Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral.

— V. I. Lenin, On the Question of Dialectics

What kind of intellectual was Jacques Camatte? Camatte would have refused to be called an intellectual, viewing such a label as a domestication of his life and work—a betrayal of what he saw as a necessity: the compulsion to write and think. Born in Cannes in 1935, Camatte worked as a teacher of earth and life sciences in Toulon and Rodez, and died on April 19, 2025, at the age of 90. Politically he was a product of what Leon Trotsky described in 1929 as “the living, muscular, and full-blooded revolutionary thought of Amadeo Bordiga.”¹

Bordiga had led an intransigent faction of the Italian Socialist Party, with revolutionary positions against war and militarism, that split in 1921 to form the Italian Communist Party, which he led until 1924. Expelled in 1930 for his uncompromising opposition to Stalinism, his name became associated with a refusal to collaborate with less radical forces in the struggle against fascism. But he was in fact among the first to advocate a united-front from below. Developed by the labour committee of the young Italian Communist Party, this strategy held that fascism had to be fought primarily through the trade unions and similar economic organisations, rather than through alliances between the Communist Party and other political parties—which, in Bordiga’s view, had prepared the ground for fascism through their support for the First World War.²  This strategy ultimately failed and in the end it was a new world war, killing millions all over the planet, that crushed Fascism and Nazism as distinct political movements—but not as social tendencies which, according to Bordiga, survived 1945 and could reconstitute themselves politically as long as capitalism existed.³ Bordiga was first arrested by Mussolini’s fascist regime in 1923, and then again in 1926, at which point he was deported to prison on Ustica, an island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, along with Antonio Gramsci, who had become leader of the party after Bordiga, and reorientated it towards the Soviet Union. Despite their sharp political disagreements, the two renewed their friendship on Ustica and worked together during their imprisonment. It was only after 1945—working in deep political isolation and under conditions of strict anonymity—that Bordiga elaborated his theory of the development of capitalism and its catastrophic tendencies.

Bordiga's theoretical reflections profoundly shaped Camatte’s thinking and also fed into the earliest formulations of operaismo, which drew on Bordiga’s reading of Marx as a theorist who grasped the fundamentally political character of capitalist productive forces and industrial development.⁴  Bordiga's isolation and apparent political weakness may be seen, in retrospect, as a strength by comparison with the more successful Gramscian tradition—a tradition that shaped a left paralyzed between two impossibilities: unable to break decisively with the Soviet Union, yet equally incapable of forging a rigorous practical critique of capitalism as a system that was built through state power. This is especially true in so far as the “socialism” of China increasingly reveals itself as a possible future for capitalism itself, lending new urgency to Bordiga's critique of the Soviet experiment as an economy in transition towards capitalism. Bordiga and Camatte, despite their real deficits, thus today remain important and challenging figures, worthy of being brought back from the obscurity to which history confined them,⁵  and which they would ultimately embrace.

Although Camatte was by no means a typical Bordigist—far from it—this background shaped his life and thought, long after Bordiga and Marx ceased to be his main reference points. To understand Camatte, then, we must understand how he interpreted the intransigent form of Marxist radicalism that came to be known as “the Italian Left.” He had no drive to become a public intellectual, secure a university position, or participate in what he called rackets, but sought to establish a connection—what he called a “mediation”—to life itself: a concept that we will seek to define in this text. His desire to be at the margins can be read as defiant and courageous, though it may just as well signal isolation and powerlessness. More prosaically, it also reflected how the boom years after 1945 allowed people like him to study at university and use the increased free time at their disposal to think, write, and act. The post-war baby boom saw a massive expansion of higher education participation in France: student numbers multiplied more than sixfold between the early 1960s and early 1990s. This growth, and with it the evolution from an industrial to an increasingly service-based capitalism, forms a backdrop for understanding the trajectory of Camatte’s thinking and his work with the journal Invariance, which he founded in 1968 and continued to publish until 2001, later shifting to a primitive yet still-functioning (at the time of writing) website.

Camatte’s distrust of the public sphere was typical of the French “ultra-left”. It was enabled by the expanding middle class’s new capacity to express themselves as unique individuals with opinions on everything from the origins of class to the future of the human species. The anonymity Bordiga famously defended was meant to be an antidote to such individualism and eclecticism, but it may have reinforced the idiosyncrasies of his own interpretation of the Marxist tradition.⁶  We should not forget that Camatte also belonged to the “wild” generation of the 1960s, a period marked by proliferating conflicts among a manifold of subjectivities as well as a demonstrated inability of insurrectionary workers to seize power. Many radicals in this generation came to see revolution as part of a “critique of everyday life.” Bordiga had insisted that it was not enough to seize the factory, one had to seize power, but power over what? Camatte’s answer was: over the reproduction of human life itself.

The revolutionary individualism of 1968, to which we will return later, certainly represented a radical break with Leninism, Maoism, Stalinism and similar currents that were still real political alternatives in the 1960s. But it also made Camatte prone to errors that mark his work and make it readily usable by his enemies. And it pushed some of his speculations to the outer limits of rationality, and hence towards what he himself would describe as a kind of madness.  In isolation, or in a sect, one can certainly become a prophet, just like Bordiga had been for the circles with whom Camatte came into contact in the early 1950s, but one can also be a fool.

Still, if nothing human is alien to us, then even Camatte’s errors (discussed below) must be seen as expressions of the passion of life that he urged us to affirm as a sensuous force capable of moving us beyond the alienation of capital. He wagered that the sentiments and passions of the world’s masses and multitudes were central to any break with capitalism. It was in the reproduction of our daily lives, and not any political groups or revolutionary rackets, that an exit from what Andre Gunder Frank once called the five-thousand-year-old world system could be found.

Yet we will argue that even the late Camatte, who broke with the Marxist tradition and hoped for the emergence of a new anthropology, should be seen as a political realist in that he sought to explain a real defeat. He did not postpone the perpetually deferred revolution to a distant future in which everything that ought to happen would eventually occur. Instead he accepted the actual defeat of the revolutionary workers’ movement and sought to describe how capitalism’s real domination of labour entailed the domestication of Marxism as a theory of revolution.

For Camatte, real subsumption did not only describe the capitalist reorganisation of the labour process inside the factory, but also the extension of this logic to society as a whole, such that all social relations were integrated into capital’s community (an interpretation of Marx we have criticized in previous work⁷ ). This historical shift was, for Camatte, inseparable from the transition from a regime dominated by absolute surplus value—based on extending and intensifying the working day—to one dominated by relative surplus value, which depends on continuous technological innovation to reduce socially necessary labour time. The post-1945 period saw the widespread diffusion of technologies like automated assembly lines, digital control machinery, and petrochemical production, increasing productivity, accelerating the rhythm of work, and integrating workers’ needs into capital’s expanded reproduction. For Camatte this meant that the proletariat could no longer appear as an autonomous subject confronting capital “from outside”, but had become instead a moment of capital’s own reproduction, something which for Camatte rendered revolution impossible.

AWAITING THE END

Yet despite his many deviations, Camatte never abandoned the Bordigist interpretation of Marxism as a theory of capitalism’s demise. Until his death, he awaited not only the end of capitalism but also what the British paleontologist Henry Gee recently called “the end of the human empire.”⁸  As a Bordigist, he maintained that the anticolonial revolutions during the 1950s and 60s needed to converge with a broader uprising generated by the global crisis of capitalism—a crisis that Bordiga had predicted would erupt around 1975. This thesis developed into Camatte’s conviction that the events of 1968 might inaugurate a revolutionary wave capable of drawing vast segments of humanity into a unified struggle against capital.

Bordiga himself, however, viewed the global student movement of 1968 with deep skepticism. Their goal, he argued, was not the overcoming of capitalism but mere sexual liberation which, from his perspective, posed no threat to the world order. The students were, Bordiga insisted, “sterile” in the sense that they could not generate a new communist future. This argument merits being quoted at length, since it helps illuminate Camatte’s theory of an emergence from capitalism—and how, for him, this emergence was inseparable from the actual, biological reproduction of the human species:

According to Marx, the proletariat is a class not only because without its labour no production is possible of any of the commodities whose accumulation forms the enormous wealth of capitalist society—whether consumer goods or capital goods—but also because the proletariat, in addition to producing everything, reproduces itself as well; that is, it accomplishes the production of the producers. It is in this sense that Marx sought to reintroduce into his modern doctrine, after nearly twenty centuries, the classical term by which the ancient Romans designated the members of the labouring plebs of their time: proletarians.

