Bury me, bury me under your waste, your spit and your impotent delirium, because know this, like the shamans, Zalmoxis, Pythagoras, Christ, I will draw from mother earth the infinite vital power, and I will resurface full of wisdom, joy and an exuberant life which will allow me to reach this human community from which the infernal stupidity which marks you, the Manichean narrowness which hardens you, the terrorist rage which periodically torments you, as well as the inability to exist without defaming and vilifying others, will have disappeared. I will have left your world and been resurrected!
— Jacques Camatte, ‘Scatology and Resurrection’ (1975)

For even the most assiduous readers of Marx, taking Jacques Camatte seriously means committing heresy. Letting oneself be carried away by this thought means moving beyond habits and conveniences. It is one of those voices that speaks to oneself against oneself, but always from oneself. It pushes one to betray what stood there, before us, unshakeable as a law. Traversing Bordiga's prophecy of a world revolution in 1975, from the theorization of the counter-revolution, from the emergence of the revolution (1968) to its integration, Camatte's thought accepts transformation without denying its origins. It is therefore not a question of playing Marx against Marx in an attempt for the umpteenth time to save him, but of playing Marx against his future and of being forced to go beyond him. This is why it has often been easier for the "ultra-left" galaxy to forget Camatte, to dismiss him as "crazy", to not tackle his analyses head-on and to hide them behind their unacceptable consequences, even though his influence through the journal Invariance has been, even today, decisive.¹  Yet, to undergo such a negative experience – an examination of one's own conscience in relation to what one held to be true – does not amount to abandoning oneself to the path of despair. For, as he indicates in the article ‘Towards the Human Community,’²  his journey, while not disjointed from that of "the species," can be summed up as the reconciliation of the young Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts with the thought of Amadeo Bordiga. For those who have not read Marx – or who have not been made by it – let us simply say that, faced with the unreason of rationality, Camatte did not simply take refuge behind Marxist theory as a substitute for truth. He continued to hunger for meaning and did not snack on the old workers' programme to fill his empty stomach; on the contrary, he whetted his appetite by confronting it with its own aporias.

Reading Camatte is therefore not a break with Marx and his followers. It is the inscription of the need to remember an "impersonal" thought – albeit fetishized by the cult of the one who was the "vector" of its enunciation – which would no longer be able to grasp the state of things. If someone must be brought down, it is perhaps not the father himself, but his ghost who prowls around and tirelessly leads us up the garden path. Not to kill the father, but to desacralize him, to recognize where and when he is surpassed, where and when he is nothing more than a spectre haunting the past. It must be said that Camatte is perhaps not a voice that speaks to those who, for good or bad reasons, have not once called themselves "Marxists." It is difficult to find a text in which Marx is not cited or, at least, mentioned. The reader is obliged to accept this omnipresence. But Camatte's voice, coming from the innards of Marx, will clearly indicate to those who think of refounding a critical, even revolutionary, thought – at the dawn of new concepts, metaphysical revolutions or even new materialities – that walking with Marx can sometimes allow us to reach the same summits. Moreover, such a path, as long as it remains present in memory, can avoid many pitfalls when it comes to opening new ones. Reading Camatte is to understand that starting with Marx does not mean invariably returning to him.

However, the content of this memory cannot be reduced to the heavy clogs of class struggle, which should be brandished like a torch as the era darkens. On the contrary, it is a demystified relationship with history, a search not for "origins," but for historical presuppositions (and, from a certain development of Camatte's thought, biological and paleontological presuppositions) that mark our existences. Understanding, therefore, where "we" start from in order to know where and how to go from "primitive human communities to the future human community."³

The entire first part of his theoretical work – inseparable from the journal Invariance,⁴  of which he was the founder and, to this day, the main driving force – precisely seeks to make visible, behind the latent confusion of the 1960s and its cargo of concepts (bureaucratization, industrial society, consumer society, etc.), the main mediator in all human relations: capital. In this way, it was once again possible to fully consider a subject that, according to Camatte, could still bring about communism: the proletariat. In these years, he therefore did not yet distance himself from the Marxist, and more precisely Bordigist, doxa through which he had constructed himself. On the contrary, he reaffirmed it against the International Communist Party (ICP), with which he broke in 1966 and which, through figures such as Lucien Laugier or Suzane Voute – and with Bordiga’s approval – was sinking into an activist tendency.

