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This World We Must Leave by Jacques Camatte

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This World We Must Leave by Jacques Camatte THIS WORLD WE MUST LEAVE AND OTHER ESSAYS JACQUES CAMATTE THIS WORLD WE MUST LEAVE AND OTHER ESSAYS NEW AUTONOMYSERIES Jim Fleming & Peter Lamborn Wilson, Editors TAZ WHORE CARNIVAL THE TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS Shannon Bell ZONE, ON TOLOGICAL ANARCHY, POETIC TERRORISM X-TEXTS Hakim Bey Derek Pell THIS Is YOUR FINAL WARNING! CRACKING THE MOVEMENT Thom Metzger SQUATTING BEYOND THE MEDIA Foundation for the Advancement FRIENDLY FIRE of Illegal Knowledge Bob Black THE LIZARD CLUB CALIBAN AND THE WITCHES Silvia Federici Steve Abbott FIRST AND LAST EMPERORS INvISIBLE GOVERNANCE THE ABSOLUTE STATE & THEART OF AFRICANM!CROPOLIDCS THE BODY OF THE DESPOT David Hecht& Maliqalim Simone Kenneth Dean & Brian Massumi WARCRAFT WIGGLING WISHBONE Jonathan Leake STORIESOF PATASEXUAL SPECULATION Bart Plantenga THIS WORLD WE MUST LEAVE Jacques Camatte CRIMES OF CULTURE Richard Kastelanetz THE ELECTRONIC DISTURBANCE PIRATE UTOPIAS Critical Art Ensemble MOORISH CoRSA!RS & EUROPEANRENEGADOES SPECTACULAR TIMES Larry Law Peter Lamborn Wilson ELECI'RONICCIVIL DISOBEDIENCE FUTURE PRIMITIVE Critical Art Ensemble John Zerzan THIS WORLD WE MUST LEAVE AND OTHER ESSAYS JACQUES CAMATTE EDITED BY ALEX TROTTER AUTONOMEDIA Anti-copyright @ 1995, Jacques Camatte & Autonomedia. This book may be freelypirated & quoted. The author and publisher, however, would like to be so informed at: Autonomedia POB 568 Williamsburgh Station Brooklyn, New York 11211-0568 Phone & Fax: 718-963-2603 Printed in the United States of America. CONTENTS Introduction ............................................................................ 7 On Organization (cowritten with Gianni Collu, 1972) ........ 19 The Wandering of Humanity (1973) .................................... 39 Against Domestication (1973) ............................................. 91 This World We Must Leave (1976) ................................... 137 Echoes of the Past (1980) .................................................. 181 Index .................................................................................. 25 1 INTRODUCTION erein are gathered several essays by Jacques Camatte, editor of the journal Invariance, that exist in English Htranslation. This is the first of three volumes of Camatte's writings to be published by Autonomedia. 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 tenden­ cies to it today are the International Communist Current (to whom Camatte is a bete noire), the remnants of council com­ munism, 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 westernEuro pe. (More information aboutthe PCI and other currents in the Italian communist left is contained in a transla­ tor's footnoteto "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 7 8 JACQUES CAMATTE 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 influencedby 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 pro­ grams. His attitude toward individualist anarchism is ambiva­ lent. He credits it with having maintained the spark of rebel­ lion, 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, Benj amin 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. THIS WORLD WE MUST LEAVE 9 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 capitalisUsocialist mode of pro­ duction. 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 (com­ pare this with the Gaia hypothesis). In North America, Black and Red press, which was the firstto 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 indi­ viduality 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 10 JACQUES CAMATTE modem depersonalized and collective capitalist, the capitalist without capital whose stock in trade is speculation and ideo­ logical 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 counterrevolu­ tion, when there is little activity, revolutionaries should main­ tain loose networks of personal contacts to maintain the conti­ nuity 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 formalparty. The communist move­ ment 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 Domestica­ tion," and "This World We Must Leave" Camatte criticizes marxism in greater depth. Marx had proclaimed in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, "Com­ munism 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 forthe realization of the human community. If com­ munism has been a possibility since the middle of the nine­ teenth century, then subsequent history can be described as the THIS WORLD WE MUST LEAVE 11 frustrated, bloody, and increasingly desperate wandering of humanity away from its own real interests, resultingin the mis­ ery 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 uncon­ scious of its
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