At this point, wishing to develop our comparison between the fecund proletariat that is now supposedly meant to retire from history and today's students who riot to take its place, one would be tempted to indulge in easy irony upon reading press reports about student communities such as American colleges or French campuses, where the principal revolutionary demand appears to be sexual freedom.

Male and female workers can, by coupling, generate new workers for the labour armies of centuries to come, whereas it is by no means automatic that students will generate students—not even among those peoples where the children of workers and peasants have been granted the magnanimous freedom to study.

Sterile classes can demand nothing from history; and the most formidable Bastille against which young Frenchmen appear to have had to hurl themselves turns out to have been the perimeter wall that the Ministry of Education had erected to shield the female students' quarters (a veritable modern gynaeceum) from incursions by their male colleagues—who were certainly not driven by any duty to give life to future generations of students, nor convinced that genetic power formed part of the conquest of political power. Yet even if we consider the historical classes that preceded the rapacious capitalist bourgeoisie, it is easy to see that in their historical dynamics the genetic factor must always be taken into account.

In feudal society, just as it is true that the masses of serfs provide the progenitors of the serfs of later times, so too does the privilege of their exploiters, who constitute the feudal aristocracy, pass from father to son.

At the apex of that society, even for the autocratic monarch, the hereditary principle holds in its most absolute expression. History reminds us that the feudal lord sought, through the legendary jus primae noctis, the right of the first night, to have at his personal disposal even the virgin daughters of his wretched serfs.

When the modern bourgeoisie emerged, Marx, in addition to analysing its economic and social dynamics, stigmatized its morals—already denounced by the defeated feudal nobility. The new bourgeois, while hypocritically continuing to idealize the feudal and Catholic family, not only lusted after their female workers and the daughters of their male workers but, as the Manifesto expressly states, found their greatest pleasure in mutually seducing one another's wives.

Today, in this increasingly dissolving human society, and above all in its feeble consciousness of itself, we encounter not only theories that elevate students to the status of a social class, but even hear talk of a generational struggle, presenting society as divided into two camps: adults and youth. Applying our genetic criterion, we may laugh at the absurd image of a community in which the old reproduce old people and the young reproduce young people—a total subversion of every biological principle, according to which, obviously, those who are born earlier generate offspring earlier, and those approaching the end of their lives are no longer capable of reproduction.⁹

Bordiga mockingly dismissed those who saw students as revolutionary qua students. He argued that if students had any historical significance, it lay in the possibility that their children might become proletarianized—joining the expanding mass of the exploited who, he believed, would soon find capitalism uninhabitable and be forced to transform it. The “genetic criterion” Bordiga invoked in his ironic polemic against the students refers to biological reproduction as the defining feature of genuine historical classes. Throughout history, real social classes have reproduced themselves generationally: proletarians produced proletarians, serfs produced serfs, aristocrats transmitted status through bloodlines, and the bourgeoisie perpetuated itself through family inheritance. Students, however, form only a transient social category—they cannot biologically reproduce themselves as students, since they originate from diverse class backgrounds. Lacking this capacity for generational self-reproduction, students cannot constitute a revolutionary subject according to Bordiga.

For Bordiga, the proletariat's revolutionary potential stemmed not only from the fact that they are without reserves, and therefore can be determined to overthrow capitalism in a period of crisis and upheaval, but also because workers produce workers—it was the literal expansion of the working class that gave it critical mass. This growing demographic social segment would, he believed, transform capitalism as immiseration and recurring crises made adaptation to the laws and rules of capitalism impossible. The students of 1968, by contrast, were “sterile” precisely because they could not reproduce themselves as students—they produced neither new students nor anything else. Yet Bordiga's quip proved prophetic in an unexpected way. The Western European female students of '68 would average fewer than 2.1 children, making them trailblazers for later generations in this demographic sense as well. The baby boomer revolts occurred just as global birthrates began their long decline, but few understood this during the time. Published in 1968, Paul and Anne Ehrlich's influential The Population Bomb predicted global famines and social disruption driven by overpopulation, advocating urgent measures to curb population growth. Camatte similarly believed humanity was approaching a critical threshold, writing in 1973 that:

The domestication of humanity is closely bound up with another phenomenon which has intensified even further the passivity of human beings: capital has in effect ‘escaped’. Economic processes are out of control and those who are in a position to influence them now realize that in the face of this they are powerless: they have been completely outmanoeuvred. At the global level, capital’s escape is evident in the monetary crisis; overpopulation, pollution and the exhaustion of natural resources.¹⁰

For Camatte, capitalism, on the one hand, had become ungovernable—no longer constrained by politics or by the state, which in turn affected revolutionary politics; on the other hand, it had generated a new material basis for the reproduction of the human species, enabling humanity to expand to its current size of around 8.2 billion people.  

THE PASSION OF COMMUNISM

Today the debate on population growth has been reversed. CEOs, politicians and both right- and left-wing demographers now declare that we are moving towards what one book from 2020 called “an empty planet.”¹¹  From a Camattean angle,  however, this shift appears less like a new crisis than a potential return to family structures more reminiscent of hunters and gatherers than of sedentary agrarian civilizations. The latter structures—which in both Bordiga’s and Camatte’s perspective, broke with the long history of primitive communism and inaugurated the world of class — depended on women bearing many children, children who frequently died, as often did their mothers. This demographic regime raised the preindustrial world population to about half a billion people.

Yet the fear of overpopulation in the 1960s was not completely irrational. An understanding was spreading of what a rapidly growing human population—whose reproduction rested on a fossil-based economy—would entail, and the pace of demographic expansion was still extraordinary. In France the population grew from 40.5 million in 1945 to around 50 million by 1970. But although post-war Europe saw an uptick in birth rates, continued falls in mortality, and vast shifts in migration, it was already evident that the children of the baby boom would reproduce at far lower rates and indeed would view life as something more than the obligation to produce and reproduce. From a Camattean perspective, this could be seen as the potential emergence of a new understanding of life that promises to break from the “genetic criterion” of class that Bordiga treated as invariant. For the decline of the birth rate pointed to the fact that workers and other social segments would not reproduce a growing historical class—the proletariat—but rather help to weaken the reproduction of class society by decreasing the mass of workers in the future. Indeed, birth rates across much of the industrialized world began a steady and sometimes precipitous decline in the late 1960s. Even if 1968 failed to break with capitalism, it definitely contributed to reshaping the structure of the family in many parts of the world, and was thus part of a major re-configuration of the biological and social reproduction of life. The spread of reliable contraception, women’s expanded access to higher education and the workforce, shifting family ideals, and growing economic pressures all contributed to a redefinition of parenthood and revised expectations of family size.

This historical trajectory is now visible on a global scale: the current world average fertility rate is projected to fall below the replacement level of 2.1 by the mid-2050s. The 2.1 threshold is the minimum number of children per woman required for modern populations to replace themselves in the long run. Once fertility drops below that level, populations begin to contract unless offset by migration. This might not be a problem for the species as such, but it poses difficulties for a growth-oriented capitalism.

Here we find a demographic echo of what Bordiga ironically identified as the “sterility” of the 1968 generation—understood not as biological failure but as a refusal to reproduce the old world. The approach toward—and eventual fall below—the replacement threshold, on a Camattean reading, points to a worldwide emergence of forms of life no longer governed by the capitalist need to reproduce labour-power. It might even be seen as, in a sense, a reversion to the small, loose, and anti-patriarchal family structures of primitive communism. This is not necessarily a triumph of antinatalism. It seems that many people today would have more children if housing were affordable or working hours shorter. Yet even states with extensive welfare systems have declining birth rates, which reveals that many no longer view reproduction as the goal of life.

The initial decline toward replacement-level fertility was driven not by any rejection of birth or capitalism but by medical and dietary advances that dramatically reduced infant and child mortality—parents had previously needed many births to ensure two surviving children, and simply stopped once this became unnecessary. For a transitional period, world population expanded rapidly because mortality fell faster than fertility, creating a generation-long bulge as more children survived to adulthood while family sizes had not yet adjusted. Though the world population continues to grow—from 8.2 billion today toward a projected peak of 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s—the rate of expansion has slowed dramatically, from 2.3% annually in 1963 to 0.9% in 2023, and growth is expected to reverse into decline within this century.

