Communism ... Is the Affirmation of a New Community: Notes on Jacques Camatte

Abstract

It is unlikely that the thought of French commun ist Jacques Camatte is widely known to those working in the field of social and political thought. Nevertheless, it contains plenty of interest — beyond what might be delivered by a distanced history-of-ideas treatment of intellectual novelties or oddities. For a start, Camatte’s distinctive later work was built from a platform provided by a fascinating but relatively neglected (even in Italy) wing of Italian communism — the Bordigist line — distinct again from the Left communist workerism examined in the previous chapter. Second, the development of Camatte’s thinking in the direction of what has commonly been referred to as primitivism is both unusual (because of his Bordigist roots) and is one of a number of important resources for English-speaking primitivist intellectuals and collective projects. Furthermore, while this peculiar Left communist current appears to have peaked and subsequently declined in influence from the middle of the 1990s, it contains plenty to chew on, and its emphases and impulses continue to have an at least subterranean life within the broad field of anarchist thought, which has, moreover, been reinvigorated since the close of the 1990s in alternative-globalization currents, and to which I will turn in the next chapter.