Errance de l'humanité

by Jacques Camatte

L’œuvre de Jacques Camatte est entourée d’une authentique conspiration du silence. Il faut dire qu’à la différence de tant d’autres théoriciens révolutionnaires, il n’a ni trahi, ni cédé, ni cherché la reconnaissance publique. Issu d’un marxisme hétérodoxe, il a suivi imperturbablement son cheminement intransigeant, jusqu’à aujourd’hui. Mais le plus impardonnable – comme on le verra en lisant les quelques textes cardinaux de lui que nous publions dans ce volume –, est sans doute qu’il ait décrit avec exactitude, il y a presque cinquante ans maintenant, le cours historique fatal dans lequel le capital et la civilisation entraînaient l’espèce humaine. Il y a cinquante ans, il a vu la constitution de la société technologique en un monstrueux appareillage enserrant la planète, ravageant toute nature, médiatisant tous les rapports, et la nécessité vitale de déserter pareil monde. Il a vu le vide des subjectivités contemporaines, l’anxiété qui les propulse, et l’aspiration diffuse à une véritable communauté humaine. Il faut lire Jacques Camatte, parce que la compréhension du processus historique est l’une des rares façons de ne pas devenir aussi fous que l’époque que nous traversons.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction, Sociology

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Jacques Camatte was a French writer, philosopher, Marxist theoretician and member of the International Communist Party, a primarily Italian left communist organisation under the influence of Amadeo Bordiga. After Bordiga's death and the events of May 68, his beliefs began to fall closer to the tendencies of anarcho-primitivism and communization, later influencing accelerationism.

Reviews

[Deep · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’d consider this a must read for the contemporary left. Camatte ruthlessly critique the fixation with the programmatic movements of the 19 and 20th century. His lesson is simple: the proletariat is today fully integrated into capitalism, which has itself become autonomous from its old laws. The 2nd international theories which imagined a continuum between capitalism and communist production managed to do precisely that – to organize a transformation of capitalism.

We are thus left in the most difficult labyrinth, that of the desert, were all old signs and roads of the worker’s movements no longer apply.

The weakest part of the book is the 4th chapter “Communism”, were I believe many of Camatte’s solutions (such as de-urbanization) are reliant upon explanations found in other works such as This World We Must Leave (and which I remain sceptical towards). Still, seeing the contemporary potential for communism has brought about by the particularities of capitalism. Camatte remains far above those who would call for some romantic return to our roots.

In conclusion: this work offers a new reading of Marx, and a new conception of the aim of Communism fitting the 21th century. While it does not aim to provide the answers to how to realize this goal, I hope it might provide inspiration for them amongst its readers.

[Ethan]

[November 29th 2025]
I am not exactly sure why, but I remembered this essay fondly and decided to re-read it. There are actually a lot of great things, most specifically about the modern condition of capital and the state of the proletariat being kind of mythologised. I am, though, a bit stunned that fetishism plays almost no role in the text despite presenting itself to be a pretty obvious route to conceptualise man's typified nature under capitalism etc.

I have learned since my reading of this essay that Camatte came to advocate a sort of anarchism/communism that would reject transitional stages and forwards a kind of rapid replacement of all capitalist social relations with communist ones. That tracks with what is written here, and is also what I find most disappointing in the essay. As a bit of Marx-reading, I think it offers interest, but it is not compelling political philosophy, and falls into the idealisms that he criticises youth movements for in the same text. The claim that our sedentary lives are to blame for almost all our ailments is a bit too general, though I'm not unsympathetic to the motivation behind the assertion, but the idea that we are going to produce small localised communities full of movement etc., seems distinctly unlikely and impracticable. The force of capital is that it raises standards of living to such an extent that we can't go back without major, and I do not think it would be false to say, negative drawbacks. I like national healthcare, I like trains, I like global beer imports, I probably wouldn't give them up any time soon for a kind of primitivism.

In any case it raises an interesting couple of points, but comes up with no practical applicability. Sort of just as I remembered it.