As this demographic transition completed itself, something more profound occurred: the reduction of child-rearing from an all-consuming life project to a manageable undertaking liberating men and women from their primary identification as fathers and mothers, freeing human capacities for forms of life and relationships no longer centered on biological reproduction. Where families once organized themselves around the reproduction and socialization of many children—with women's lives absorbed by endless cycles of pregnancy, nursing, and care, and men's by the provision for large households—smaller families allow for the emergence of relations based on affinity, desire, and shared projects rather than reproductive necessity. This transformation in the material conditions of family life laid the groundwork for what Camatte identified as an “emergence”—a break with what the anthropological structures capitalism had required, a reconfiguration of human nature itself toward forms of community no longer rooted in the biological imperatives that had governed social life since the Neolithic revolution. This can perhaps help us explain the subsequent fall below the replacement level of 2.1 children that has produced such anxiety among the ruling classes, for this is a development that cannot be attributed to the mortality transition alone. Nor does this threaten the future of the descendants of Adam and Eve—who only needed to be two to produce a world. Rather, it signals a rejection of the abnormal expansion of the world population during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which, according to Camatte, had become identical with the expansion of capitalism as such.

This reshaping of the demographic tendency was not clearly recognized by Camatte, even though he imagined it would be necessary for any break with capitalism. This may explain why he did not take it into consideration when, in Invariance, he sought to clarify the ultimate failure of 1968. For him, developments after 1968 demonstrated that the path of the proletarian revolution had been closed off. Yet this did not lead him to abandon his essentially Marxist conviction that the emergence of desires, passions, and feelings that makes us unfit to inhabit the world of capital might ultimately re-configure the human species and hence that the reproduction of the species would be the primordial site of the break with capitalism.

Marx had asserted in 1844 that “man’s feelings, passions, etc., are not merely anthropological phenomena in the narrower sense, but truly ontological affirmations of being (of nature).”¹²  To have a nature is, in this sense, to exist as a causal power and thereby as a force capable of transforming reality. Human feelings and passions are natural insofar as they generate effects: they are not solely affirmations of their objects as sensual natures—natural things with an independent existence—but are themselves such natural objects. Our needs and desires to eat, love, work, and rest are natural precisely because they are physical and psychic powers that impel our species to hunt, mate, build cities and cultures, and thereby reshape the world according to human needs and passions. Nature, for Marx, is simply the force(s) of causality.  

The passions and feelings of men and women are, however, also cultural and historical in the sense that they vary among distinct human groups and evolve over time. Passions and feelings recreate humanity itself, since human life—and ultimately nature itself—is nothing but a process of becoming and generation in a literal sense: life implies intercourse or other modes of reproduction. For Marx, however, it was “only through developed industry—i.e., through the medium of private property—that the ontological essence of human passion comes into being, in its totality as well as in its humanity.” The human ape is, above all, the industrious ape: not merely the tool-making animal, but the creature that becomes human through the historical development of industry.¹³  

In a similar vein, a recent text, influenced by Camatte, suggests  that we become human in a full and proper sense only when we are transformed into “a self-aware species consciously coordinating its own activity as a geospheric system.”¹⁴  For Camatte, initially under the sway of Bordiga, this was precisely the aim of communism: the establishment of a world state—a global dictatorship of the proletariat—that would free the natural powers of industry from the constraints of capital. It was for this reason that, in 1969, he could insist that communism “is not a question of having or of doing, but of being.”¹⁵  

Marx had similarly argued that revolution was an affirmation of our human being. For “the less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the pub, and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt—your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being.”¹⁶  But what happens when our eating, drinking, loving, and living can no longer be separated from the development of a capitalist industry? A development that does not seem to generate the possibility of communism but rather intensifies tendencies towards war, class contradiction, and immiseration—and has led to a sixth mass extinction.  

THE HUMANISATION OF THE PLANET

Camatte increasingly came to see the unfolding of the species in a geospheric system as proof that capitalism itself has become anthropomorphized. He wrote that “in its perfected state, capital is representation. Its rise to this state is due to its anthropomorphization, namely to its capitalization of human beings, and to its supersession of the old general equivalent, gold.” But, he also underlined in an accompanying footnote, “[t]his does not exclude an opposite movement: capital forces human beings to be human.”¹⁷  Capital, according to Camatte, entails the representation of humanity as an animal that cannot be anything else than an industrious animal, forced to reshape the planet through its own economic and therefore human evolution. For, according to Marx, it is through industry that human passion “comes into being, in its totality, as well as in its humanity.” This did not imply that capitalism had become undefeatable, but it did alter the conditions for proletarian revolution so profoundly that Camatte saw such a rupture as extremely unlikely. He began instead to theorize the “potential death of capital” through its own deindustrialization and financialization. This death, he argued in his typical oracular style, had already begun to actualize itself: capitalism persisted only as a global system in which the growing economies of the south soon would eventually enter the sclerosis that is now shaping the north.¹⁸  This trajectory, he claimed, would culminate in what he came to describe as the virtualization of the capitalist economy.

When Camatte insisted that the force of life was a process of becoming, capable of reshaping the human species to the point of surpassing not only capital but class itself, he was following a recognizably orthodox Marxist tradition: one that maintained the identity of naturalism and humanism on the one hand, and the identity of communist potential and the development of industry on the other. To affirm nature—which Camatte repeatedly insisted upon—we must affirm the sensuous quality of life by satisfying our needs, feelings, and passions. Yet, Camatte asked, what happens when “developed industry” and thus “the ontological essence of human passion” no longer propels us toward a classless world but instead reinforces alienation by producing a virtual reality that isolates us from each other and ourselves?

Three years after Ivan Illich in Deschooling Society (1970) denounced the institutional school system and proposed replacing it with decentralized learning webs, based on the use of new media technologies, and reminiscent of the early bulletin board systems, Camatte wrote in Against Domestication that “Schools and universities are structures that are too rigid for the global process of capital, and the same thing holds true for the army. The rapid decline of knowledge and the development of mass media have destroyed the old school system. Teachers and professors are, from the point of view of capital, useless beings who will tend to be eliminated in favour of programmed lessons and teaching machines.” He added that “it is ironic then that many people who argue for the necessity of life turn out to be readily convinced by solutions which entrust teaching to machines and thus eliminate human life. As a general rule, it may be said that all who embrace ‘modernization’ are in fact provoking their own condemnation as individuals with a certain function in this society; they are demanding their own dispossession.” But, he clarified against all reactionary hopes, “those others who preach about the need to return to the rigid and authoritarian climate which prevailed before 1968 will not fare any better, because in order for their plans to succeed, they still have to depend on capital, and either way, left or right, capital profits equally.”¹⁹  For Camatte, the problem was radical, and thereby had to be addressed at the level of its roots.

Marx had described the ontological nature of human passion as humanity’s capacity to satisfy its needs and drives through the industrial production of commodities and this entails, at the same time, their expansion and proliferation. Camatte sought to explain what happens when this capacity—once presumed to strengthen the industrial proletariat—begins instead to weaken it. With Bordiga, he located one aspect of this weakening in the increasing stratification of the world population into domestic economies and competing spheres of interest. This fragmentation, he argued, inevitably transforms class consciousness into nationalist (or what he called democratic) consciousness, setting nations against one another and leading to war, exactly as Bordiga had argued. But Camatte also identified another, deeper dimension of this weakening: the transformation of the needs and demands of the revolutionary segment of the proletariat as its well-being becomes tied to the very industrial development driving the current epoch of extinction. This development—responsible not only for the disappearance of innumerable animal and plant species, but also of languages and entire human cultures—shows that humanity has already become a geospheric system, one that consciously coordinates its own activity in relation to the interests, demands, and necessities that propels it. In this light, the ecological catastrophe unfolding around us is not born of ignorance. Rather, it stems from the fact that the many disasters that scar the face of the planet, despite being obvious to everyone, have not given rise to a transformation of what Camatte called our being or nature.

REWILDING CIVILIZATION

The reason Camatte broke with Marxism—even though he and Pier Paolo Poggio, long before Kohei Saito and other contemporary eco-Marxists, had shown how the late Marx was turning toward ecological questions—was that industry, and thus the constitution of the human ape itself, had, for him, become the central obstacle to leaving this world. By “world” Camatte meant cosmos or life-world, that is the totality of existence, which he believed had been fully domesticated and shaped by the movement of capital after the revolutionary worker’s movement had been crushed. Yet, there existed a way out, since when capital establishes itself as a material community after 1945 it becomes autonomous and starts operating fully according to its own logic by replacing natural processes with artificial ones—bypassing soil through vertical farms and lab-grown meat, natural reproduction through commercial surrogacy, and organic life through CRISPR-edited organisms and patented sterile seeds. Capital survives by constantly overcoming limits, but its ultimate limit is humanity itself, which it can only surpass by fully integrating people into its system.

This integration paradoxically brings capital closer to what Camatte in 1980 began calling its “potential death” because by reducing everything to abstract representation and degrading human beings through this total absorption, capital undermines its own ability to regenerate.²⁰  Capital now survives only on the momentum of past centuries, having reached its true limit. Meanwhile, humanity faces its own potential extinction, and capital's actual death will only come through an emergence produced by economic stagnation itself—as people stop trying to overcome this steady state and instead affirm it, discovering forms of life no longer dependent on growth and development.