At this time, Camatte maintained the academic position of a communist militant. The period being considered counter-revolutionary, the partisan, for his part, must then only seek to deepen the theory of the proletariat. This is thus considered "invariant". It is the content of the party and defines it.⁵  This content includes the theoretical work of Marx as well as the political positions that he held, with Engels, during his lifetime: the Commune, the Second International and the struggle against its degeneration, the revolution of 1917, the Third International, the rejection of democracy and of any sacred union. As a journal, Invariance therefore had only one goal: "the reformation of the communist party." The model of the party remains the position of Marx and Engels ("the Marx-party") after the defeat of the proletariat in 1850: to leave the Communist League and continue theoretical work. Nevertheless, from issues 1 to 7 of the first series of Invariance, Camatte and his comrades already propose a vision that will lay the foundations for an overcoming to come. First, the conception of the party is not limited to its content alone, but it must already be the "prefiguration of communist society."

Camatte gently waters and tends the desire for a community-party, although it is not the community that makes the party. Then, through a study of "the unpublished 6th chapter of Capital and the theoretical work of Marx"⁶ , he establishes the foundations that will make it possible to undertake a demystifying of the world as "the material community of capital.” He does this by extending the concepts of "formal domination" and "real domination" (today translators of Marx prefer the notion of ‘subsumption’ to that of ‘domination’) to the making of society. Although immediately invisible, capital has not disappeared, far from it; for Camatte, it has succeeded in subjecting the ensemble of human activities to its own production. Capital has made the world its substance, and this is how the counter-revolutionary era must be understood. Value has become autonomous, capital is a movement, a process that no longer needs the mediation of other traditional spheres (the State, religion, etc.) to exist and maintain itself. Camatte is still very dependent on Marxist thought here. Indeed, for him, the main contradiction to capital remains the devaluation consubstantial with the valorisation process, and therefore, only the proletariat, starting from a crisis of production, can destroy it. However, as a class that negates capital and has henceforth established itself as a material community, the proletariat no longer carries within itself only its own liberation, but that of all humanity. Camatte will thus speak of a "revolution with a human title."

It is therefore firstly a relationship to history, and more precisely to a history of a world that denies its history, that presents itself as an immediacy of the eternal, as immutable. It is not a simple historical perspective that allows us to answer the question "how did we get here?"; rather, it is a question of finding, behind metaphysical conceptions that ignore each other, the trace not only of capital, but also and above all of the human species, the trace of death and, importantly, that of life.

The Camattian heresy only really begins in Invariance Series 1 No.8, mainly with ‘Transition’ co-written with Gianni Collu (also a former PCI activist who broke with the latter in 1966 to join Invariance in 1968, he notably wrote the ‘Introductory Theses’ in issue 6). It is not established directly with the betrayal of the invariance of the theory of the proletariat, but mainly through the definition of the party. For them, the real domination of capital over society has reached such a stage that no political organization can transform its course, because the very essence of the material community is organization. Political voluntarism can then only be a false representation of the subject it claims to represent, which thus leads it not to generate revolution, but to make it its racket in order to maintain itself on the "social screen."

The party as an organization that gives a revolutionary form to the masses can only boast of being a prefiguration of communism, but never truly embody it. Only the immediate negation of capital by the proletarians themselves (in insurrection) can do this. These are the lessons of May 1968 and the Black riots in the United States. Echoing Adorno's 1942 considerations on class theory⁷  (without citing him), the authors of ‘Transition’ offer that any political endeavour be considered as a racket. There is therefore a break with Marxist doxa, Leninism, and with the content that defined the party. Only the party in its historical dimension is therefore acceptable, that is, in the immediacy of the communist revolution. The task that the journal Invariance sets itself is therefore no longer the reformation of the communist party, but to "fight against the erroneous ‘theories produced from bygone eras and simultaneously highlight the future of communism".⁸  From then on, the fight against all methods of racketeering as the "real movement" becomes predominant for Camatte. Such a refusal will be a springboard to free itself from all dogmatism, because it is soon Marxism itself that will be considered a racket.

