Jacques Camatte (born 1935)
is a French writer and former
Marxist
Marxism is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a Materialism, materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand S ...
theoretician and member of the
International Communist Party, a primarily Italian
left communist
Left communism, or the communist left, is a position held by the left wing of communism, which criticises the political ideas and practices espoused by Marxist–Leninists and social democrats. Left communists assert positions which they rega ...
organisation under the influence of
Amadeo Bordiga. After Bordiga's death and the events of
May 68, his beliefs began to fall closer to the tendencies of
anarcho-primitivism,
communization, and
accelerationism.
Biography
Jacques Camatte was born in 1935 in
Plan-de-Cuques,
and worked as a teacher of
earth science
Earth science or geoscience includes all fields of natural science related to the planet Earth. This is a branch of science dealing with the physical, chemical, and biological complex constitutions and synergistic linkages of Earth's four spheres ...
at a school in
Rodez
Rodez ( or ; oc, Rodés, ) is a small city and commune in the South of France, about 150 km northeast of Toulouse. It is the prefecture of the department of Aveyron, region of Occitania (formerly Midi-Pyrénées). Rodez is the seat of the ...
.
[ During his time as a teacher, he often took stances that align with his politics, and rather than oppressively disciplining problematic children, he would recover them using methods relying on the cooperative spirit which he saw inherent in every human being.]
He lives on an isolated permaculture
Permaculture is an approach to land management and settlement design that adopts arrangements observed in flourishing natural ecosystems. It includes a set of design principles derived using whole-systems thinking. It applies these principle ...
farm in rural France with his daughter and grandson.[
]
Political activity
Camatte became involved with radical politics from an early age, first joining the Fraction Française de la Gauche Communiste Internationale
A fraction (from la, fractus, "broken") represents a part of a whole or, more generally, any number of equal parts. When spoken in everyday English, a fraction describes how many parts of a certain size there are, for example, one-half, eight ...
(FFGCI), a left communist
Left communism, or the communist left, is a position held by the left wing of communism, which criticises the political ideas and practices espoused by Marxist–Leninists and social democrats. Left communists assert positions which they rega ...
organization linked to Marc Chirik
Marck Chirik (May 13, 1907 – December 20, 1990), also known as Marc Laverne or simply MC, was a communist revolutionary and one of the founding militants of the International Communist Current.
Life
He had seen the October Revolution on his br ...
and Onorato Damen
Onorato Damen (4 December 1893 – 14 October 1979), was an Italian left communist revolutionary who was first active in the Italian Socialist Party and then the Communist Party of Italy. After being expelled, he worked with the organized Italian ...
, in 1953.[ Afterward, he became involved with the closely linked International Communist Party (ICP) where he was introduced to the work of Roger Dangeville, ]Suzanne Voute
Suzanne Voute (12 March 1922, Poitiers – 3 December 2001, Marseilles) was a militant Left Communist active in France from the 1940s. She became a member of the team, alongside Maximilien Rubel and Michel Jacob who translated much of the work of ...
, and most importantly, Amadeo Bordiga, who he began corresponding with in 1954.[ However, he had several disagreements with the party, especially in regards to the question of ]National Liberation
Wars of national liberation or national liberation revolutions are conflicts fought by nations to gain independence. The term is used in conjunction with wars against foreign powers (or at least those perceived as foreign) to establish separat ...
, and wrote several articles in the party's organ, ''Il Programma Communista'', relating to this issue.[
In 1961, Camatte began to perform a growing intellectual role within the ICP, opening up a real intellectual exchange with Bordiga himself. His text "Origin and Function of the Party Form" published in 1962 showed a certain convergence with Bordiga. For the latter, it was important to differentiate between the "formal party" (the organized real party) and the "historical party" (the group carrying a communist historical program). Bordiga, fleeing all activism, proclaimed that Marx's theory was primarily the theory of the proletariat. For Camatte, the historical party was a materialized organ in a formal organization of the proletariat, whatever its size. Consequently, Camatte believed that in a counterrevolutionary period, as before May 1968, the "internationalists" should not fall into the trap of activism, but should develop the communist program, concentrating first and foremost on the critique of political economy.][
After moving to Paris in 1964 and becoming involved with their local branch of the ICP, he became opposed to what he considered ]Trotskyist
Trotskyism is the political ideology and branch of Marxism developed by Ukrainian-Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and some other members of the Left Opposition and Fourth International. Trotsky self-identified as an orthodox Marxist, a rev ...
activism developing within the party, including the formalization of meetings, bureaucratization of party membership, agitation being centered around a party newspaper, and the agitation for Communist
Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, a s ...