[May 1st 2022]
Camatte draws on obscure Marxist ideas to critique the Proletariat as being the primary revolutionary force. He's wrong in many ways, but he's wrong in an interesting way, and whether his conclusions (being that the proletariat is essentially an outmoded concept) are right or wrong, at least it provokes thought and critique of one of the most quickly accepted facets of socialist thought.

The section on communism was pretty empty of substance though, same kind of meaningless socialist platitudes as many make. "Humanity will be different! We'll abolish the master-slave dialectic!" okay, but how, what would meaningfully construct a path toward this in the slightest? He even advocates for a sort of re-appropriation of the gemeinwesen in a manner that is decentralised, small, non-societal, etc. But this is incredibly naive in the inevitability of globalisation, this would not work in any advanced industrial society, unless you were to demand people give up their new basic necessities...quick access to food, medication, etc. To decentralise and have many many small communities would absolutely cripple the supply chains, and in fact, ironically, all of the good things that most Marxists acknowledge capitalism has brought about, and in fact are, the prerequisites for any socialism.

Overall, an interesting read, ill-thought through in its practical application though I appreciate the attempt to direct a theory into a genuine social action reminiscent of Marx, else suffering a reality-break.

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 3 out of 5]

A tough read for me as I wasn't properly acquainted with Marx's distinction between formal and real subsumption on which Camatte develops his thesis of the 'autonomization of capital'.

Now how does capital achieve autonomy? After all, is it not a statement of absolute idealism to suggest that Capital operates independently of proleterian material agency? According to Camatte's narrative, at one point it duped ("mystified")the prolatariat into confronting its own debased condition (the product of wage labor as well as the wage labor itself) as something not of the latter's own making. Thusly, mystification become effective and real.

"Development in the context of wandering is development in the context of mystification. Marx considered mystification the result of a reversed relation: capital, the product of the worker’s activity, appears to be the creator. The mystification is rooted in real events; it is reality in process that mystifies. Something is mystified even through a struggle of the proletariat against capital; the generalized mystification is the triumph of capital. But if, as a consequence of its anthropomorphization, this reality produced by mystification is now the sole reality, then the question has to be put differently. 1) Since the mystification is stable and real, there is no point in waiting for a demystification which would only expose the truth of the previous situation. 2) Because of capital’s run-away, the mystification appears as reality, and thus the mystification is engulfed and rendered inoperative. We have the despotism of capital."

From what I understand, Camatte is saying that capital has mystified its own historical development and through this mystification of mystification itself has escaped (i.e. achieve "runway" dynamics) its fatal confrontation with labor. Capital has fully integrated into its circuitry not just labor as an aspect of human dimension but the sum total of human experience down to its biological being (real subsumption). In this way it also has rendered inoperative communism as a project that will theoretically unleash the full extent and universalization of productive forces which have been supposedly held in check by capitalism as a particular mode of production.

Earlier, revolution was possible as soon as the mystification was exposed; the revolutionary process was its destruction. Today the human being has been engulfed, not only in the determination of class where he was trapped for centuries, but as a biological being. It is a totality that has to be destroyed. Demystification is no longer enough. The revolt of human beings threatened in the immediacy of their daily lives goes beyond demystification. The problem is to create other lives. This problem lies simultaneously outside the ancient discourse of the workers’ movement and its old practice, and outside the critique which considers this movement a simple ideology (and considers the human being an ideological precipitate).

Camatte wants to salvage from communism not historical materialism nor even the category of the prolatriat but a reactivation of a certain sense of human as Gemeinwesen ("Community"), which remains invariant through history in spite of capital's totalizing process of real subsumption.

Ray Brassier's explication of social abstraction in the essay "Wandering Abstraction" is an invaluable secondary source for understanding Camatte's thesis. You can read it on http://www.metamute.org/editorial/art...

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some really ingtriguing stuff in here about the limits of the proletariat, as a class composed by and, Camatte argues, fully absorbed into capital, to be the basis for revolution. Can see how primitivist thought came out of this (and the writings of Perlman etc.) but that doesn't change the fact that most of primitivism is bullshit and this isn't. Made me think of Chris Carlsson's book Nowtopia, which I need to re-read.

