𝗝𝗮𝗰𝗾𝘂𝗲𝘀 𝗖𝗮𝗺𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲 - 𝘏𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘍𝘦𝘢𝘳, 𝘑𝘶𝘮𝘱 𝘏𝘦𝘳𝘦! (1975)
This text, newly translated and published by Endnotes last year, contains both the brilliance of Jacques Camatte and some concepts, in embryo, that would lead to the decay of his thought.
This text, newly translated and published by Endnotes last year, contains both the brilliance of Jacques Camatte and some concepts, in embryo, that would lead to the decay of his thought.
Camatte traces the concepts of formal and real domination, the restructuring of capital in the 70s, and the collapse of the proletariat's power qua proletariat in its conflictual relation to capital. The article, by turns brilliant and maddening, is worth close study.
Jacques Camatte wrote to Bordiga as a young man, and eventually became a militant of the International Communist Party (ICP), an inheritor of the legacy of the factory struggles in Italy in 1919 and of battle against Stalinist degeneration.
As the 1960s came to a close, Camatte broke with the ICP, although he continued to write in and publish Invariance, a journal he began as an ICP militant. Camatte was an early theorist of the restructuring of capital, the death of the labor movement, and the collapse of Marxism.
He would go on to develop a theory that capital, through its real domination, had domesticated and dominated humanity to the point that humanity was identical with the 'material community' of capital, and thus we find ourselves in "The World We Must Leave", which we must "exit."
While never positioned firmly within the milieu, Camatte came to argue for a sort of primitivism. This brought him into contact with Catholic reactionaries and other traditionalists in revolt against the 'modern world'. This contact, sadly, was not just of convenience.
In his fraternization with reactionaries, Camatte would deepen reactionary positions (seen in this piece with his disgusting characterization of abortion as a 'horrible act'). However, he never became a conservative and retained, on some level, a radical against this world.
Jacques Camatte's death was announced on April 20th, 2025. In his later years, he defended Greta Thunberg's environmentalism, and still spoke out against capital in its monstrous colonization of human beings towards its own ends. May we all, someday, leave this world.
*remained
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