Camatte discerned an early intuition of this in the Bordigists’ 1953 transition programme which arguably is one the first examples of a revolutionary politics of degrowth, where the productive forces were no longer something to be expanded but constrained and reformed. After a successful revolution, capital would be deliberately disinvested so that only a small fraction of production served the needs of future production; production costs would be deliberately increased so that, as long as wages, money, and the market continued to exist, more remuneration would be exchanged for less labour time; and the working day would be drastically reduced—at least by half—through absorbing unemployment and eliminating socially unnecessary activities.

For the Bordigists, the new communist economy had to be guided by a plan oriented toward essential needs, coupled with a strict limitation of consumption to halt the diffusion of harmful and superfluous commodities. Practices that reproduced an entrepreneurial psychology needed to be abolished (in this sense Camatte’s idea of a human revolution remained faithful to his early Bordigist convictions).  For Bordiga, the true enemy was the enterprise. Its boundaries were to be dismantled by reallocating productive activities in line with the new organisation of consumption. Welfare understood in mercantile terms would be abolished and replaced with a basic social provision for those outside the sphere of labour.  Metropolitan areas would undergo a planned population decline via deurbanization, resulting in rural population redistribution and reduced traffic metrics across density, scale, and speed of traffic. Professional specialisation and the social division of labour would be directly attacked through the abolition of careers and qualifications. And finally, schools, the press, all channels of communication, together with the entire apparatus of leisure and entertainment would be placed under the authority of the new dictatorship—not to perfect domination, but to strip the social body of any mercantile residues and clear a space where another relation to life could emerge.

No indication was given in this programme of how such measures could be undertaken without provoking a civil war that would render them impossible or, for that matter, what juridical system would be needed to control this transition process (what should one for example do with all those who refuse to comply with the new system?), and this inattention to practical and legal questions partly explains or at least justifies Camatte’s break with Bordigism. Yet Camatte nonetheless speculated on similar schemes and in a text from 1989 entitled “Émergence et Dissolution” he wrote that the dissolution of existing social forms could release a spontaneous proliferation of communities capable of leading us out of a capitalist mode of production that, in his view, no longer offered a future. The task, he insisted, was not so much to consciously destroy capitalism through a political revolution—which would merely reproduce the world it sought to replace—but rather to strengthen the tendencies that pointed beyond this self-destroying system (and here again one can see how close he was to his Bordigist past). This would involve forming an intense, reflective pole of communities capable of developing relations of participation extending beyond themselves to the cosmos as a whole. Such forms of life, he hoped, could lay the foundation for a new mode of being because capitalism was not only destroying itself, but was, in a sense, already dead.

“Émergence et Dissolution” outlines a kind of transition programme—what Camatte described as “a program for the regeneration of the biosphere”—that in many ways resembled the Bordigist’s proposal of 1953. Camatte wrote that “[t]here is no need to wait for a specific moment for it to be put into practice. It can be actualized immediately, though on a very limited scale and even in a non-coherent, non-unitary way. For it to develop fully and thus allow the realization of the objective for which it is proposed, a convergence of various actions by men and women operating within the current process of dissolution is required.”²¹  Yet against the Bordigists he insisted that this transition required an inversion of the industrious capacity of the human animal.

What was needed, for Camatte, was a geospheric understanding of the Earth as a living being and a reshaping of humanity’s metabolic relation to nature. The self-consciousness required for such a “vast effort of reflexivity” revived the need for “the formation of the party-community.” The measures he imagined, grounded in the long history of the species and the fragile interdependence of soils, vegetation, climates, and microbial life, amounted to roughly ten fundamental transformations. What stands out to us is their strange combination of a rampant and perhaps typically French utopianism with a certain element of realism.

1. First, Camatte wrote, humanity must recognise its historical separation from nature—intensified since the advent of agriculture—and accept that repairing the resulting destruction of the biosphere will take centuries, including the gradual reduction of human population levels.²²  This process has, to an extent, already begun, without coercion or planning, and in that sense Camatte’s hope for the emergence of “a vast spontaneous movement, uninhibited by any organization claiming to want to regulate a process” can be said to be verified.

2. Practices rooted in humanity’s earliest domination over nature must be abandoned or radically restricted. For example fire, supposedly a foundational tool of civilization, must be used only rarely; the burning of organic material must be treated as a crime.²³  This seems quite irrational, even if understood as a criticism of the Promethean path long defended by Marxists—and which has helped push us into the sixth mass extinction that threatens capitalist civilization itself. Fire and the burning of organic material have been essential to the evolution of life. Wildfires function as  natural evolutionary forces that sustain biodiversity: they drive natural selection, create ecological niches, and some species (such as the lodgepole pine) even require fire’s heat to reproduce.  Archeologists have found that indigenous Australians actively used fire to re-shape ecosystems for tens of thousands of years.²⁴  If this is so, then, Camatte is clearly wrong to suggest that the use of fire itself is the direct source of the trajectory that led to the world of the atom bomb.  However, Camatte was surely right that a system of taboos—for that is what the criminalization of the burning of organic material implies—is needed if we want to reshape the current modes of energy extraction and power generation.

3. Hunting and fishing should also cease entirely. While large-scale animal husbandry could be abandoned quickly, small-scale livestock and agriculture would require more time, since both depend on population reduction and ecological regeneration. Human diets would therefore progressively shift away from the consumption of animals, tending toward largely vegetarian or vegan forms of subsistence.²⁵  For Camatte, the issue is not the morality of consuming animals as such, but the restoration of a balanced metabolic relation between humanity and the rest of nature. ²⁶  Industrial meat production, overfishing, and intensive hunting undeniably disrupt the regenerative cycles of ecosystems and strain the organic interchange—the “metabolism” which for Marx links human societies to the natural conditions of their existence. Reducing these pressures is essential for ecological recovery. Yet it seems impossible to eliminate hunting and fishing altogether if we are to continue living as humans historically have.

4. The construction of new roads, highways, airports, ports, and cities must stop immediately in order to halt the expanding artificial crust that smothers ecosystems. This does not, for Camatte, necessarily imply the destruction of existing cities or modes of communication. His wager appears to be that halting further expansion would allow human activity to re-establish a balanced metabolic relation with the planet, preventing further ecological disruption while still permitting sustainable interaction through existing infrastructure. The goal can thus be reinterpreted as ecological stabilization rather than outright technological regression: a curbing of humanity’s intrusion into natural cycles, not the elimination of civilization itself—though this interpretation may be more reformist than Camatte himself would have accepted.

5. A drastic reduction of automobile, air, and maritime circulation must follow, accompanied by the development of lower-impact forms of locomotion and greater reliance on human-powered movement. Transportation contributes disproportionately to greenhouse gas emissions, habitat fragmentation, and pollution of air, soil, and waterways.²⁷  While the complete elimination of motorized travel is unrealistic, even a gradual shift to sustainable, human-scaled mobility can reduce these pressures and allow ecosystems to stabilize. Here again, one may accept Camatte’s general tendency if the goal is framed as mitigating further damage rather than achieving a perfectly harmonious system.

6. Tourism must be abolished, as it exemplifies a highly developed form of human commodification and social destruction.²⁸  According to Camatte, large-scale travel turns people and experiences into consumable spectacles, reinforcing hierarchical and competitive relations. Similarly, organized sports—especially professional or mass events—dramatize capitalist competition and function as a tool of social control and mass distraction, rather than fostering genuine human development or community.²⁹  

7. Construction should be prohibited in ecologically fragile interface zones such as coastlines, riverbanks, and alpine borders, where life is both dense and vulnerable.³⁰  Camatte’s point is especially pertinent today as climate change increases the susceptibility of these areas to erosion, flooding, and ecosystem collapse. Restricting new construction could preserve natural buffers and biodiversity, reducing the risk of cascading environmental effects. This measure is one of the more realistic components of Camatte’s transition programme: it does not demand the dismantling of existing infrastructure, only restraint in expansion.

8. The construction of buildings that exalt domination—religious monuments, theaters, stadiums, military installations, and academic complexes—must cease, along with artificial emissions such as intense lighting and electromagnetic waves.³¹  These structures and interventions reinforce hierarchies, spectacle, and the consolidation of power, shaping human perception and behavior to conform with authority and capitalist norms. But this hope for a tabula rasa would not only sacrifice too much of what has made us what we are, but also reproduce the apocalyptic myth of a new beginning that ultimately remains bound to the world of religion, spectacle, and politics that Camatte hoped we would abandon.³²

 9. Electricity generated by nuclear power must be abandoned in favor of locally produced energy drawn from natural phenomena, accompanied by research into new renewable technologies. All waste should be managed carefully: organic matter composted, and hazardous materials treated to minimize ecosystem disruption.³³  The ecological rationale is straightforward: centralized, high-risk energy systems pose long-term contamination hazards, while locally controlled and renewable sources enhance resilience and reduce environmental risk.

