Jacques Camatte And the
New Politics of Liberation

Dave Antagonism

2004-2005
Contents

‘The Despotism of Capital

‘The Domestication of Humanity
Paradise Now!

‘The Revolt of Humanity Against Capital

Editors’ Note

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17
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2
During the final decade of the 20" century and into the
carly years of the 21, the nature of radical polities funda-
‘mentally changed. The hegemonic currents, Marist-Leninism
and social democracy, suffered from the sea-change of neo-
liberalism, and had difficulty grappling with the new currents
of opposition embodied in such things as the Zapatista
Uprising, radical ecology and the anti-summit movements.
On a deeper level many of the fundamentals of traditional
Leftism had been unsettled intellectually by post-modernism
and by the changes of social organization that accompanied
the growth of post-Fordist capitalism, not to mention the fall
of the USSR and the regimes of Eastern Europe. This crisis
of the Left was quickly interpreted as the universal victory
of Liberal Democracy. However it is now clear that social
antagonism, often of a revolutionary anti-capitalist nature,
has not departed; rather it is re-asserting itself in ways that
seem unintelligible to traditional political analysis.

One of these new currents is green anarchy/anarcho-
primitivism (GA/AP). Consciously anti-ideological, it s rather
abroad church of numerous tendencies and trajectories united
by an anarchie politics that details a critique that goes beyond
opposition to the state and market to a larger critique of
civilization and its totality. Its roots are also broad, coming out
of elements of radical ecological politics (especially around
groups like Earth First! UK and the Animal Liberation Front),
various counter-cultures and the ultra-left. I is the purpose
of this essay Lo investigate one of the ultra-left authors that
GA/AP has been deeply influenced by, yet who remains
Largely ignored by wider audiences: Jacques Camatte.

Camatte is a difficult figure for English speaking readers
His political origins are deeply immersed in the ultra-left, yet
his political trajectory goes beyond them. The ultra-left is
Largely ignored in English speaking countries except as a foil
to Lenin'’s polemics or as a European curiosity. Camatte comes
out of the Italian Communist Left (though he is French) and

5
ke them shares a deep engagement with Marx at the level of
high theory that can be bewildering to the uninitiated. Whilst
he was an essayist for nearly 40 years (mostly published in
the journal Invariance) there exists only one English-language
collection of his essays: This World We Must Leave & Other
Essays, published by the eclectic label Autonomedia (home of
many of the more serious works of contemporary radicalism.)

Camatte, however, has had some strong influences amongst
(GA/AP). Later issues of Do or Die, the pre-eminent theoreti-
cal journal of GA/AP in the UK, with a wide readership in the
broader ecology movement, cite him on a number of occasions
David Watson, prominent theoretician of Fifth Estate, the pub-
lication that in many ways was the first to articulate a thorough
GA/AP praxis in the USA, shows an engagement with Camatte.
Camatte’s writings on organization profoundly influenced the
development of the publication Green Anarchist. More broadly
though, Camatte charts the same political territory as GA/AP
in a sophisticated way. He carries many of the same strengths
and weaknesses of the broader current(s) and is thus useful for
constructing a (post)-modern anarchic practice.

However, Camatte is no anarchist himself. Like the ultra-
eft his vision is communist and maintains a deep engagement
with Marx. He is (like Marx maybe?) not, though, a “Marxist™
Camatte writes, “We (the journal Invariance) integrate Marx's
work (since he especially is concerned) but we do not pose a
Marxist theory nor our own theory” This is not merely seman-
tics but rather evidence of Camatte’s attempts to build praxis
through the refusal of ideology a tendency he shares with many
radicals that emerged out of the near-revolution of May 68
However, his reliance on Marx would make him unacceptable
for many anarchists for whom Marx is anathema. Camatte's
vision of communism has, of course, nothing to do with the
statist regimes of the USSR et al. Indeed, Camatte affirms a vi-
sion of communism that is not only anti-statist but one that
connects with deeper associations of gemeinwesen. To quote:

6
“Communism puts an end to castes, classes and
the division of labor (onto which was grafted the
movement of value, which in turn animates and ex-
alts this division). Communism is first of all union.
It s not domination of nature but reconciliation,
and thus regeneration of nature: human beings no
longer treat nature simply as an object for their de-
velopment, as a useful thing, but as a subject (not
in the philosophic sense) not separate from them if
only because nature is in them. The naturalization
of man and the humanization of nature (Marx) are
realized: the dialectic of subject and object ends™

“This vision of communism is obviously libertarian, and
one could argue goes beyond many anarchist visions such as
anarcho-syndicalism, which only poses the self-management
of the division of labor as an alternative, and glorifies
production and work.