[Kaden · Rating 4 out of 5]

Within the Imperial core Capital has escaped. The non-living has become autonomous. The mystification of Capital is no longer formal (i.e. reified), it has become real. The law of value has been escaped, it is simulacra. Attempting to critique Capital by diving into its images is a foolish task (for humor, take the contemporary ACP, where consciousness is determined by how proletariat [read: productive worker] you are). The proliferating subjectivites deployed by Capital are not ideological, they are as real as the two eternal categories professed by Saint-Marx -- dialectic between the savior proletariat and the surplus-value addicted bourgeoisie. The proletariat (as defined by their economic position) will not save us. Then, asks Camatte, where is revolution to be found? "We must create new lives." The contradiction that emerges is Capital's disregard for the sensuous human (if I may, the Unique). Everything is linearized, all desire is lack (a constant injunction to enjoy that can never be fulfilled), death is valued above all, the official narrative of history is Stalinist (uni-linear), pan-sexuality is spreading (this is, I consider a mistake, his reichian/zizekian understanding of sexuality is wrong), etc.

Our goal is to bring back the lost (I don't think it was lost) Gemeinwesen... An archaic image of a lost totality! Man did you even read your own writing?!

Why? Because Capital exists for Capital, and essentially alienates us from becoming.

[Val Davidson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maybe the greatest essay to come out of the left in the past 50 years. In my copy I have pretty much the entirety of the first 10 pages highlighted — he goes fucking scorched earth on everyone and everything. His view of capital as self-reproducing, autonomous, and slowly phasing out the aspect of human labor isn’t just astute, it’s terrifyingly prophetic in retrospect. In that way, too, he serves as a very meaningful alternative to someone like Land (who I honestly think appropriates as much from this Deleuze) for those of us who remain unconvinced that there’s anything liberatory about that process of automization (though Camatte got a bit wacky and “problematic” not long after writing this).

Unlike a lot of reviewers I’m not at all averse to his more naturalistic solutions, though they’re not without strong critique, a critique that lay on similar ground to the main issue in this text: his continual undoing of the subject, almost monism, while continually lapsing into humanism. I will also admit I did plenty of time as an out-and-out primitivist and I remain sympathetic to a lot of it so I find value in his usage of Marx’s Gemeinwesen as a sort of anti-civ community (though he develops this more in other essays).

There is no world in which this is not a necessary and often world-destroying read for modern leftists.

[Solal Gomez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ce n'est plus le prolétariat qui est dominé par le capital, c'est l'humanité tout entière. Devenu entitée autonome, le capital a colonisé nos esprits, la révolution ne sera pas une nouvelle gestion du capital mais une rupture complète avec le vieux monde.
Le texte est très intéressant et fait écho au réalisme capitaliste / acid communism de Mark Fisher je trouve, même si je ne suis pas d'accord avec Camatte sur les conclusions.
À lire quand même !

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Critique of Marx. Camatte posits that people have been trained to see themselves as a middleman for capital and can't see themselves functioning in another type of society (such as a socialism/communism as defined by Marx). Any rebelling that proletariat classes have done exist only within the capitalist system itself.

[Daniel Zautner · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good view on the incompatibility of capital and class oriented theory as a revolutionary force in a society where class is the absolute despot.
My only wish is that Camette went beyond Marx on the subject.

[Slow Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great, blistering, short

[Sean A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Camatte's cutting analysis, Capitol has not just become automated. It is autonomous.
Primarily working within a critical, but hyper-Marxist context, his analysis of selected Marxist passages make way more sense to me than Marx ever did. While the atmosphere of say, St. Louis MO 2014 is far less saturated with Marxism than Italy in the 70s, I still see that his critical commentary provides a springboard for Camatte's own unique insights.
While I would like the communist utopia Camatte describes, in the blind land of capital the most prescient theories that I found in here were about capitalism itself. Something like a runaway train, which has also incidentally absorbed any idea of a unified proletarian existence or resistancecapitol(ism) becomes an actor in and of and exclusively for itself. The authentic human we long for is therefor dead, and Camatte's only suggested remedy is communism. But his is a communism far different from orthodox Marxism. It is an undomesticated undefiled communism which only comes with the destruction and suppression of capitol.

[Rui Coelho · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short but rich and original. I will return to Camatte.