Camatte

[Yuppie Grinder]

I've seen a lot of anarchists and left-coms talking about this guy lately.
From what I gather this dude was a member of the ICP but left after they started cooperating with people who didn't hold the exact same views as them and actually doing activist work. Then he became a sort of proto-primitivist. He believed liberal capitalism has become "totalitarian" and that the working class has no hope for emancipation. He wrote a lot about reconnecting with nature.
That all sounds very, very bad to me. So fans of Camatte, why do you dig the guy? What's some good stuff to read to get the gist of his thought?

[StockholmSyndrome]

I'd say the primitivist milieu can be divided into 2 general camps: post-Marxists and New Agers. The post-Marxists are the John Zerzans and Fredy Perlmans who were highly influenced by Camatte, and the New Agers are the Derrick Jensens and Daniel Quinns who think humanity has suffered a spiritual fall from grace because we like to know where our next meal is coming from.

Basically, the post-Marxists, and Camatte generally, take dialectics off the deep end. They believe capital has completely subsumed humanity and there can no longer be any talk of "class". For them, the paradigm has shifted from bourgeoisie vs proletariat to humanity vs "capital" (by which they mean basically everything human beings have ever created.) Somewhere down the line they decided that capital is no longer a "social relation between persons that is mediated by things", but that it is instead a "thing" in and of itself. They are lost in an idealistic and romantic haze as far as I'm concerned.

[Flying Purple People Eater]

Basically, the post-Marxists, and Camatte generally, take dialectics off the deep end. They believe capital has completely subsumed humanity and there can no longer be any talk of "class". For them, the paradigm has shifted from bourgeoisie vs proletariat to humanity vs "capital" (by which they mean basically everything human beings have ever created.) Somewhere down the line they decided that capital is no longer a "social relation between persons that is mediated by things", but that it is instead a "thing" in and of itself. They are lost in an idealistic and romantic haze as far as I'm concerned.

What the fuck are they smoking!?

This is why I hate metaphysics!

[Let's Get Free]

This is the first time I've heard of him.

[Brosa Luxemburg]

Actually, he has some descent work before he dwells into primitivism

The Democratic Mystification

Origin and Function of the Party Form

I enjoy his work from his left communist and Bordigist years, but after that I really could care less.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

I don't think it's fair to call Camatte's analysis of "the real domination of capital" "dialectics off the deep end". Whether or not one agrees with the political conclusions he draws, I think his understanding of the development of capital, the way it changes class relationships, and the character of the material means of production produced by capital in the phase of its "real domination" is very valuable.
After all, at this point, don't we find the working class confronting itself in anticapitalist struggle? Can we really continue to understand the working class, in its development, to necessarily carry with it a communist project?
That's not to say that I think the working class should be abandoned as a site of potentially revolutionary/emancipatory subjectivity, only that it ought to be rethought, teased out in new ways, and grappled with as a problem rather than a solution.
Eh?

[Ravachol]

Tbh if anything, the typical 'leftist' reaction to the 'p-word' has pushed me closer to it. I can't stand the knee-jerk reaction within some milieus that shuts off all critical thought.

But, moving on:

Basically, the post-Marxists, and Camatte generally, take dialectics off the deep end. They believe capital has completely subsumed humanity and there can no longer be any talk of "class". For them, the paradigm has shifted from bourgeoisie vs proletariat to humanity vs "capital" (by which they mean basically everything human beings have ever created.)

You're roughly correct but not completely. Camatte's position holds that capital has completed its shift from formal subsumption (ie. a previous mode of production is subjected to capital's domination through a process of primitive accumulation and is integrated into its logic, the production process and the process of social reproduction, however, are largely untouched) to real subsumption (in this phase, through its increasing integration into the logic of capital, the process of social reproduction determines and is determined by the logic of capital, as is the production process. As such, the proletariat as the driving subject of capital has its desires and its very form of being determined by capital).

This shift is sometimes periodized in a very rigorous fashion (usually with the shift from fordism to post-fordism in the late '70s) but is at other times seen as dual processes, where formal subsumption followed by real subsumption colonize more and more of the wold and our very being, throwing up new terrain to be colonized in the process. The proletariat as such is always a category of capital (as variable capital), the difference is that under real subsumption, according to Camatte, it more or less loses its position as the revolutionary subject.

A critical introduction to Camatte can be found here: http://theanarchistlibrary.org/libra...-of-liberation

There's differences between Camatte, Perlman and Zerzan though.

Perlman (in his later years) goes further than Camatte and his analysis is rooted in an anthropological excavation of civilisation itself, the rise of class society and its roots in agriculture, sedentism, the production of surplus, etc. To him, the distinction of formal vs. real subsumption is a moot point because the essence of civilization prefigured this.

Zerzan is largely in sync with Perlman's vision in 'Against his-story, against leviathan' but places more emphasis on the role the division of labour, the technological compositions that led to the expansion of the division of labour, the role of abstract thought as a prefiguration of mediation and alienation, etc.

I don't agree with everything authors from this particular current write, but they have some really valuable insights regarding technology, the structure of capital, 'progress', etc. which no serious communist can ignore and would do well to engage with instead of remain stuck in 19th century chimney utopias.

Somewhere down the line they decided that capital is no longer a "social relation between persons that is mediated by things", but that it is instead a "thing" in and of itself. They are lost in an idealistic and romantic haze as far as I'm concerned.

His point was that the real subsumption of humanity by capital had made capital the only horizon, the very material community upon which our reproduction rested. Capital was thus 'anthropomorphized' (which it is, given that capital appears to us as the subject of history, as becomes clear in phrases such as 'the markets were shocked at' or 'the economy requires').

What these currents were very good at, as Virgin Molotov Cocktail pointed out, is that they pointed towards class belonging (ie. the class-in-itself as well as the class-for-itself, acting as a class that is) as the final limit that restrains the proletariat to be a category of capital. The situationists (as well as the earlier illegalists, it could be argued), with their poetic proclamations of 'never work', hinted at this same specter, though from a very different perspective.