“This essay will grapple with two of Camatte’s key theoret-
ical themes: the despotism of capital and the domestication of
humanity. Both arguably chart the course of social relations
under the conditions of the real subsumption of society by cap-
ital and are key themes (even if they are not expressed in the
same language) of much of the GA/AP critique.

‘The Despotism of Capital

Camatte asserts that we have entered a particular period of
capitalism, which he calls the “Despotism of Capital”. This is
a situation in which capital has created and forms a “material
community” and a “human community™ in other words it is
the condition of real subsumption: a situation where human ac-
tivity takes place in the interior of capital. Previously we could
typify capitalism as a “nomadic war machine” (Deuleze & Guat-
tari). That s, an expansive apparatus or an ensemble(s) of appa-

7
ratuses, that attempts to de/reterritorialise, reform and capture
people, space and activity. This war machine had a combative
frontier and thus there is something beyond it: an exterior. Dif-
ferent discourses place radical potential in this exterior, seeing
in it both a boundary and a negating force to capital. This ex-
terior was conceptualized as a number of social forces: the in-
dustrial proletariat (Marxism); the third world peasantry (Mao-
ism); or students and marginal groups (the New Left),for exam-
ple.

Camatte theorizes a different situation, one in which no sub-
stantial boundaries none that can not be overcome to capital
exist. Indeed, it is not the case that capital dominates society,
as some kind of lording power, but rather that it itself consti-
tutes the entire community. This situation of the Despotism of
Capital is typified by a number of conditions. One is that is
has undergone a process of “autonomization” This is a situa

tion in which the various elements of capital production, ex-
change, rent, the state etc, increasingly fuse together and es-
cape any previous human constrictions on their development
‘The second process is one of anthropomorphosis. Here capital
transforms itself into nothing more than human behavior and
human behavior into nothing more than capital. This happens
through capital’s tendency to ultimately head towards a state
of representation and thus able to mediate all human interac-
tions, and comprise all of humanity’s relationships within its
terrain.

Almost intuitively it is possible to see the merit in Ca-
matte’s assertions. Human life seems to have taken on an
increasingly massified form as it is constructed from cradle to
grave within the dominant institutions of capital. Lived experi-
ence takes place on the terrain of school, hospital, work place,
Internet, shopping center, movie theatre etc, i. within all the
realms of the many hierarchies of capital, so much so that life
becomes defined within the terms of these hierarchies. The
institutions themselves become increasingly fused and unified

8
into a whole. Moments of production and consumption, of
work and leisure, of public and private seem to move to a more
or less undifferentiated experience. Especially if we consider
the advent and application of various digital and cybernetic
technologies, we see a tendency toward the blending and
standardization of daily life. (Note: Interestingly, part of this
process is the invention of consumer difference. Niche markets
are marshaled out of the memory of uniqueness or the cultural
singularity of a previous time, what Camatte calls “Echoes of
the Past”, that both feeds a desire for otherness yet negates its
possibility). Subjectivity, whether it be as a student, mother,
worker (all three at the same time?) or whatever, seems to
be nothing more than a deeply personalized fetishization
of the imagery of capital. For Camatte, capital reintroduces
subjectivity. For it is through the production of individual
identities that are understandable only through the framework
of capital, that the entirety of human activity can be subsumed
within exploitative relationships.