trade unions.[
In 1966, after further controversial writings within the party, Camatte and Dangeville split from the party along with eleven other members. This split was particularly painful, because as Camatte recalls, "whoever leaves the party is dead to the party."][ Since Camatte was the librarian of the ICP's periodicals and literary collection, he had to barricade himself inside of his apartment to keep them.][ Eventually, he was forced to burn the entirety of the collection that was not written by Bordiga, to prove that he was not an "academic".][ Bordiga later referred to this as "an act of gangsterism."][
After the split, and then conflict with Dangeville leading to a second split, Camatte founded the journal '' Invariance'', which sought to protect the purity of revolutionary theory.][
]
Theories and beliefs
Camatte saw ''Invariance'' as the daughter of the events of May 1968, claiming that 1968 was "the end of the counter-revolutionary phase... May '68 is not the revolution, it is its emergence. An emergence which had been prepared by the Vietnam War, the international monetary crisis..., the struggle of the guerrillas in Latin America, and especially that of the black workers' movement, provoked by the consequences of automation."[ Significantly, Camatte early on rejected the class-based concept of proletariat. The future "party" of tomorrow was "an impersonal force above generations" and classes, because "it represents the human species, the human being who has finally been found. It is the consciousness of the species. And any attempt to prematurely form artificial organizations, as the ICP and other 'ultra-legal' groups did, was tantamount to a 'gang' or 'racketeer'."][
During this time, Camatte produced his most notable work, ''Capital and Community'', which analyzes Marx's ''Results of the Direct Production Process'', the subject of capital as totality, and ]Communism
Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, a s ...
as the formation of a ''Gemeinwesen'', or a human community.
After collecting and publishing a great amount of historical documents from left communist currents, and analyzing the most recently discovered writings of Marx, in the early-1970s Camatte publicly abandoned the Marxist perspective. He decided instead that capitalism had succeeded in shaping humanity to its profit, and that every kind of "revolution" was thus impossible; that the working class was nothing more than an aspect of capital, unable to supersede its situation; that any future revolutionary movement would basically consist of a struggle between humanity and capital itself, rather than between classes; and that capital has become totalitarian
Totalitarianism is a form of government and a political system that prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual and group opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high if not complete degree of control and regul ...
in structure, leaving nowhere and no one outside its domesticating influence. This pessimism about revolutionary
A revolutionary is a person who either participates in, or advocates a revolution. The term ''revolutionary'' can also be used as an adjective, to refer to something that has a major, sudden impact on society or on some aspect of human endeavor.
...
perspective is accompanied by the idea that we can "leave the world" and live closer to nature
Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physics, physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomenon, phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. ...
, and stop harming children and deforming their naturally reasonable minds.
To Camatte, the Communist perspective remains postponed indefinitely: "Human society can only survive if it transforms itself into a human ''Gemeinwesen''. The proletariat no longer has a romantic task to accomplish, but restoring its human centrality."[ Camatte proposes the concept of "inversion" as being the only way to accomplish this, a concept which he draws from Bordiga's later works.
]
Legacy
''Invariance'' was particularly influential after it was first published, with new editions typically selling around 4,000 copies.[ It found a wide audience in the left-wing of the French Trotskyists, and especially among Italian ]Autonomists
The Autonomists (french: Autonomistes; it, Autonomisti) was a Christian-democratic Italian political party active in the Aosta Valley.
It was founded in 1997 by the union of the regional Italian People's Party with For Aosta Valley, and some f ...
, most notably with Antonio Negri claiming to have been "inspired" by the journal when he was reading it while in prison.[
Camatte's views came to influence the ]anarcho-primitivists
Anarcho-primitivism is an anarchist critique of civilization (anti-civ) that advocates a return to non-civilized ways of life through deindustrialization, abolition of the division of labor or specialization, and abandonment of large-scale or ...
, who developed aspects of Camatte's line of argument in the journal ''Fifth Estate
The Fifth Estate is a socio-cultural reference to groupings of outlier viewpoints in contemporary society, and is most associated with bloggers, journalists publishing in non-mainstream media outlets, and the social media or "social license". The ...
'' in the late-1970s and early-1980s.
In the 21st century, his views also went on to influence accelerationism, and his essay ''Decline of the Capitalist Mode of Production or Decline of Humanity?'' was featured in ''#Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader''
References
External links
Jacques Camatte's web site
* ''Jacques Camatte and the New Politics of Liberation,'' Dave Antagonism (Green Anarchy nos. 18, 19, 20, and archived a
https://web.archive.org/web/20091002060432/http://www.greenanarchy.org/index.php?action=viewwritingdetail&writingId=14
*
Introduction to Camatte's work from Michele Garau for Ill Will Editions.
Bordigism
Marxist theorists
French communists
1935 births
Living people
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