Herein are gathered several essays by Jacques Camatte, editor of the journal Invariance, that exist in English translation. This is the first of three volumes of Camatte's writings to be published by Autonomedia1 . Most of these essays have been published previously as pamphlets.
Jacques Camatte comes out of a political tradition, the Italian communist left, that has had little impact and almost no existence in North America. The closest political tendencies to it today are the International Communist Current (to whom Camatte is a bête noire2 ), the remnants of council communism, and, to some lesser extent, anarchosyndicalism. The International Communist Party, the organization that Bordiga, one of the founders and early leaders of the Italian Communist Party, and Camatte were active in, is still extant in western Europe. (More information about the PCI and other currents in the Italian communist left is contained in a translator's footnote to "On Organization.")
Like many in France, Camatte started to question marxism about the time of the epochal 1968 worker-student uprising. He came to reject marxist cornerstone concepts such as the theory of the proletariat and the necessity of the party. Rather than the scenario described by Marx of the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat, Camatte maintains that capital has successfully absorbed this contradiction, and he sees today a proletarianized humanity at large dominated by the "despotism of capital," which has constituted itself as an anthropomorphized, all-encompassing material community controlling not only society and the economy but all of space and time, culture, imagination, and life on earth as well. His ideas since the late sixties, however, have remained deeply influenced by marxian and bordighist themes. The very title of Invariance, taken from Bordiga's theory of the "invariance" of the communist program since 1848 (meaning that communism has been an immediate possibility since that time, without waiting for the maturation of productive forces; Camatte's modification holds that communism has always been possible throughout history) attests to this, as does Camatte' s retention of Marx's term Gemeinwesen (human essence, collective being of the human species-the goal of communism).
Camatte has never been an anarchist; in fact, he explains that his critique of formal political organizations applies as much to anarchist entities such as syndicalist federations as it does to the councilist or partyist currents of marxism. He claims no direct affinity with other ultraleft marxist groups such as Socialisme ou Barbarie or the Situationist International, because they were formal organizations and clung to the old council communism in their political programs. His attitude toward individualist anarchism is ambivalent. He credits it with having maintained the spark of rebellion, autonomy, and critical consciousness. But he refuses to support the egoism of Max Stimer, and he makes no mention in any of his writings of the nineteenth-century American individualists Josiah Warren, Benjamin Tucker, and Lysander Spooner. Camatte seems to believe that individualism, like parliamentary democracy, would ultimately prove to be an obstacle to the constitution of the Gemeinwesen.
Camatte makes occasional use of insights from Parisian postphilosophers such as Foucault, but unlike them he remains to a great extent a champion of Marx and much less so of Nietzsche and Freud. You will not hear any enthusiasm from Camatte for (post)structuralism. He calls Baudrillard a polemicist in oedipal revolt against his father (Marx). He evinces no respect for the academic marxologists such as Althusser. Even the Frankfurt School is taken to task in Camatte's assertion that Adorno failed to understand the true nature of fascism's mass appeal.
Camatte advocates regeneration of nature through the end or radical curtailment of civilization and technology, and a new way of life outside the capitalist/socialist mode of production. He believes that the human species must undergo fundamental changes in order to exist in harmony with the community of all living things and with the earth itself (compare this with the Gaia hypothesis). In North America, Black and Red press, which was the first to publish "The Wandering of Humanity" in English, is close to Camatte's version of Marx beyond marxism. Otherwise, Invariance' s group of affinity -albeit significantly less flavored with Marx- has included the publications Anarchy, Fifth Estate (in earlier days), and the short-lived Demolition Derby.
In "On Organization" Camatte and Collu explain the reasons for their break with the International Communist Party, describing it, like all other political organizations, as a gang or racket. The gang seduces its recruits, then vampirizes their creative abilities and suppresses their desires and their individuality in the name of an illusory community. The critique of organization here refers not only to "groupuscules" on the ultraleft, but to the entire social fabric of capitalist society as it exists in the late twentieth century. The organization is the modem depersonalized and collective capitalist, the capitalist without capital whose stock in trade is speculation and ideological commodities. In this society, organized politics of the left or right, parliamentary or extraparliamentary, is part and parcel of the functioning of the system, and cannot effect a revolutionary change.