Continuing on the theme of fetishism and representa-
tion, it is now commonplace to talk of the total mediation
of life through the representations of capital. Surely this
is Baudrillard's simulacrum or Debord's spectacle! All of
them allude to the situation of total commodity fetishism,
where the fetishism has totally outstripped the realness of
any use-value the commodity once possessed. It seems these
observations are so obvious to be almost banal. It is worth
stressing, though, what this means for the formation of social
relationships. The situation of (almost) total domination of
representation/fetishism s one where there is a disappearing
ability to have an unmediated relationship with anything. All
relationships tend towards their conception, formation and
end within the realm of capital. To quote:

“Asaresult of this process of anthro-pomorphosis,
capital becomes in turn a spectacle. It assimilates
to itself and incorporates in itself all qualities of
men, all their activities, without ever being one of
them, otherwise it would deny itself by substan-
tialization, inhibition of its life process”

‘The Despotism of Capital has not emerged out of nowhere.
Camatte cites two major reasons for its trajectory: the mas-
sive growth in productive forces and the effect of various
pre-capitalist presuppositions of capital. Classical Marxism be-
lieved that whilst capitalism would bring into being immense
productive forces, it would at one point reach “decadence” and
become a hindrance to their development. It would be up to
socialism and then communism to continue the development
of productive forces. Camatte thoroughly rejects this, arguing
that the development of productive forces has been crucial
in establishing the despotism of capital and the removal of
barriers and resistance to its power. It is this that has allowed
capital to constitute itself as a community. As Camatte writes
“ What he (Marx) presented as the project of communism
was realized by capital’. Camatte rejects this, seeing that
since capital and the productive forces have grown together
smoothly, the social relationships and the productive forces
are united in a singular “totality”. Since capital enforces its
despotism by means of “objects and things that are invested
with new modes of being the expansion of productive forces
is the expansion of the prison in which the human finds
himself or herself individually and collectively. If we take into
account the division of labor and hierarchy that are inherent in
industrial (and now cybernetic/digital) production, expansion
of the productive forces across the social terrain to the extent
that they constitute in entirety the social terrain, means vast
expansion of atomization, massification and submission.

The expansion of productive forces has led to the dom-
inance of ideologies that further deepen the despotism of
capital. One of these is science. Camatte rejects the standard

10
conception of science being a positive revolutionary force,
decrying it as the “goddess and servant of capital”. For Ca-
matte, science is nothing more than a “study of mechanism
of adaptation that will assimilate human beings and nature
into the structure of capital”. This is obviously quite a break
from traditional Marxism, and more broadly, standard leftist
thought which sides with the entire project of modernity (of
which science is a part) against pre-existing religious/mystic
consciousness. Whilst Camatte (unlike many who critique
science) has no time for the revival of new-age mysticism,
he maintains a particular vitriol for orthodox Marxism's
celebration of science and technology.

For Camatte, Marxism is a “repressive consciousness”.
Rather than being a key to revolutionary praxis it “seems
to be the authentic consciousness of the capitalist mode of
production” This is because Marxism has always posited
the development of productive forces as the sine qua non
of liberation, yet it has been the development of productive
forces that has rendered powerless the rebellion of the classical
proletariat. Marxism has thus functioned as an intellectual
justification for the development of techno-scientific rational-
ity and the massive expansion of industrialization. Indeed, the
history of labor movements and national liberation struggles
is one in which the struggle against the political control of the
bourgeoisie has worked often to actually create and extend
the despotism of capital.

Camatte not only sees the power of capital extend across
the social body but back and forth in time as well. He empha-
sizes the continuing importance of the “presuppositions of cap-
ital": the vast inheritance of the trajectory of class society that
allows capital to develop. For Camatte “[cJapital is therefore
the endpoint of the phenomena of democratization, individu-
alization, and massification, all of which had begun to emerge
well before capital had become a determinant element in the
society”. To go further:

1
“These presuppositions are: production and au-
tonomization of the individual, together with a
related movement production of private property;
production of the state and its autonomization;
production of exchange value, which can assume
highly developed forms. These elements of pre-
suppositions, which appeared at the time of the
Greek polis, are bound up with a representation
that justifies the rupture with nature and with
the community, the domination of men over
animals and plants, and the domination of men

Whilst Camatte here dates many of these developments
with the arrival of the Greek polis (and hence, in a sense, of
the “West), his investigation makes him look even further
back. Camatte questions Neolithic developments of animal
husbandry and the rise of agriculture. He sees in them the rise
of the original conception of property and patriarchy and the
original rifts in the pre-existing geimenwessen. Classically,
eritiques of technology start with the Industrial Revolution.
Here Camatte is beginning to develop the critique of capital-
ism, and thus the emergence of communism as a revolt against
civilization.