10. Human dwellings should be redesigned to align with natural flows, while reforestation should aim to restore complete ecosystems and acknowledge trees and other organisms as companions rather than resources.³⁴  These steps would reduce species loss, maintain biodiversity, and rebuild ecosystem services. The objective need not be a perfect biotic integration, only measurable improvements in habitat connectivity, species survival, and ecological function. In this sense, Camatte’s “primitivist” politics appear less as an impossible rejection of history than as a concrete proposal for the rewilding of civilization, even if he would likely have objected to such a realistic interpretation of his attack on the wandering of humanity into the world of capital.

Camatte accepted that none of this could be achieved by Homo sapiens in its current form; what would be required is the emergence of another human type whose relationship to nature breaks with our species’ historical trajectory, abolishing the division between the inert and the living, interior and exterior, by recognizing that everything in the cosmos participates in the process of life. This might seem extremely speculative and a deviation from his Marxist roots. Yet, as we have insisted, some of these points can be reinterpreted in more realistic terms. And the question that Camatte posed by tracing the long durée of humanity’s feelings, needs, and passions remains tied to the Bordigist interpretation of Marx. Camatte’s “primitivistic” politics—which was far more interesting than a simple return to the past, since for him change involved a future recapitulation of lost potentials—was born from the Bordigist insistence that communism is not built but exists as the real movement that abolishes the present state of things. His critique of civilization must therefore be seen as a tendency pointing to a real, though non-actualized, potential generated by class contradiction, and the course of history itself. And to be made rational this politics of rewilding needs to address the question of labour; it needs to be liberated from the romantic notion that nature is a stable system that could on its own block humanity’s wandering. The realistic dimension in Camatte’s speculative musings on the history of the human species, namely, that civilization was born from the human need to subjugate nature, can in that sense be an immanent critique of his own utopian wish for a world without error.

To rewild civilization would then primarily imply the appropriation of labour and control over investment precisely because we are living in a world which we cannot fully govern or master.³⁵  Perhaps this points to the need to criticize the concept of abolition as such, and instead to accept the rationality of, for example, Ernst Bloch’s suggestion that we are all rightful inheritors of the long course of civilization, which has become a necessary part of what it means to be human. This is not far from Bordiga’s belief that overcoming capitalism will not abolish the richness of the past but rather recapitulate it in a new form. As we have seen, Camatte did not want us to abandon ourselves to the wandering of history or live in relation to a perpetually deferred future. He believed that we could begin to merge with the totality of life here and now. Syncretism, appropriation, and mestization characterize his path, and he could thus write as early as 1961 that “the knowledge of the party integrates all that of past centuries (religion, art, philosophy, science)” into a whole and thereby recapitulates the history of humanity into a new way of being and knowing.³⁶  

What we have described as Camatte’s transitional program, and what he might call a program of inversion, is thus rooted in the struggle of human beings against their mobilization as citizens, soldiers, consumers, and workers. This is a struggle about affirming and defending oneself as what one is or wants to be outside the categories of this dying or already dead world. It is in this sense that Camatte’s critique of democracy (as a nationalist ideology of the citizen tied to the nation-state) and of politics (as a form of governance structured around the ideologies of 1789, which no longer make much sense) can find purchase in a world where our present forms of life have catastrophic consequences for the biosphere and for ourselves. And, as Camatte himself insisted in this program for the regeneration of the planet, such experiments only make sense if they are real and thus connected to what is happening now—whether in new communal ways of existing or in concrete struggles to reform the world of work, such as the occupation of the GKN auto parts plant in Florence, where workers refusing to be laid off are desperately struggling to reshape the factory and take control over investment.

The odds, to be clear, are against all such attempts, but they are nevertheless firmly grounded in the ontology of human passion that Camatte found in Marx and above all in Bordiga, a collection of whose writings he subtitled The Passion of Communism.³⁷  Yet the passion for a classless society did not merely compel Bordiga and his comrades to live against the infamies of the world, in opposition both to so-called really existing socialism and to the Western democracies that rested on colonial violence and capitalist exploitation. That would have made them mere utopians. The passion for communism also gave them insight into the forces that shape and dictate politics here and now.

BORDIGIST REALPOLITIK

Bordiga cannot easily be made to fit into the tradition that Perry Anderson called Western Marxism, even though Anderson himself saw Bordiga as marking its inception. For Anderson the contrast between Eastern and Western Marxism reflected the difference between opposing feudal autocracy in the East and bourgeois democracy in the West, and he identified Gramsci as the original Western Marxist. Yet he wrote that:

strangely it was not Gramsci but his comrade and antagonist Amadeo Bordiga who was to formulate the true nature of the distinction between East and West . . . At the fateful Sixth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, in February–March 1926—by now isolated and suspected within his own party—Bordiga confronted Stalin and Bukharin for the final time.³⁸

Anderson then quotes Bordiga’s speech to the Plenum:

We have in the International only one party that has achieved revolutionary victory—the Bolshevik Party. They say that we should therefore take the road which led the Russian party to success. This is perfectly true, but it remains insufficient. The fact is that the Russian party fought under special conditions, in a country where the bourgeois-liberal revolution had not yet been accomplished and the feudal aristocracy had not yet been defeated by the capitalist bourgeoisie. Between the fall of the feudal autocracy and the seizure of power by the working class lay too short a period for there to be any comparison with the development which the proletariat will have to accomplish in other countries. For there was no time to build a bourgeois State machine on the ruins of the Tsarist feudal apparatus. Russian development does not provide us with an experience of how the proletariat can overthrow a liberal-parliamentary capitalist State that has existed for many years and possesses the ability to defend itself. We, however, must know how to attack a modern bourgeois-democratic State that on the one hand has its own means of ideologically mobilizing and corrupting the proletariat, and on the other can defend itself on the terrain of armed struggle with greater efficacy than could the Tsarist autocracy. This problem never arose in the history of the Russian Communist Party.³⁹  

In this speech, according to Anderson, Bordiga grasped “the essential twin character of the capitalist state: it was stronger than the Tsarist state, because it rested not only on the consent of the masses, but also on a superior repressive apparatus.” The problem, for Anderson, was that he never turned this insight “into any cogent political practice.”⁴⁰

For Camatte, however, rather than a symptom of his political weakness, this was evidence of Bordiga’s superior political realism. Bordiga understood that the opening created by the Russian Revolution was closing, and that instead a defense was needed of the legacy running from Marx and Engels to Lenin. These figures defended, in Bordiga’s view, a harsh and deterministic form of naturalism and materialism that had little in common with the idealism and historicism of so-called Western Marxism—a tradition rooted in the idealistic belief that non-revolutionary conditions can be overcome by a “cogent political practice.” To return to voluntaristic activism in such a situation was worse than naïve. Marxism, Bordiga insisted in 1951, is “not the doctrine for the understanding of revolutions, but of counterrevolutions: everyone knows how to orient themselves at the moment of victory, but few are those who know what to do when defeat arrives.”⁴¹  The paradoxical task for revolutionaries was therefore to refuse all forms of naïve activism while simultaneously cultivating a political militancy that did not capitulate to the defeat of the proletariat and the consolidation of the capitalist state. The only way to do this was to root political theory in the real needs and desires of the proletariat. For Bordiga as well as Camatte, the revolutionary process was natural and even biological, grounded in instincts and needs rather than ideas and consciousness. What was lacking was not revolutionary theory, but a widespread passion among the proletarians to overcome capitalism.

After the Second World War, Bordiga became the leading guru for a circle of communist workers and anti-Stalinist revolutionaries who launched the journal Il Programma Comunista in 1952. The journal was the political organ of one side of a split within the main organisation of the “Italian Left” at that time: the Partito Comunista Internazionalista. The faction that published Il Programma, and which later took the name Partito Comunista Internazionale, criticised parliamentarism but—unlike many other groups of the so-called ultra-left—defended the political use of trade unions and emphasized the revolutionary potential of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles.