Camatte fingers representation as the essence of politics. He points out that Marx rejected popularity and the cult of personality, and saw communism not as doctrine and frozen ideology, but as movement and theory. Camatte makes use of Marx's distinction between the formal party and the historic party. For Marx, the formal party is an actual, but ephemeral and contingent, organization that exists during a time of heightened revolutionary activity. In times of counterrevolution, when there is little activity, revolutionaries should maintain loose networks of personal contacts to maintain the continuity of critical theory. These networks he called the historic party. For Camatte, the formal party is now a us.eless concept, having degenerated into numerous sectarian rackets. Marxists have made a fetish of the formal party. The communist movement can now (since 1968) exist only as a party in the historic sense; the proletariat (humanity) cannot recognize itself in any organized representation.
In "The Wandering of Humanity," "Against Domestication," and "This World We Must Leave" Camatte criticizes marxism in greater depth. Marx had proclaimed in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, "Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution," and described the proletariat as the estate or class that is the negation of itself as of all other classes, because it is the vehicle for the realization of the human community. If communism has been a possibility since the middle of the nineteenth century, then subsequent history can be described as the frustrated, bloody, and increasingly desperate wandering of humanity away from its own real interests, resulting in the misery and destruction of human beings and nature.
The problem has been defined by marxists as largely one of consciousness, as Camatte points out. A proletariat unconscious of its historical mission cannot succeed in making the communist revolution and remains a mere sociological category. Therefore the correct form of consciousness has to be produced, even if it has to be introduced to the workers from 'outside' (i.e., by revolutionary intellectuals). The German Social Democrats, already veering away from Marx's theoretical rigor, established a workerist consciousness, Socialist ideology, as a goal in itself that became reified in an organization, the Social Democratic Party, the guardian of that consciousness and all it entailed: pride in worker identity and belief in the dignity of labor. Camatte calls marxism repressive consciousness, because it requires that the true, mediate, and historical goal be repressed in favor of immediate appearance and organization.
The Social Democracy became a countersociety in Europe that was eventually absorbed by the dominant society of capital. Lenin and the Bolsheviks compounded the errors of Social Democracy by insisting on a more extreme program of instilling the proletariat and other insurrectional classes with a dogmatic consciousness that served as a mechanism of repression and provided only the illusion of liberation.
As a result of fascism (another workerist ideology), social democracy, and World War II the old proletarian movement was defeated, wage labor became universalized, and the proletariat lost its specificity. The state found it increasingly difficult to enforce universal values owing to the superannuation of the bourgeoisie, and the countersociety lost its unity owing to the diffusion of the proletariat. In this strange post-World War II society, in which a despotic western capitalism has absorbed and repressed classes, the general equivalent has given way, the center will not hold. Revolt, particularly since the 1960s, has splintered into numerous movements that have drifted ever further from universalism and a critique of the totality. The racketization of consciousness has increased, becoming more specialized, like segments of a consumer market. In Camatte’s terminology, repressive consciousness has been superseded by the disintegration of consciousness. As examples he cites the U.S. women’s liberation movement, gay liberation, antipsychiatry, and other leftist movements that define themselves only in relation to what they are against. All of these movements grouped around partial demands have lent themselves easily to recuperation by capital’s material community.
In his exposition of the development of capitalism and how it has arrived at its present domination of the planet, Camatte uses another theme taken from Marx—the periodization of capital’s history into two principal stages, formal domination and real domination over society. Marx had analyzed capitalism’s origins as an agricultural revolution which first expropriated human beings from the land, then reduced them to laboring in factories. The first stage of industrial capitalism, which Marx called the formal subsumption of labor under capital, was marked by the continuing predominance of the countryside over the town, the survival of handicraft production, and the dependence of the capitalist’s profit on absolute surplus value, determined by the length of the working day. In the second stage, real subsumption, capital and the bourgeois class established definitive control over the production process and the state (early to mid-nineteenth century in Britain), and profit derived principally from relative surplus value brought about through the revolutionizing of technology.