It must be made clear, however, that Camatte does not see
the Despotism of Capital as the triumph of either bourgeois
society or of the capitalist ruling class. Indeed, he argues that
capital, through its constant need to revolutionize itsel, both
destroys bourgeos society and all classes including the ruling
class, reducing us all to a general universalized proletarianized
mass. Camatte argues that both the bourgeoisie and the pro-
letariat emerged with capitalism, but their struggle with each
other, carried out on the presuppositions of capital and the un-
questioning of productive forces, led to their abolition and the
domination of society by capital. It was since proletarian strug-

12
gle was successfully “mystified” by the categories of capital,
when proletarian identity was built around the celebration of
its role of “productive laborer”, that proletarian struggles ad-
vanced the domination of society by capital

We can see this in the struggles and demands of the classic
Iabor movements. As opposed to the very earliest movements
of the proletarianized (such as the Luddites), which rejected
the idea of wage-labor, the classical labor movement celebrated
it. Classical labor movements fought for the right to workfor
the protection of their role within capitalism. This may have
seemed justifiable considering the brutality of laisse-faire cap-
italism. The effect though of mass movements of both left and
right (the popular front, fascism, liberal/social democracy, etc)
was to add to the creation of the conditions of real subsump-
tion.

‘The effect of the creation of the community of capital (by,
in part, proletarian struggle) was simultancously the general-
ization of the proletarian condition and the destruction of the
revolutionary specificity of the proletariat. Of course, the uni-
versalization of wage-labor/proletarianisation has not meant
an equalization of wealth or power under the despotism of cap-
ital. Indeed, the current global order has created a proletarian-
ized multitude that s riddled by division. Capital maintains its
rule through the imposition of opposed roles (the cop vs. the
student, for example) up and down its pyramidal structure.

How true are these claims? If we look back over the his-
tory of the labor movement, the proletariat has tended to move
further and further towards the interior of capital, and all la-
bor moves towards a condition of proletarianisation. More and
more of life takes the appearance of work, and work takes the
appearance of life. We have the situation where the condition
of wage-labor swells, but labor as a specific antagonistic class
disappears. This does not mean the end of struggle it is now
conceived on a different basis. Indeed, the simultaneous absorp-
tion and generalization of the proletariat leads to the transfor-

13
mation of all into potential antagonists: “because it (commu-
nist revolution) won't be the activity of one class only but of
humanity rising up against capital”.

‘The other side to this claim is that the ruling class, the bour-
geoisie, ceases to exist. Capital dismantles bourgeois society
with its clear restrictions and norms, because it appears in the
way of capital's total subsumption of daily life. The cultural
conflicts of the last 20-something years, the debates on public
morality and censorship, ete, have not been between a liber-
ating social force and class society, but rather between capi-
tal's desire for increasing social commodification, and the so-
cial structures from whence it emerged. Fixed rigid structures
(schools, etc) that were essential to the emergence of capital be-
come interferences in movements and flows that must be (and
are) overcome. The neo-liberal offensive has been just this, the
transformation of traditional refuges of bourgeois society into
the circuitry of capital

Is this the same as the disappearance of the ruling class?
It seems obvious that there exist strata that populate the com-
‘manding heights of the global order. But do they truly rule?
Are these sections any less dominated and alienated by capital?
Whilst ideologically, certain individuals do take on the appear-
ance of feudal Sun Kings depending on the fluctuations of vari-
ous social discourses their personal existences are not crucial to
the continuation of the social order, in the same way a king’s
or Pharaoh's is. Those who are at the top of the ziggurat of
capitalism exist totally within social structures and discourses,
and are coded by them. Whilst they are in the control tower
of society, it is the concretized and embodied mechanism that
provides the only possible courses of action. To quote David
‘Watson, “only the circuitry acts”