Camatte encountered these groups in 1953 as a 17-year-old student at a high school in Marseille, after meeting the Italian worker and communist Otello Ricceri, who had emigrated to France in 1925 after taking part in armed clashes with the Fascists. Camatte later recalled that Ricceri “introduced me not only to Marx, whom I was already beginning to discover on my own, but above all to Bordiga.” Camatte, who had lived through the Nazi occupation of France and witnessed how the Republic—like many other Western countries—intensified its colonial oppression in Asia and Africa after the Second World War, said that Bordiga allowed him to position himself

with regard to the war. I felt that the Nazi camp, the democratic camp, and the whole problem of resistance did not concern me at all; and Amadeo argued precisely that none of this concerned us, that the problem was revolution, how to rediscover that fundamental issue. This was a response of fundamental importance to me. The same was true of the colonial phenomenon, an issue that was increasingly topical in those years. I felt that the official communist position was one of repression rather than acceptance of the liberation movement of those peoples.⁴²  

This does not imply that the Bordigists— often seen as hopelessly rigid in their rejection of both Western capitalism and the Soviet Union—were indifferent to parliamentary elections and colonial wars. They discussed the potential of Arab and African national revolutions, established contacts with Algerian revolutionaries, and tracked Western efforts to weaken any link between Germany and Russia. What the political strategist Halford Mackinder famously called the “world island”—the landmass of Africa, Asia, and Europe—was central to the unfolding of an anti-capitalist revolution and a key reason why the United States sought to dominate the world through the Marshall plan, the establishment and expansion of NATO, the construction of a worldwide network of military bases, and the hegemony of the dollar.

Without accepting the proverb that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, Bordiga argued that the United States was the most powerful enemy of the proletariat. He even speculated that a German victory in both the First and Second World Wars might have created a weaker adversary for the revolution, given Germany’s location in the heart of Europe—without seas or mountains for protection—and its weak political legitimacy. The victory of the United States—an industrial empire with a fully developed democracy—marked the triumph of a country that had never produced anything resembling socialism or communism and that was protected by the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean from the anti-colonial revolutions that Bordiga and Camatte believed might evolve in a communist direction, even if they also insisted that the establishment of capitalist growth was a necessary precondition for this process.

Camatte stressed that “the destruction of the old colonialism is an absolutely positive development”⁴³  since it weakens France, England, and Belgium. He also argued that it is

racist to systematically denigrate these revolutions because of their political instability (which can be seen especially in Black Africa.) The political difficulties are directly linked to the inadequacy of the solution imposed by global capitalism and against which the masses are trying to fight. To achieve a certain stability, significant economic development would be required to reinvigorate the destroyed ancient economy.⁴⁴  

However, he continued, “since these countries are producers of raw materials, global capitalism has no interest in their development as this would cause these goods to rise in price. These countries will long remain weak points, cracks in the global capitalist system. These cracks will be easily exposed during the crisis.”⁴⁵  

It was the unwillingness of the Western workers to answer the anti-colonial revolutions with an analogous attack on capitalism that ultimately led Camatte to abandon the Marxist theory of proletariat. The postwar growth of the middle classes in Western Europe appeared to refute the tendencies toward immiseration that were meant to unite workers internationally into a coherent front against capitalism. This subsumption of the class according to Camatte did not change even when inflation came back in the 1970s, and a policy of structural unemployment took hold even in the old welfare states. The problem was, for Camatte, that even immiseration and unemployment would lead to desires and needs for more work, and hence the reproduction of the industrial system that he wanted to abandon. Nevertheless, he never abandoned the search for potentials in the collective needs and general desires of the masses. For him, a revolt against the five-thousand-year-old world system could only come from the millions of people labouring all over the world. And his refutation of the theory of the proletariat may have been premature, not exactly because the tendencies toward proletarianisation and precarisation are now palpable even in the welfare states of the West—Camatte definitely saw this coming and thereby developed a theory of why capitalism produces surplus-populations—but rather since his hope for a regenerated biosphere necessitates that the world of work is reshaped.  

MARXISM IN THE SUBJUNCTIVE TENSE

Historical materialism, for both Camatte and Bordiga, is written in the subjunctive. For it concerns the different paths that are possible in a historical situation, and thus the desires, passions, and needs that arise within a given social context. The subjunctive is the grammatical mood of ethics and politics, since both are concerned with counterfactual paths.⁴⁶  For the Bordigists, these paths could be divided between the conformist, reformist, and ultimately revolutionary (or, as they called them, antiformist) practices that shaped a particular historical period.⁴⁷  This determinism did not exclude agency; it simply meant that agency, if it is more than wishful thinking, always manifests as a tendency—something that tends toward a specific goal, whether the conformist defence of the existing order, the increasingly illusory attempt to reform it, or the antiformist effort to break with it by unleashing a repressed potential.

This theory of a tendency, or a real movement, can be related to the natural philosophy that Camatte found in his master’s writings. Bordiga cannot easily be counted among the Western Marxists because he treated matter as dialectical—determined by potency and relativity. The matter of human society expresses a form or ideal—an invariance, or natural law—which allows specific ethical and political stances to generate distinct social realities by following distinct paths or tendencies. This is why cultivating the communist programme was such an important endeavour for Bordiga: for it defined the stance capable of unleashing revolution and it also showed, as both Adam Smith and John Mayard Keynes has insisted, that political economy is a moral science that seeks to explain the material foundations for the good life. This is clearly also the case with the critique of political economy, and it helps explain why Bordigism and similar forms of ultraleftism often lapse into absolute moral pronouncements that lack any real capacity to transform reality—precisely because of their materialism. The programme implies, in other words, that revolution requires an ethos: one that claims to be grounded in reality, yet nonetheless demands a moral choice.

This choice may well place one on the losing side of history and thus serves as proof of a willingness to live for something other than fame, power, or security—to side, for example, in the midst of war, with the international proletariat (often more an abstraction than an organised force) rather than with the fatherland.  But the revolutionary workers’ movement that emerged in 1917 was not, from the perspective of this ethical materialism, destined to be defeated. The world could have been otherwise than it is now had the workers been able to follow the thread of time that runs from class and capital to community and communism. 

Recognising this historical tendency as a force that was bound to generate a future revolution required what Bordiga openly called faith. In an early text where he defined Marxism as a socialist idealism, Bordiga showed that for all of his criticism of morality he was still a moral philosopher and defined revolutionary politics as a kind of ethics rooted in the social world of the proletariat:

We believe in revolution, not as a Catholic believes in Christ, but as a mathematician believes in the results of his research. I quoted Engels’ words at the beginning to illustrate this: the intellectual reflection of class struggle is not just pure reasoning, but also an idealism—a form of enthusiasm—which is precisely the healthiest and most enduring because it begins with a logical examination of reality and remains faithful to it. It is a form of idealism that can arise spontaneously in the soul of even the most ignorant worker if the social environment [l’ambiente sociale] of the proletarian organization accustoms him to it and elevates him to feel it. This form of sentiment does not deny the principles of Marxist dialectics. There is no logical process in the human brain that does not have a sentimental reflection [riflesso sentimentale].⁴⁸

This focus on the “social environment”—as if revolutionary organisation were nothing but a natural habitat for revolutionary life—was essential for Bordiga. He insisted, as early as 1913, “that political opinions are not the result of abstract ideas or philosophical and scientific knowledge, but of the environment [l’ambiente] in which one lives and the immediate needs of this environment.”⁴⁹  Political opinions, the young Italian Marxist argued, are more a “matter of ‘feeling’ than a product of philosophical and scientific culture.” He urged the Italian socialists to mobilise this “environment of sentiments” into a political and organised force: a revolutionary party. This helps explain why Marxism so readily became a natural philosophy in Bordiga’s hands, and why Camatte’s naturalism or his theory of revolution as an emergence related to the reproduction of daily life was not a break with the Bordigist tradition. Later Bordiga insisted that the relations between “subject and object,” “joy and suffering,” “stillness and motion,” “nature and thought,” and even “life and death,” were not static and fixed, but rather dynamic and relative, since matter was not simply the stuff of physics but—as in the Aristotelian tradition to which Marx himself belonged—a potency that shows that reality not only can change but is change and movement directed toward specific ends.⁵⁰  When Christian Reichers, the young historian who became something of a Bordigist after writing the first monograph on Gramsci in German, criticized Camatte’s interpretation of Bordiga in 1975, he overlooked how the deterministic physics of Bordigism could evolve into Camatte’s more speculative natural philosophy.⁵¹

It was not Camatte, but Bordiga, who, at a party meeting in 1960, denounced science as a bourgeois mystification, depicted Yahweh as a Leninist revolutionary who crushed Sodom and Gomorrah and sent angel-astronauts to Earth, and came close to claiming that thinking pre-exists life as a non-biological residue within matter itself.⁵²  Life, in this account, seems nearly identical with the information that pervades both biological and non-biological matter. Thus, if Camatte would later revive panpsychism by insisting “that everything in the universe, in the cosmos, is life,” Bordiga had already opened the door to such ideas by coming close to pansensism—the idea that all things are capable of perception or sensation, and therefore distribute information, in a germinal sense—just as another Italian revolutionary, Thomas Campanella, had done long before him. For, Bordiga argued, “[n]ature has known and knows because, even without life—at the level of the inorganic, mineral world alone—it leaves traces that correspond to knowledge of itself” and the human species is simply a piece of organic matter that can become self-conscious of the knowledge and memory already present in nature as evolutionary records.  

