"Desire, needs, and the revolution from a schizoanalytic perspective" -
Eugene W. Holland

In any Marxist discussion of needs and revolution, Deleuze and Guattari
have an important if controversial contribution to make, because of the
distinctive relation they posit between needs and desire. Although their
theory of desire occupies all of Anti-Oedipus and part of A Thousand
Plateaus, I propose to focus on three issues: (1) how Deleuze and
Guattari relate desire to economic production and to needs, resulting in
the promotion of a peculiar notion of "revolutionary schizophrenia";
(2) how and why this perspective gets modified (if not abandoned) in A
Thousand Plateaus; (3) the implications of Deleuze and Guattari's theory
of desire/needs for revolutionary praxis, more specifically the kinds of
necessary conditions they envisage for revolution to succeed.

What is distinctive and controversial about Deleuze and Guattari's view
is that they see need as being derivative of desire, rather than the
other way around. Yet because they define "desire" as a concomitant of
productive force, their argument is nonetheless particularly relevant to
Marxist discussions of needs. Their earlier enthusiasm for unbridled,
"schizophrenic" desire gets tempered in A Thousand Plateaus partly
because they recognize that capitalism has been able to quite easily
accommodate even such a highly-accelerated form of desire as
schizophrenia. Despite the moderation evident in the later work, they
still hold that quite stringent conditions are required for revolution to
succeed, especially given advanced capitalism's ability to provoke as
well as satisfy desires at increasingly high speeds.