Camatte, writing in the 70's, foresaw the revolution as
a looming possibility and the end of capital close at hand.
Obviously that was not the case. The neo-liberal offensive
that arose as a counter-revolution to the social ferment that

1
Camatte wrote about was an active process that involved
planning and coordination. The top stratas of society were
increasingly galvanized into acting in a dynamic fashion. Neo-
liberalism made the various corporate executives, ideologies,
politicians, party leaders, communist party commissars, etc,
act like a ruling class even though objectively there may not
have actually been one.

‘The existence of hostile classes is a useful tool to explain
various social phenomena. A conscious and coordinated rul-
ing class, enriched with its own autonomy and with the ability
to dole out privilege, helps explain why an exploitative society
would survive: oppressed peoples would be deliberately held
down through repressive mechanisms. The model of the class
society is thus that of the conqueror: the rule through force of
the core over the periphery. Yet, if we now exist in the com-
munity of capital where all human behavior is part of a social
wide machinery, a social factory, (Negri, Tront, et al) where
we are slaves not to people but to the social relationships and
discourses that we make up, how does the system survive? If
we are our (and each other's) own manifestation of oppression,
why do we not just stop it? How can you explain the contin-
uation of oppression/exploitation once clear, separate classes
stop existing?

Camatte explains this phenomena as “domestication’”. In-
deed, the domestication of humanity and the rise of the despo-
tism of capital are impossible without each other: their exis-
tences allow the other to function.

‘The Domestication of Humanity

Domestication — the reduction/destruction of human-
ity's wild and autonomous subjectivity — rises with the
earliest Neolithic origins of civilization. It reaches new heights
with the origins of the despotism of industrial capital. The

15
domestication of humanity is the Social/psychological State
of the processes mentioned above. The human being under-
goes “analyzing-dissecting-fragmenting” and then “capital
reconstructs the human being as a function of its process”
‘The effect of this is that capital captures and transforms the
fundamental eritical facilities of humanity, the ability to think,
conceive, communicate and wires them as part of the broader
social circuitry. Camatte writes that “precisely because of their
mental capacities, human beings are not only enslaved, but
turned into willing slaves of capital”. The (re)production and
circulation of life-as-capital require a huge amount of deep
personal investment in all of capital’s processes. Hence, the
post-modern economy is a vast libidinal economy gripping in
constant agitation and anguish. The process of domestication
involves the recuperation of the desires for community and
individuality of gemeinwesen: ‘communal being comes in
the form of collective worker, individuality in the form of
consumer capital’. We see a recurrence of a central point
of Camatte’s thinking: that the despotism of capital is the
achievement of the premises of “communism” but in negative.

What has allowed this domestication are previous pre-
suppositions of capital that structure the behavior of humanity
in certain ways: “[t]he rupture of the body from the mind made
possible the transformation of the mind into a computer which
can be programmed by the laws of capital” This is critique
then of the project of rationality: the celebration of thought
above and outside the body, and the broad instrumentalization
of life that accompanies it. The inheritance of rationality is
the extension of the binary of mind/body into the irrational
as well. Part of the condition of domestication is the reduction
of human experience to a seemingly inert and scopohilic
state. Camatte states that “man (sic) becomes a sensual and
passive voyeur, capital a sensual and suprasensual being”
Again, only a cursory view over the representations of mass
society is enough to give some validity to this perspective. For

16
example, think of the explosion of Reality TV, where countless
thousands are desperate for a chance to move up a notch in
the Panopticon in an attempt to infuse their lives with action
and meaning