This was not an illegitimate transformation of Marxism. Marx’s studies on Democritean and Epicurean philosophy, and Engels’ work on the dialectics of nature, clearly indicate that Marxism can be understood as a natural science applied to the social world. Eric Hobsbawm would later argue, in a comment on Ernst Bloch, that Marxism is not only a philosophy of history but also a science of life and nature.⁵³  Karl Liebknecht had transformed revolutionary socialism into a form of vitalistic speculation in his posthumous work The Laws of Motion of Social Development.⁵⁴  It is within this broader tradition of revolutionary naturalism that both Bordiga and Camatte can be situated.

THE OVERCOMING OF DEATH AND CAPITAL

Bordiga and Camatte were therefore not alone in interpreting Marxism as a kind of physics, but they may have been unique in their radical insistence that such a naturalized understanding of history also described communism—or what Camatte later called the Gemeinwesen. Communism, in their view, reveals the human being as nothing more than a part of nature, and thus as a being  capable of becoming conscious of how it is already—even in its alienated state—embedded in the cosmic process of life, a being that cannot be abstracted from what modern folk biology and academic science alike would classify as mere dead matter.

Despite their fierce critique of religion—and it must be emphasised that Camatte’s and Bordiga’s atheism was both dogmatic and radical—they nevertheless argued that myth and theology can express palpable truths about human existence. Myths, they suggested, can even help us imagine a new metabolic relation to nature and thus to the future, since nature, for them, is the reality that unfolds in time and space and thus cannot be separated from the becoming of history.⁵⁵

In 1961, Bordiga even described Marxism as a coping mechanism that helps us confront failure, loss, and death as something other than tragic necessities. Such processes can instead be seen as moments within the necessary evolution toward communism—an evolution that is already real, even if we cannot access it here and now except through the “sentimental” conviction that capitalism is destined to die. For Bordiga, once we grasp that individual life is an instantiation of the whole, we can begin to overcome our finitude and, in a sense, transcend time by viewing reality from the standpoint of the future and the species, rather than from the individual’s isolated perspective in the here and now:

In communism, which has not yet happened but which remains a scientific certainty, the identity of the individual and his fate with their species is re-won, after destroying within it all the limits of family, race, and nation. This victory puts an end to all fear of personal death and with it every cult of the living and the dead, society being organized for the first time around well-being and joy and the reduction of sorrow, suffering, and sacrifice to a rational minimum, removing every mysterious and sinister character from the harmonious course of the succession of generations, a natural condition of the prosperity of the species.⁵⁶

Bordiga’s interpretation of Marxism turned it into a kind of scientific faith. It was a faith in two senses: first, as a mathematical creed that was said to be capable of predicting the future, and second, as a form of naturalistic religion that could help humans overcome the fear of death by teaching them how to view life from the perspective of the species or even the cosmos. In a concrete sense, Marxism as the theory of the necessary eclipse and death of capitalism could also reshape one’s understanding of time itself, for the one who knows how capitalism will end already participates, in some measure, in communist life in the present.

This led Camatte to insist that one of the most important things about the Italian left was:

Amadeo’s formulation [which] went something like this: ‘We don’t fight; we’re not militants.’ He also said that we had to act as if the revolution had already happened. That struck me deeply, because it meant I could no longer allow myself to be entangled in—or swallowed up by—the existing world. At the same time, if that movement (which liked to call itself a party, though it wasn’t truly one) simply reproduced the prevailing ways of life, then it wouldn’t have been worth it.⁵⁷

The essential task was to become part of the emergence of a new life that was here but not yet fully developed. And, according to Camatte, this birth simply could not be confined  within the limits of a formal party. It was a power so radical that no formalised racket could hope to own or control it. It had to be identified with the power of life itself.

AN ENVIRONMENT OF REVOLUTIONARY SENTIMENTS

In his fragmented study on Marx and Engels’ discussions of the party, Origin and Function of the Party Form, written together with Roger Dangeville—who, like Camatte, abandoned the Partito Comunista Internazionale in 1966—Camatte developed Bordiga’s thesis that the party, understood as the part that seeks to represent the whole, i.e., the truth of the world, was the environment which could give rise to the almost spontaneous creation of a new way of living incapable of conforming to the existing society. Camatte therefore made a distinction between the historical, or material, party of communism and formal communist organisations. The former referred to the growth of sentiments and thoughts that could no longer adapt to the laws and life of capital—and therefore to the immediacy of the here and now—whereas the latter sought to formalise such sentiments and movements into a political programme capable of being put into practice as an organised force. These formal attempts to organise the proletariat could, however, easily fail or be subsumed by capital, whereas the material or historical party was the spontaneous formation of radical tendencies inside the proletariat that pointed beyond capitalism. Yet, for the Bordigists, these tendencies needed to become formalized and organized. For Camatte, revolution depended above all on a social environment capable of generating a “party-community” that pointed beyond capitalism. The role of such a formal party, in turn, was to be a habitat for the conviction that one could, if only in thought, leave this world and, in a sense, begin to dwell in the future. This is not an exaggeration. At the beginning of the 1960s, Bordiga declared that

Our science is not the answer to the stupid question: “what is Capital?” It is the demonstration that capital will die and that its death will be violent; even more... that in the light of science, capitalism is already dead today—in Karl Marx’s day as in ours—and does not exist. Far from being the biology of capital, our science is its obituary.⁵⁸  

It was this understanding of Marxism as a science of how to overcome and, more so, accelerate time by relating the here and now with a deterministically certain future that, according to Camatte, made Bordiga anything but an intellectual. We can therefore return to the question that began this text. For the term “intellectual,” Camatte argued, had a precise historical meaning, one he believed became obsolete with the uprisings of 1968, and this obsolescence helps us understand his work.

According to Camatte, the social turmoil of the sixties, with wildcat strikes and workers organizing outside the classical labour movement expressed not only a rejection of classical social democracy and of the communist parties that still looked to the Soviet Union as an alternative. It was also a rejection of the world of leftist rackets.  In 1976 he wrote that the recessions and anti-colonial revolutions did not revive revolutionary agitation in Western Europe or the United States, and that by the early 1960s proletarian passivity seemed almost permanent.⁵⁹  Groups such as the German SDS, their American counterparts, and Japan’s Zengakuren sought to rekindle revolutionary power through exemplary action, but they disappeared with the insurrectionary wave that culminated in Paris and Mexico in 1968, revealing that their role had been to prepare the ground for a broader revolutionary movement.

The fate of the Maoist organizations in France—whose ideology, drawn from the Chinese Cultural Revolution, ultimately fractured under the weight of new social struggles—demonstrated, according to Camatte, that revolution could not be reduced to a political seizure of power alone but required a total transformation of production, life, and human relations. For this, he came to believe, a formal party was no longer necessary. The events of 1968 seemed to have bolstered Camatte’s conviction that his split from the Partito Comunista Internazionale was justified, for he judged it had ceased to be an environment for revolutionary thought and sentiment. It had become a meaningless political racket with no role to play in world history. This reconfigured, for Camatte, the role of so-called revolutionaries—a theme he developed in a 1980 article on the death of J.-P. Sartre in the third series of Invariance, where he wrote:

In the last century, the question of the usefulness of intellectuals was, for a time, central to debates among the Russian populists. They had come to realize that they were no longer an integral, organic part of the traditional community and contributed nothing to it—they were, in effect, useless. Therefore, if they rejected the politics of the tsarist state and refused to serve the autocracy, they were compelled to find a justification for their existence, for their very reality. It was clear that they were products of the community’s decomposition, that their culture was rooted in the ignorance of the muzhiks, and so on. It was in this context that the idea of “going to the people” emerged. On the one hand, it was an attempt to rediscover their roots; on the other, an attempt to enlighten the masses and facilitate their path toward emancipation.⁶⁰  

This was the political path of the intellectual, which Camatte contrasted with that of Marx—and especially of Bordiga—who, he believed, did not concern themselves with the ideological or cultural development of the proletariat but with their class instinct and drive for revolt. He exclaimed that

Bordiga had no need to link himself to a community; he was part of one that was not immediate, not simply defined by a specific group of men and women fighting for a given goal, but a community that certainly postulated the existence of the latter but was not strictly conditioned by it, since it brought together, according to him, the living, the dead, and those yet to come!⁶¹

Camatte meant that Bordiga had developed a science that did not seek to criticize reality or instill revolutionary ideas but to participate in the almost providential tendency toward communism that Marxism had revealed as a real movement—a tendency towards a determinate goal. Marxism, in Camatte’s reading of Bordiga, is a philosophy of nature because it is a teleological theory of the unfolding of human nature. It is a theory of the real movement of the human species, grounded in the production of subjectivities that cannot fully adapt to the existing world of capital and class. These subjectivities are not merely passive reflections of social contradictions; although they do emerge from the contradictions, especially those rooted in class relations.

