01Flows and capture
Deleuze and Guattari describe reality as composed of flows — of matter, energy, desire, bodies, capital, language. Capitalism, in their analysis, is a machine for decoding and reterritorializing these flows. It breaks down the fixed codings of previous social forms (feudalism, tribalism, tradition) and then recaptures the liberated flows in new, more extractive arrangements.
Capital deterritorializes everything — dissolves local bonds, traditional communities, fixed identities — and then reterritorializes the freed energy into wage labor, consumer desire, and market dependency. Liberation is not about returning to the pre-capitalist coding; that coding is already gone. It's about finding flows that can escape reterritorialization.
02Rhizome vs. tree
The tree is the dominant image of Western knowledge: a root, a trunk, branching hierarchically. One origin, one logic, everything derivative. The rhizome — grass, fungus, tubers — grows differently: no single root, multiple entry points, no hierarchy, spreads horizontally, can be broken and grow from any fragment.
This is not just a metaphor for organization. It's a claim about how thought, desire, and power actually work. Hierarchical tree-thinking tries to locate the root cause, the central authority, the originating point. Rhizomatic thinking tracks connections, multiplicities, lateral spreads.
Commons institutions are structurally rhizomatic: multiple entry points, no center, governance distributed across nodes. This is their strength, not their weakness. The attempt to impose tree-structure — a center, a hierarchy, a single root authority — is what destroys commons.
03Lines of flight
Every social formation has lines of flight — trajectories of escape, possibilities that exceed current capture. A line of flight is not a retreat. It's a creative break that opens new territory: a workers' cooperative that exits the employer-employee relationship, a commons that exits the market logic of allocation, a mutual aid network that exits the charity/state binary.
Lines of flight can be recaptured — coopted, domesticated, absorbed back into the system. But they can also be extended, connected to other lines of flight, built into new forms of collective life. The question is never just "does this escape the system?" but "what does this escape create?"
04What this adds
Deleuze and Guattari are difficult precisely because they're trying to describe movement, not structure — processes of becoming rather than states of being. For the commons, they're most useful in two ways.
First, they explain why commons institutions feel so threatening to capital even when they're small: they're not threatening because of their size but because of their form. A genuine commons is a line of flight — it embodies a different logic of allocation and governance. Scale matters less than the existence of the alternative form.
Second, they're useful against the nostalgia trap: the impulse to reconstruct pre-capitalist commons as if returning to a prior state. The flows have already been decoded. The task is not restoration but creation — building new forms appropriate to current conditions, not archaeologically recovering old ones.