Marx’s periodization is a useful model but limited, because it applies only to the production process. In Camatte’s version, capital moved on from real domination over the economy and politics (bourgeois society) to real domination over humans in their biological being (material community of capital). Capital has become representation—a point of agreement Camatte has with other theorists such as Debord—and has escaped from human control, including that of the dominant classes. In the West, the period of transition to real domination occurred in the years around World War II and was effected by such movements as fascism and the New Deal. Bourgeois society disappeared but capital thrived and only tightened its grip. The movement toward real domination is an ongoing process. In many parts of the world (India, Africa) capital still reigns only as formal domination, distinct classes continue to exist, and peasant communities still constitute the majority of the population. Russia is an intermediate case, closer to the West, but not fully under the real domination of capital, and China likewise is increasingly moving down the path of real domination.
Camatte criticizes Marx’s beliefs that exchange value could not become autonomous by escaping from the law of value and a rigorous general equivalent (i.e., gold), that science and progress could only bring good things, and that communism would be a superior mode of production that would bring about a liberation of productive forces imprisoned by the capitalist mode of production. In fact, Camatte says, capital has developed economic forces of production far beyond what Marx or anyone in the nineteenth century could have dreamed.
It is this identification of progress with development of productive forces in the economy that is one of the most baleful characteristics of marxism and that has made of “socialism” merely a variant of capitalism. When human beings are seen primarily as producers and laborers, they become nothing but the activity of capital, and the full dimensions of communism as the liberation of human creative capacities cannot be realized. Camatte argues that when Marx talked of capitalism imprisoning productive forces, he was referring to the frustration of human productive forces as much as, or more than, to economic stagnation. Here Camatte, like Bordiga, rejects the theory of capitalist decadence. This theory, originally developed by Rosa Luxemburg and now held by groups such as the International Communist Current, states that capitalism has been, since the early twentieth century, in historical decline as a mode of production capable of furthering progress for humanity. To Camatte, it is absurd to view the reign of capital as ever having been “progressive,” and now “decadent” and in need of replacement by a superior mode of production. Communism is a new way of life in harmony with nature, not a mode of economic production, and it is humanity, not capital, that is decadent.
Marxism, as the ideology of economic development, has a positivistic optimism about science and technology that it shares with frankly pro-capitalist ideologies. This positivism has led it to downplay or ignore the environmental consequences of unlimited growth of productive forces. Industrial production has resulted in countless environmental and human catastrophes—oil and chemical spills, leaks and explosions of toxic gases, nuclear accidents, despoliation of nature, etc.— that have been particularly severe in the former Soviet Union.
Capital has reduced nature and human beings to a state of domestication. The imagination and the libido have been enclosed as surely as the forests, oceans, and common lands. Camatte still uses the word revolution to describe the process of overcoming capital (though elsewhere he criticizes the concept of revolution, saying “Capital...is itself revolution’’). But he sees this revolution not as an overthrow of the capitalist mode of production, but rather as its abandonment. The revolution must take place in a biological dimension and will be a human revolt, not delimited as the dictatorship of a social class. He defends hippies, Yippies (punks too? one wonders), regionalists, vegetarians, and organic agriculture, saying that counterculture groups, although limited in their aims, can unleash a more significant social movement that will supersede them.
