrast, tends to emphasize the proliferation of mediations: assemblages, networks, conceptual personae, and machinic processes. Minor communism thus occupies an ambiguous position within these debates. It shares the communization critique of centralized party politics but does not entirely abandon the question of organization.

Destituent Power and the Politics of Withdrawal
Another set of contemporary discussions that resonate with Lee’s reading concerns the concept of destituent power, associated with thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben. Destituent power refers to forms of political action that do not aim to seize or constitute state power but rather to deactivate the structures through which power operates. Rather than replacing one regime with another, destituent movements seek to render the existing apparatus inoperative. Their aim is not to found a new sovereignty but to dissolve the mechanisms that sustain the old one.

There is a clear affinity between this idea and Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of lines of flight. Both concepts emphasize the possibility of escaping the structures of power rather than confronting them directly. The revolutionary event becomes a process of desertion, sabotage, or withdrawal from the circuits through which power reproduces itself. Lee’s concept of minor communism can be read productively in relation to this destituent logic. If the missing people must invent themselves outside the representational structures of the nation-state, then revolutionary politics cannot simply involve the occupation of existing institutions. It must involve the creation of alternative forms of collective life that operate beyond those institutions.

At the same time, Deleuze and Guattari’s insistence on the production of new social relations complicates the destituent perspective. The problem is not merely how to deactivate existing structures of power but how to generate the conditions for new forms of cooperation and solidarity. In other words, destitution alone is not enough. The disappearance of existing institutions does not automatically produce the new social relations required for a communist society. This is precisely where the concept of minor communism becomes useful: it names the experimental processes through which those relations might begin to emerge.

Bergson, Vitalism, and Revolutionary Thought
One of the more surprising dimensions of Lee’s book is his discussion of the philosophical sources that inform Deleuze’s political thought. In particular, he emphasizes the importance of Henri Bergson – a figure often regarded as marginal within the Marxist tradition. In the context of postwar French philosophy, Bergson’s vitalism was widely dismissed as an outdated metaphysical speculation. Lee points out, however, that Bergson’s ideas had a very different reception in other parts of the world. Within certain currents of African socialism, Bergsonian concepts such as intuition and duration were mobilized as tools for rethinking the history of philosophy and articulating alternative forms of political subjectivity.

Deleuze’s engagement with Bergson thus takes on a new significance when viewed through this global perspective. Rather than a purely academic interest, it becomes part of a broader dialogue with intellectual movements emerging from the Global South. Lee argues that Deleuze’s adaptation of Bergsonian vitalism allows him to reinterpret Marxist concepts in a novel way. Revolution becomes less a deterministic outcome of historical contradictions than a virtual potential embedded within the dynamics of social life. The task of political thought is therefore not simply to analyze existing structures but to identify the conditions under which new forms of collective existence can emerge. In this sense, the idea of communism functions less as a blueprint for a future society than as what Lee calls a “transcendent object of sociability.” It names the possibility of creating new social relations that continuously transform themselves through processes of differentiation and experimentation.

Virtual Politics and the Idea of Communism
A key concept running throughout Lee’s analysis is the distinction between the virtual and the actual – a distinction central to Deleuze’s philosophy. The virtual refers not to something unreal or imaginary but to a field of potentialities that can be actualized in different ways. Applied to politics, this distinction allows Lee to reinterpret the idea of communism. Rather than identifying communism with a specific historical regime or institutional structure, he suggests that it should be understood as a virtual horizon: a set of possibilities for organizing social relations beyond the constraints of capitalist production.

This perspective also sheds light on the failures of historical Marxism. Deleuze does not deny these failures; instead, he treats them as opportunities for rethinking the concept of revolution. The collapse of existing socialist regimes reveals the limitations of certain institutional forms but does not invalidate the virtual potential embedded within the idea of communism itself. From this perspective, the task of political philosophy becomes one of radicalization rather than abandonment. The legacy of Marxism must be transformed rather than simply discarded.

There is a passage Lee cites from Deleuze in which thinking is described through the image of casting dice – a gesture borrowed from the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé. To think is to take a risk, to open oneself to the unpredictable outcomes of a throw. Lee’s book embraces this spirit. Communism After Deleuze does not offer a definitive interpretation of Deleuze’s political philosophy. Instead, it invites readers to participate in a speculative experiment: to reconsider the relationship between philosophy, revolution, and the invention of new collective subjects. In doing so, the book contributes to a broader effort to rethink the legacy of Marxism in a world where the traditional coordinates of revolutionary politics have been profoundly transformed. 

If the twentieth century was defined by the rise and fall of state-centered socialist projects, the twenty-first century may require a different imagination of communism: one that operates through networks of struggle, processes of subjectivation, and the continuous invention of the people who do not yet exist. There is something here that recalls, obliquely but insistently, the political sensibility of Duck, You Sucker! by Sergio Leone: the uneasy encounter between disparate revolutionary trajectories, the mixture of cynicism and hope, and the sense that revolution is less a heroic narrative than a contingent process of becoming, often misrecognized even by those who participate in it. Much like Leone’s film – where the explosion is never simply what it seems, and where the line between banditry and insurgency is constantly blurred – Lee’s account suggests that communism today cannot be approached as a stable identity or program, but only as a shifting assemblage of forces, alliances, and inventions.

Whether or not one accepts all of Lee’s interpretations, his book performs an important task. It reminds us that the future of communism cannot be derived solely from the history of European political theory. It must also be sought in the unfinished experiments of the Global South and in the conceptual innovations that emerge when revolutionary thought travels across different contexts. In this sense, Communism After Deleuze reads less like a commentary on Gilles Deleuze than like a fragment of the book yet to come: a text that participates in the ongoing attempt to invent the political subjects capable of transforming the world.