The first page of Deleuze's most important philosophical work, Difference and Repetition, lays the groundwork for his analysis of capitalism. There are, he insists, two enemies of the difference he champions. They are representation and exchange, ‘the qualitative order of resemblances and the quantitative order of equivalences’ (DR 1). Capitalism plays one against the other: the cash nexus of the market decodes representation and thence frees desire from its repression by codes; ‘all that is solid melts into air’, as Marx put it. But capital also recaptures desire and subjects it to the demands of private accumulation through commodity production and exchange. Marx's analyses of capital were thus crucial for Deleuze throughout his career. Indeed, Deleuze not only insisted that he and Guattari remained Marxists (N 171), he also planned to devote what would have been his last book to ‘the greatness of Marx’ – although he was not able to write it due to health problems. From the first pages of Difference and Repetition, then, it is clear that Deleuze shared with Marx what Marxists would call a ‘dialectical’ evaluation of capitalism, one that assesses both its benefits to humankind and its liabilities. But already, a crucial difference emerges. What Marx admired most about capitalism was its socialisation of production relations and the attendant development of human productive forces, which offered humankind the historical prospect of overcoming necessity and realising freedom.