In “Echoes of the Past" Camatte discusses various subjects—patriarchy and feminism, Christianity and Islam, nominalism and universalism, and the political right. He expands the concept of the wandering of humanity by projecting it further back in time—not just back to the nineteenth century, but to the sixth century B.C., with the advent of the Greek polis. This is the moment (Western civilization) he identifies as the definitive rupture with nature and the triumph of male dominance, although he also points out that this process had already begun long before among peoples practicing pastoralism. Patriarchy as such comes to an end with the victory of capital (i.e., autonomized exchange value), but the society dominated by capital remains male-dominated because patriarchy survives in residual form through its offspring, “phallocracy” (a term used in the discourse of French feminism that is bound to be unfamiliar to most American readers outside academe). Camatte sees the modern feminist movement as one of the results of the failure of the proletarian movement. He credits the feminists with having made valuable contributions to the critique of the left’s representation, but criticizes them as well for their tendency to produce yet more representations, which can then be recuperated. The liberation of women within capitalist society gives capital a new lease on life; it can now exploit and distort the capacities of women as it has those of men.
Having blasted marxism and the left at such length, Camatte turns his attention to the right, specifically la Nouvelle Droite (“New Right”) in France and its leading intellectual, Alain de Benoist. This movement had its origin as the reaction to May 1968, although it is in fact not as “new” as it claims. It is instead a resuscitation of rightist currents from sixty years or more ago, just as the May uprising reactivated all the important themes of the avant-gardes of the 1920s. Unlike the liberal and leftist antifascists, who simply demonize fascism without making a serious attempt to understand it fully, Camatte recognizes that movements such as fascism and nazism, though certainly antihuman, incorporated tendencies in genuine revolt against the phenomenon of capital and for the restoration of community and reconciliation with nature. These themes are with us still, “echoes of the past,” and the New Right tries to exploit them and channel them into a new, quasi-fascist, representation—the false community of pure ethnic cultures.
De Benoist has affinities with nazism, Romanticism, and Slavophilism but also with various movements usually thought of as left-wing, such as anti-imperialism. He decries the homogenizing force of Americanization and calls for a community, but one embracing only Europe, not the human species. Camatte denies that De Benoist’s thought holds any originality; although De Benoist tries to demonstrate that marxism is unscientific, he owes most of his concepts to Hegel and Marx. His movement stands for a defense of natural inequality. Its reyection of Christianity is actually a rejection of marxism because marxism and (early) Christianity are leveling doctrines with true affinity for each other; marxism is a secularized Christianity painted red. The right imposes the tyranny of elitist privilege, and the left imposes the tyranny of abstract equality. Fascist movements play both sides of the coin. Camatte concludes, perhaps prematurely, that the New Right has no future either in service to capital or against It.
The writings in this volume date mostly from the 1970s; the most recent is from 1980. The world has undergone tremendous changes since then, especially within the last five or six years, and some of Camatte’s statements may now seem dated. Among them: his endorsement of Bordiga’s overoptimistic prediction that the communist revolution would be accomplished by the end of the 1970s, and his confidence that “the capitalist system has long since accepted rises in wages.” But he does not rule out the possibility of capitalism suffering in the future another economic dislocation as severe as that of 1929.
There are aspects of Camatte’s worldview with which one can argue. He is suspicious of the call for the abolition of work, even calling it a “capitalist slogan,” because he fears it plays into capital’s tendency to rob people of all fulfilling activity and dominate their leisure as much as their work. It seems possible that here Camatte is mistaken, that the zerowork concept, by explicitly opposing the reduction of human beings to pawns of economic production, and fighting for “the right to be lazy,” actually makes a significant, perhaps the most significant, gesture against domestication.
Little, if anything, from Invariance has been translated into English in the last decade. Those who read French and wish to obtain more recent issues of Invariance can reach Jacques Camatte at the following address:
Spiralhétre—le Segala
46140 Belaye
FRANCE
Thanks to the following people for their help in realizing the publication of Camatte’s collected writings: Robby Barnes, Freddie Baer, Bob Black, Francois Bochet, David Brown, Jim Fleming, Steve Izma, Tad Kepley, David Loneragan, Lorraine Perlman, Henri Simon, Paul Z. Simons, Michael William, and John Zerzan.
Alex Trotter