Deleuze on "The Greatness of Marx"

There's an amazing post at Destratified about the connections between Deleuze and Marx, focusing on Deleuze's proposed but unfortunately unrealized book Grandeur de Marx. After reading the post, I remembered an article in Le Nouvel Observateur with some revealing quotations from Deleuze about Marx, including a reference to the "Grandeur" book. (I briefly referenced this in my book on Laruelle, pp. 96-97.) The article didn't seem to be digitized anywhere, but luckily I was able to find the original article again on microfilm in the library, and sent it to Matthew for inclusion in his bibliography. I'm posting the article below for anyone interested, with a rough translation of the final section where Deleuze describes his relation to Marx. Deleuze died only a few days before this article was published.

Gilles Deleuze:

I never had any special loyalty to the Communist Party. (I was never psychoanalyzed either -- I escaped all that.) And I had never been a Marxist prior to the 1960s. What made me hesitate was to see the kinds of things the communists made their intellectuals do.

I should also add that I wasn't a Marxist then for the simple fact that I hadn't really read much Marx in those years.

I read Marx at the same time I read Nietzsche. This was a nice pairing for me. And I still find validity in many of those concepts. There's a critique there, a radical critique. You will find references to Marx and marxism all throughout Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Today, I can say that I feel completely marxist. For example, the article that I published on the "Society of Control" [reprinted in Negotiations] is completely marxist, even though I discuss things that Marx knew nothing about.

I don't understand it when people try to say that Marx was wrong. And even less when they claim that Marx is dead. There are so many urgent tasks today: we need to try to understand the global market, what it is and how it moves. To do that, one must turn to Marx.

My next book will be titled "Greatness of Marx." It will be my final book. Although these days I no longer have the desire to write. After my book on Marx I think I'm going to quit writing. At which point I will spend the rest of my time painting.

[Source: "Le ‘Je me souviens’ de Gilles Deleuze," Le Nouvel Observateur (Nov 16–22, 1995), 50-51.]