Gilles  Deleuze identifies in his essay “Postscript on the Societies of Control” his vision of the evolution of Foucault’s “disciplinary societies”, defined as the family, the school, the factory, the hospital, and the prison, and particularly focused on the factory. He purports to identify a crisis, in particular as the nebulous and shadowy (though never quite defined) “administrations in charge” demand reforms, and claims we are moving toward “societies of control”. He then proceeds to engage in fairly standard decrying of technological and social advancement, with particular attention being given to capitalism and the old workhorse, the corporation. It would be easier to take his arguments as being less politically motivated and more a matter of serious and immediate concern where it not for two issues: his historical treatment of capitalism and his clearly biased approach to labor unions.

When approaching capitalism, he offers the barest fig leaf of suggesting that capitalism conquers “sometimes by specialization…sometimes by lowering the costs of production”, but more significantly focuses on “nineteenth- century capitalism is a capitalism of concentration, for production and for property… the capitalist being the owner of the means of production but also, progressively, the owner of other spaces conceived through analogy (the worker’s familial house, the school)”. He then goes on to define the new capitalism as a mutation, and the corporation as the embodiment of that mutation, one that is dispersive, wherein “[t]he family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an  owner-state  or private power-but coded  figures- deformable and  transformable-of a single corporation that now has only stockholders” and “[c]orruption thereby gains a new power”.

Contrasting this is his treatment of unions, “their history of struggle against the disciplines or within the spaces of enclosure, will they be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance against the societies of control? Can we already grasp the rough outlines of these coming forms, capable of threatening the joys of marketing?” This assumption that unions, which can be argued to be a form of control equivalent to any corporation of their own, as the path to resistance against societal control in the form of corporations, is counter-intuitive. It is also deterministic, which seems to defy the very essence of defying resisting “societies of control”.

Given the decidedly mixed history of unions over the course of labor relations both in the US and abroad, as well as the mixed benefits and tragedies that corporations have brought, it is far from given that capitalism, or corporations, are completely bad, or that unions are unvarnished good. To craft a narrative that casts either in such an absolute light makes it difficult to give anything else he has to say in his article any amount of credibility.