Interestingly enough, Reality TV helps give weight to Ca-
matte’s view in other ways as well. Witness how, when on air,
people are quick to behave in ways that are already scripted,
to faithfully act out all they have been taught. Here we see
people,as they are everywhere: “reflections of capital” Yet this
does not quite allow us to explain the lack of revolt. We must
go a little further. The effect of domestication is a difficulty in
the ability to begin to act autonomously. The rise of the ideolo-
gies of new social movements is for Camatte not the arrival of
new rebellious social actors but a product of the “disintegration
of consciousness™. The project of self-activity by conscious hu-
‘man beings against the totality of capital recedes to the support
of reified actors against sectional challenges. This is a condition
of the Right as well as the Left. For Camatte, the disappearance
of class and the arrival of the despotism of capital means all
politics has been reduced to a competition of various “gangs”,
none of which just embodies the fractured modes of being,

Trapped in such a huge mass, imprisoned in a global and
seemingly infinite division of labor, engaged in endless activity,
overwhelmed with ideology, s this the end for our protagonist
humanity? For Camatte “this is nothing other than the reign of
death”. Can we begin to image lines of escape?

Paradise Now!

Camatte remains a revolutionary and, as mentioned previ-
ously, was optimistic about a revolution against capital erupt-
ing in the mid 1970s. To understand this we have to see his
theorizations as theorizations of process. What he is writing
about are unfolding social tendencies that are in motion. Ca-
matte does foresee a time when domestication will be so pro-

17
lific that the nature of humanity will be fundamentally differ-
ent, just “accessories of an automated system”. But not quite
yet

There are two currents in Camatte that work to explain
the potential for revolution: one implicit in his writing and
the other explicit. The former is the concept of species-being.
‘This concept has fallen in ill repute with radicals due to
the ascendancy of the ultra-conservative ideology of socio-
biology: something that Camatte rejects. Camatte writes that
capital “having de-subtantialized everything, it simultane-
ously becomes charged with a substance that inhabits it”
In other words, even as capital captures, and recreates as
its self all human social life, there continues on, even in a
fractured and alienated state, some kind of essence of human
inter-relationship. Alienated and repressed as it i, it provides
an antagonist kernel in the heart of capital.

‘The second current s that the activity of capital creates rev-
olution itself. As seen above, capital constantly revolutionizes
social processes. Camatte argues that this constant change cre-
ates instability, a permanent sense of crisis and a fear of the
future that compels people to rebel

It is here we can locate a major flaw in the writings of
Camatte and the broader theorization of GA/AP. The flaw is
that all activity is prescribed to capital — humanity appears to
be a passive victim. If we take on Camatte’s arguments about
the presuppositions of capital, then we construct a 10,000-year
meta-narrative of constant oppression. Indeed, GA/AP writer
Zerzan describes the history of civilization as a “horror show
or death trip”. David Watson talks of the dominance of capital
as a “mega-machine” and compares it to a “hydra”. Both au-
thors then paint a picture of total dominance and inescapabil-
ity: a non-dialectic view of history. There is some justification
for this. The collapse of all serious revolutionary challenge and
the horrors of “real existing socialism” are testament to the con-
tinual power of Power. The daily-lived experience within the

18
despotism of capital is one of hopelessness: the cultural climate
being a mixture of inertia and anxiety.

“This problem seems to be almost epidemic to those who
analyze the conditions of real subsumption (Frankfurt School,
ete). By its nature, they assume the end of an exterior to capi-
tal and thus the end of the space from which resistance arises.
However, there is one tendency that escapes this quagmire: a
current we can call Autonomist Marxism (AM). It is the sug-
gestion of this essay that Camatte and GA/AP more broadly
would benefit from a reading in combination with AM (and
vice versa).

In some ways GA/AP and AM are polar opposites. A crude
reading of both sees the former as an image of the constant
power of capital, the latter as the constant power of labor.
Maybe something fertile can arise from thesis and anti-thesis?

What we can take from AM is the conception of the con-
stant antagonism of those caught up within capital as our the-
oretical starting point, and that the conditions of real subsump-
tion don't signal the end of struggle but new and shifting battle
grounds. Crucial to this understanding is to see capital not as
a state of “fetishism” but of “fetishisation” — a distinction be-
tween the concrete of domination and its concretization. The
former assumes the end point s here, that latter sees a constant
struggle that capital can never win: history is not just 10,000
years of domination, but also 10,000 of resistance both within
and without domination.

