Jacques Camatte

The work of Jacques Camatte is surrounded by an authentic conspiracy of silence. It must be said that unlike so many other revolutionary theorists, he didn't betray, he didn't surrender, he didn't seek public recognition. Coming from a heterodox Marxism, he has imperturbably followed his uncompromising path until today. But the most unforgivable thing - as you will see when reading the few cardinal texts we publish in this volume - is undoubtedly that he accurately described, almost fifty years ago now, the fatal historical course in which capital and civilization were dragging the human species. Fifty years ago he saw the constitution of the technological society in a monstrous apparatus imprisoning the planet, ravaging all nature, mediatizing all relations, and the vital necessity to desert such a world. He saw the emptiness of contemporary subjectivities, the anxiety that propels them, and the widespread aspiration to a true human community. You have to read Jacques Camatte, because understanding the historical process is one of the rare ways not to become as crazy as the times we are going through.
(From the headline of the book Errance de l'humanité, by Jacques Camatte, Éditions la Tempête, Bordeaux 2021.)

Finding Camatte

An encounter with Camatte is the happy obligation to embark on a cheminer - a departure, a going towards something, even if it is just a place where one can stop and reflect, where one can even turn back while looking forward. Jacques Camatte keeps the elusive, but powerful, artificiality contained within the pretensions of dialogue at a distance and, instead, invites us readers and admirers to go on a journey, a search, a walk with him, and in so doing one might have the privilege of talking with him. This is what happened to us when we visited him in April 2016, and which we then intended to communicate in an issue of the magazine. That journey and path is transparently aimed for in our project of translating his works: to make the process a comprehensive human experience. By doing so - and all the more so in this moment of irreversible crisis in the thought and civilization of the West - we are abandoning anything (competition, the world, intellectual customs, ancient certainties) that is dragging us toward extinction. and all the while in a situation where everyone is feeling that the human species must attempt a reversal. The nature of this encounter with Camatte is also communicated in a text on the Cercle Marx website, presenting an interview with Camatte:

In October 2019, we had the honour and pleasure of meeting Jacques Camatte for an interview. A former friend and companion of Bordiga, Jacques Camatte was born in 1935 and has elaborated extensively and constructively on Marx's work in the magazine Invariance, founded in 1968. [...] Jacques Camatte can be considered a “wise man” (almost in the Aristotelian sense of the term): a good and deeply kind man who has come to a form of self-sufficiency in a relationship of contemplative harmony with nature.

In the manner of Descartes who, in Discours de la méthode told the story of a man lost in the woods, we too got ‘lost’ in the middle of the woods, which meant we had to continue to the end of the path. where we met Jacques. After a long journey through nature we finally found Jacques in a magnificent place in the middle of the trees, far from alienating civilization.

Notice

Jacques Camatte (born 1935) was a prominent radical Marxist theoretician in European left-communist circles during the fifties and sixties. However, the events around 1968, particularly in France, caused him to gradually shed his left-communist affiliations. He saw that humanity was now caught in an impasse. There could no longer be any overthrowing of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat because all of humanity had now become ‘domesticated’ by capital. Therefore, any organised revolt against capital now only helped it develop. His proposal is that instead of fighting capital - a strategy that, if ‘successful’, only returns capital to us in a stronger form - we must abandon it. The taking leave of this capitalist world entails recreating connections with the natural world. it does not mean going to war against capital in order to topple it. Since the 1980s, he argues, capital has moved from the domination of humanity in a living social structure to a dead, or robotic, autonomous form in which humanity has become effectively obsolete: humanity has been fully incorporated into the autonomous form. but the residues of ‘naturalness’ in the human species are a drag on the speed of development. So, in the current era we are seeing the dramatic acceleration of the processes that are removing all forms of natural life from the planet, including those residues within human beings. Humanity has, if you like, unleashed a monster that has run away from all control, even swallowing its own masters, and which is now setting the final scene for an unprecedented mass extinction. The only way we can save life on the planet, according to Camatte, is to abandon the fight against capital at the same time as we abandon capital itself - by living differently. In the process of this withdrawal capital will ossify and ‘die’. like a zombie might ‘die’ if it is starved of brains. For Camatte, the current pandemic and the responses to it are symptoms of the final stages in the degeneration of the human species. Despite the dire signs, Camatte hopes recent events will help foster an awakening that may lead to the eventual regeneration of the planet. His writings over the decades can be found here. The original article in French is here. Camatte's core concept of ‘wandering’ describes the journeys humanity has taken since beginning to separate itself from the natural world and becoming uncertain of what the species - that is, itself, or Homo sapiens - actually is. Once separated from nature and having been permeated with doubt the species has sought by, all manner of means, to find justification for its existence and a purpose. It also felt “the need to create a sheltered world”, and it is in this sheltered but traumatic plane of existence that history, or wandering, takes place. It is, therefore, effective and useful to think of this wandering as history, or to think of history as a wandering.