Affect theory, or ‘non-representational theory’ (Thrift 2008), is usually placed in sharp opposition to Marxist theory, by advocates of both approaches. I am arguing, instead, that we need to draw them together. This is precisely what Deleuze and Guattari attempted to do in Anti-Oedipus (1983). The attempt was not entirely successful, but it seems prescient in the light of subsequent ‘neoliberal’ developments in both affective and political economies. To put this in a slightly different way, I am largely sympathetic to Bruno Latour’s insistence that networked social processes cannot be explained in terms of global categories like ‘capital,’ or ‘the social’ – because these categories themselves are what most urgently need to be explained. As Whitehead says, the business of philosophy ‘is to explain the emergence of the more abstract things from the more concrete things,’ rather than the reverse (Whitehead 1929/1978, 20). The only way to explain categories like ‘capital’ and ‘the social’ is precisely by working through the network, and mapping the many ways in which these categories function, the processes through which they get constructed, and the encounters in the course of which they transform, and are in turn transformed by, the other forces that they come into contact with. But explaining how categories like ‘capital’ and ‘society’ are constructed (and in many cases, auto-constructed) is not the same thing as denying the very validity of these categories – as Latour and his disciples, in their more uncautious moments, are sometimes wont to do.