Faced with the failure of Bordiga's prophecy, Camatte did not simply remain in his own corner to perfect a theory of the proletariat (this was notably the case with the Communism or Civilization group, which in 1976 swore only by the first seven issues of Invariance and continued to work – still today– on refining and rereading sacred texts). He confronted capital and, with the members of Invariance, notably Jean-Louis Darlet, sought to understand its transformations. One thing is certain: the capital of the 1970s was no longer the same as that of the late 19th century (not stupid). The law of value, and therefore its corollary, the theory of the proletariat, could undergo transformations without the capitalist mode of production having been destroyed. In other words: "invariance varied."⁹

In Jean-Louis Darlet's article ‘Beyond Value, Superfusion of Capital’ (which will be a groundwork for Camatte's developments), the abolition of the gold standard, the universalization of wage labour, the indistinction between productive (surplus value) and unproductive (surplus value) labour, as well as the planetary scale on which capital is now deployed, and all this thanks to the erection of fictitious capital (which is no longer a parasitic sector of the mode of production that Marx theorized, but the last form that capital takes) and therefore the omnipotence of credit, all these allow capital to encompass the contradiction on which any revolution of the proletariat should be made possible: the devalorisation that the valorisation process implies. It is at this precise moment when capital is no longer anything but pure representation, when only its form remains, that it extends its hold to the entirety of human activities. It has become the very mystification of communism "through its objective and subjective community," it "anthropomorphizes itself":  it colonizes minds. Thus, if the theory of the law of value is outdated, so is that of the proletariat. The revolutionary subject is no longer the producer of wealth (surplus value), it has been integrated.

An issue later, Camatte published the article ‘Wandering of Humanity, Repressive Consciousness, Communism,’ which explained the transcendence of Marxism. Marxism is seen as a theory from a bygone era that must be considered a racket as long as it still seeks to gain a grip on reality while denying its anachronism. Based on the same observations as Jean-Louis Darlet, Camatte declared that there was no longer any class that represented future humanity. The liquidation of bourgeois society was replaced by a struggle between organized gangs. There was no longer any safeguard for capital; it could thus achieve its domination by escaping from human control. It was therefore no longer tenable to believe, with Marx, that it was in the development of the forces of production that there could still be revolutionary certainty.

Again, the belief in the development of the contradiction between the proletariat and capital gives the latter the weapons to sharpen its own longevity. "Historical materialism is the sanctification of the wandering into which humanity has sunk for more than a century; the increase of productive forces is the sine qua non condition of liberation. Now, by definition, all quantitative increase moves in the sphere of the indefinite, of the false infinite. Who will fix the “height” of the productive forces, to determine the arrival of the great day?”¹⁰  At the same time as Camatte closes the doors of Marxism and its revolutionary subject, he allows himself, from a relationship to history which goes beyond the classical origins of the universal commodity form (development of trade and monetary circulation, rise of cities, colonization and wage labor), to put humanity back on the front of the stage (from the history of a particular technique and its relationship to nature which has become global: domestication), because the stripped human being “tends to be reduced to its biological dimension.”

From there, and more powerfully with ‘This World That We Must Leave,’ Camatte immerses himself in the search for a new dynamic. This dynamic, often considered by the entire communist left as a-class and therefore counter-revolutionary, is nevertheless the fruit of a journey that tirelessly returns to confront Marx, Bordiga and the analysis of capital. If revolution is no longer possible except as "biological and cosmic," it is precisely because it can no longer be either political or social, due to the very fact of capital and its accomplished despotism. To walk with Camatte is to experience a rational abandonment of rationality as a revolutionary perspective, without, however, advocating an irrational rationality.

It is an entire world that must be left, knowing why, and not by the hasty departure implied by the realised mystification. To leave Marxism, therefore, because it no longer allows one to reject this world, but doing so by refraining from becoming fascinated by what produced its anachronism. Camatte's work conjures up a language that has exhausted itself, a language whose grammatical rules still allow for new formulations, but which will never create anything "authentically new" (Bloch), a garrulous language without poetry. Nevertheless, by rejecting both the social and the political as a sphere of possible deployment of the revolution, it can sometimes be difficult to grasp where the collapse of capital’s despotism can concretely emerge from. The research that Camatte embarked upon from the 1970s onwards is today very close to the very propositions of political ecology and their alternativism (exit from productivism, destruction of the species, relationship to non-humans, relationship to death, etc.), but it does not sink into latent reformism or a form of racketeering, because it carries within it the unfolding of a thought that is one with a profound desire for secession. It unfolds as an attempt to desert capital and its representations, starting from a look into the distant past, not to glorify it, but to extract from it the experiences that allow for the forging of another form of life.

Our understandable panic is matched only by our enthusiasm, and we will be reactionaries and revolutionaries, heretics and prophets.¹¹

Translated by Howard Slater
Original text at https://entetement.com/camatte-lheretique/