Reading Camatte through this lens, we reach an interesting
insight. Capital's condition of anthropomorphis is the transfor-
‘mation of everything into a state of tension. We are caught up
ina social relationship that s itself a permanent crisis, the tus-
sle between fetishization and anti-fetishization. Read this way,
the formation of material human community by capital, is the
formation of every aspect of lfe as struggle: the generalization
of revolt as the sine qua non of existence.

19
‘The Revolt of Humanity Against Capital

“Revolutionary struggle is struggle against domi-
nation as it appears in all times and places, and in
all the different aspects of life” — J. Holloway

“In the Beginning Was the Scream” in Revo-
lutionary Writing: Common Sense Essays in
Post-Political Politics

How can Camatte inform the creation of a viable and dy-
namic anarchic praxis? And is the struggle already throwing
up forms and gestures that share a commonality with Camatte?

To begin with a radical politics informed by Camatte sig-
nals the end of the politics of the guillotine. The image of the
revoltagainst capital being a war between two separate and dis-
tinguishable classes now finds little relevance. Instead we are
presented with a revolt of humanity against capital: against a
social relationship that is constructed out of the reification of
our own activity. Revolution is reaffirmed as self-abolition: as
the liberating destruction of the roles and behavior that make
s up and force us to remake the conditions of our own enslave-
ment. As Camatte writes: “each individual must be violent with
him/herself in order to reject, as outside themselves, the domes-
tication of capital and allits comfortable, self-validating ‘expla-
nations”™. If we consider the global dimensions of the material
community of capital, revolution grows from the self-abolition
of the proletariat, to the self-abolition of a planetary work ma-
chine — the complete and total remaking of daily life. This con-
cept of revolution goes beyond the standard ideas of both the
Left and ultra-left: of the seizing of the infrastructure of capi-
tal and applying it to new management (whether that is of the
party or councils).

Camatte is scornful of demands to occupy the factories: “so
all the prisoners of the system are supposed to take over their
prisons and begin the self-management of their own impris-

2
onment™. The revolt against the despotism of capital, a situa-
tion predicated on the development of production forces, and
historical presuppositions, is a revolt against the entirety of
capital. I is a revolt against the nature and trajectory of civi-
lization: against both the original ruptures of the gather/hunter
gemeinwesen and its latest developments. This revolt has prim-
itive and Luddite dimensions. But Camatte doesn't turn this
into an ideology, he doesn't believe in a simple return to a per-
fect primitive stage (as some GA/AP proponents do); this kind
of thinking is just another “echo of the past” — a product of a
domesticated humanity.

Camatte argues that we must reject a mythology of class.
He writes: “We are all slaves of capital. Liberation begins
with the refusal to perceive oneself in terms of the categories
of capital, namely as a proletarian, as member of the new
middle class, as capitalist ete. Thus we also stop perceiving
the Other — in his [sic] movement toward liberation — in
those same categories” I would also suggest that here we
find a momentary link between Camatte and the kind of
popular global Zapatismo that is found in many anarchic
circles. The first global encounters that the EZLN hosted
were for “Humanity against Neo-liberalism”. The rejection
of the roles capital has created for us allows us to see the
lines of connection we share with everyone. It also is crucial
in the creation of praxis that does not reify particular social
struggles as the determining element of general revolution.
‘Thus we can move to construct the networks/ thizomes/webs
of resistance that can celebrate the difference, singularity and
validity of each of its participants, whilst not collapsing into
a politics of fracture. The transformation from a proletarian
project to a human one means that new methods of struggle
are needed. It could be argued that the massive mobilization
of civil society that opposed the latest chapter of war in the
Persian Gulf, is testament to the living death and impotence of
that standard praxis of both the Left and liberalism. Camatte

21
argues that to be successful, a liberating revolution must take
place on its own “terrain”. But if there is no exterior to capital
where can this terrain be? Camatte is somewhat infuriating
in not helping to identify this new terrain: he only identifies
what it is not. For example: “Today humanity can launch its
battle against capital not in the city, nor in the country side
but outside of both: hence the necessity for communist forms
to appear that will be truly antagonistic to capital, and also
rallying points for the forces of revolution”. Where could this
be? Itis possible that this terrain to launch struggle from only
comes into existence with struggle. One could think of the
global movements that aim to redefine space such as squatted
social centers in Europe, community gardens in New York, the
autonomous municipalities of Chiapas, for example, as these
new spaces. If one thinks of the latter then we can see how it
is both rural yet global — space where various communities
live daily agrarian lives, yet also a sort of planetary epicenter
taking on people and meaning much broader than its physical
borders. A host of other rebellious gestures both constructive
and destructive — graffiti, rioting, crossing borders, Reclaim
the Streets parties, the Temporary Autonomous Zone, com-
munes, dumpster diving, voluntary homelessness — could all
be seen as ways that this new terrain is created.

These kinds of activities invariably bring people into
conflict with the state, as they disrupt the smooth flows of
capital and transgress laws of property. This means the issue of
violence must be confronted. Yet the rejection of the black and
white of class war means we are pushed up against those who
are just ourselves: humans playing roles assigned by capital.
Camatte, while not sympathizing with the state, argued that
many student clashes with the riot cops in the early 19705
worked to reinforce the roles capital uses to pit humanity
against each other, not diminish them. Camatte doesn’t preach
non-violence but rather that revolution must deal with a
contradiction of violence: that it exists in social conflicts, that

2
violence against capital is to be celebrated as essential, yet
violence against capital often means violence against people,
which can swamp the revolution and crush its liberating
nature. This has a number of implications. For Camatte, since
communist revolution is about the reaffirmation of life, the
representation of revolution as war, with its focus on death
and martyrdom, works only to project repressive notion of
humanity into the core of the revolt against domination —
“this would be putting itself (revolution) once more on the
terrain of class society”.

Again he is vague about an alternative, suggesting “we
have got to find new methods, such as treating all institutions
with contempt and ridicule by leaving them trapped and
isolated in their own concerns”. This perspective may have
been viable in the early 19705, when capital seemed to have
lost any innovative qualities. However, facing the active
project of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism, maybe a more
insurrectionary approach is needed.

But if we look at the trajectory of the revolts against neo-
liberal institutions that manifested in anti-summit struggles,
we see some validity in Camatte’s concerns. The more ‘success-
ful insurrections appear to be ones that were both festivals and
insurrections: that participate in the creating of new modes of
being as they jam the functioning of capital. Sometimes that
smashing of the London stock exchange and the torching of
police cars will be a central part of the destruction of domesti-
cation, other times it will be part of its reinforcement by bru-
talizing revolutionaries, and reducing everything to thuggery.

But can we even challenge domestication personally in
the hope of challenging it socially? It is unclear. It is possible
that a wide range of social deviance, of politics of the body,
of culture, of irrational ecology concerns, of sexual liberation,
contain within them wild feral qualities that offer at least the
chance of rebellion. Humanity is not yet totally roboticised.

2
S0 let us finish off on Camattes most optimistic note: “Living
is not submission, but reinvention, creation!”™

Editors’ Note

‘Throughout this series the author uses the term “commu-
nist” to describe a desirable society or goal. For those unfamil-
iar with this particular usage, (we assume) he is using it in the
pre-Marxist (and therefore, pre-Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist) con-
text, common for various anti-state communists. This gener-
ally means a classless and property-less society based on co-
operation. It is important to point this out, since most people
are only aware of communism's “popular” connotations and
context — state communism and authoritarianism. While we
understand how the author uses the term, many of us find it
dubious and feel it to be confusing to use a term with such
overt baggage. The term “anarchy” already encompasses the
positive aspects of communism, but also explicitly makes clear
anti-authoritarianism and the autonomy of the individual as
integral components.

2
‘The Anarchist Library
Anti-Copyright

Dave Antagonism
Jacques Camatte And the New Politics of Liberation
2004-2005

Retrieved on December 3, 2009 from www greenanarchy.org
Article published in Green Anarchy 18, #19, #20

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