The real movement expresses the tendencies inherent in these contradictions—patterns and directions in history that, according to Bordiga, not only reveal the possibility but the necessity of transformation. Without such tendencies, history would consist only of random coincidences; with them, the movement of reality takes shape, giving rise to emergent forms that point beyond the existing order. The role of revolutionaries is to take part in this emergence and, insofar as they can, hasten its becoming. This might seem paradoxical: if the future is determined how can one hasten its becoming? Why should one fight for a revolutionary programme if its victory—or at least the decisive schism between socialism and barbarism—is destined and cannot be settled by human will alone? Bordiga never gave a clear answer to this, even if hints can be found throughout his writings. Perhaps this ambiguity can explain why Camatte abandoned this form of determinism without rejecting the theory of tendency and real movement.    

THE REVERSAL OF PRAXIS

According to Bordiga, Marxism recognises the necessity of a reversal of praxis: a conscious break with habits, structures, and ways of life that reproduce the logic of domination and capital, and he saw this tendency as what Marx and Engels famously described as the real movement that abolishes the present state of things. For Bordiga, a “reversal of praxis” refers to the moment when a conscious and organized proletarian party intervenes politically so that its subjective will becomes a decisive force in a historical turning point. In such a moment, the party transforms objective conditions and redirects the course of history, “reversing” its predetermined trajectory and opening a revolutionary path—a process exemplified, for Bordiga, by the Russian Revolution of 1917. For Bordiga, the theory of the proletarian revolution as a real movement is therefore not merely a theory of a future event. It is a theory of a historical tendency that is operative even in periods of defeat, a certainty that persists despite setbacks or the failure of specific efforts. It produces new forms, new subjectivities, and new possibilities for transformation. In this framework, historical defeat clarifies rather than invalidates the theory of real movement. And even if this is why Camatte ultimately abandoned the theory of the proletariat—since it had become a faith that could not be falsified—he still sought to salvage the idea of real movement through the notion of an emergence, or a series of emergent potentialities, that can break or at least reshape capitalism and the long course of civilisation upon which it rests.

Bordiga’s reversal of praxis thus became Camatte’s theory of inversion, which sought to rekindle lost potentials in human history by once again participating in the tendencies that he believed were reshaping life here and now. Camatte argued that the failure of particular visions, strategies, or revolutionary experiments does not negate the existence of these tendencies themselves even if he abandoned the idea of proletarian revolution. Their potentiality continues to live on as a desire. However, he thereby reshaped Bordiga’s theory of the historical tendency towards communism into a theory of passion and so into a theory of human desire or need in a more general sense. From Camatte’s perspective, feelings, hopes, and anticipations of the future—although they may later be falsified by historical events—are rational expressions of the real movement. They remain meaningful even when they fail, since the passion for a world beyond capitalism is still real. And according to Camatte’s interpretation of Marx, feeling and passion are nothing but human nature. Marxism, understood as a philosophy of the becoming of human nature, therefore theorises both the general tendencies inherent in human life and the conscious interventions of particular groups and parties that seek to accelerate, organise, or embody specific tendencies—be they conformist, reformist, or antiformist—in human history.

In an early essay, “Accumulation: A capitalist and not socialist phenomenon, or Violence and Reformism” (1957), Camatte clarified this almost religious dimension of the Bordigist interpretation of tendencies in history. He wrote that “Marxism has freed itself from anxiety because it is an extrapolation into the past and into the future, which is the result of a real scientific theory.”⁶²  It was this liberation from fear—i.e. the confident belief that the world of class would necessarily end—that establishes a community which , by forging an inner relation between past, present, and future, overcomes time.⁶³  According to Camatte, this community even implied a kind of immortality in the Feuerbachian sense: “For the man of the society of the future, immortality is no longer situated in a state beyond death, but within the life of the species, from which the individual is not separated because social man is at the same time Gemeinwesen.”⁶⁴

To understand Camatte’s argument in this early article we have to stress that, according to Bordiga, it was the whole that was living. The individual was from this perspective a mere accident and nothing without the species, since no individual can live without having had a father and mother and hence without the species that reproduces itself as a myriad of individuals. For Bordiga, the human cannot be understood as an individual (and this was something that Camatte would revolt against even if he never abandoned the fixation on the universal). The relativity between “subject and object,” “joy and suffering,” “stillness and motion,” “nature and thought,” and even “life and death” implied that the individual was, first and foremost, an instantiation of the social whole, since individuals can only exist together with other individuals. This is why the environment determined everything, and why culture and ideology were always only expressions of a much greater habitat that both Camatte and Bordiga identified as life.

Camatte recalled that Bordiga, during the 1912 debate on the meaning of culture in the Italian Socialist Party, rejected the idea that workers needed education to participate in political life. They were parts of the social whole that would become unable to adapt to the status quo and would instead adapt towards communism. This was not a rejection of theory but a reconceptualization of thought as a way to refuse what Camatte called “the immediate,” in order to establish a mediated and impassioned relation to the unfolding of what Bordiga believed was a future necessity: the death of capitalism.

As we have already seen, there was a sense in which for Bordiga this was a necessity that had already happened, even if it could not be visualized from our merely individual perspectives that Marxism should help us transcend. As noted above, Bordiga predicted that this potential death of capital could become factual—and hence immediate—around 1975, through either war or revolution. This, however, did not occur, even if 1968, according to Camatte, signaled the emergence of a revolutionary break. The reason for the non-occurence of the potential death of capitalism — or rather the fact that capital in a sense died but lives on zombie-like in what Robert Brenner has described as a perverse feudal form — was, as we have also seen, capital’s real subsumption of society.

In the 1970s, amid the wave of protests that Camatte initially believed signalled an imminent revolution, the now forty-year-old Bordigist began to argue that capitalism had surmounted its own tendency toward communist revolution. This was achieved, he contended, through the expansion of the middle classes, incipient tendencies toward deindustrialisation, and the failure of the revolutionary workers’ movement to establish an international organisation strong enough to supersede capitalism. Prior to the turn to services and digitalization that has been called the third industrial revolution,  and which Camatte conceives as real subsumption,  the proletariat had possessed a concrete possibility—together with rebellious peasant populations that were shaking the world’s foundations—to develop an anti-capitalist regime grounded in degrowth. This was the path that could reverse the praxis that made the proletariat a mere cog of the machine. But this did not happen. The communist forces did not fight for dis-accumulation and de-capitalisation. Instead, they became vehicles for industrialised accumulation, and ensured that the Western proletariat failed to unite with the “non-white peoples” whose uprisings reverberated globally until the 1970s (and perhaps we are still seeing the consequences of this missed opportunity). Yet as Camatte had already argued in 1957, the further development of industry would ultimately strengthen capitalism’s grip and transform the workers’ movement into a series of separate conformist organisations devoid of any real capacity to weaken the rule of capital.

A REDUCTIO AD REVOLUTIONEM

The victory of the United States in 1945 and the Soviet Union’s failure to realise the proto-socialist potentials of the early Russian Revolution signified, for Camatte, that history was no longer tending toward a communist world. The real movement had been defeated. The year 1917 had represented a genuine possibility from Bordiga’s and Camatte’s perspective, but one that was never seized. Thus, the Allied victory constituted, in Bordiga’s strange analysis, the defeat of the revolution—not because the Axis powers were in any sense revolutionary, but because he believed that Fascism and Nazism would have been easier for a revolutionary proletariat to overthrow.⁶⁵  The Americans were protected by the Atlantic and the Pacific from foreign intervention, and the Nazis were a tyrannical force devoid of legitimacy. Thus, ironically, given his criticisms of anti-fascism, Bordiga suggested that an anti-fascist revolt against a victorious but weakened fascism in 1945 could have sparked a world revolution.

But hoping for the victory of the Axis powers because of their relative weakness in a potential class war was undoubtedly a perverse speculation—and one that arguably contributed to one of Camatte’s most serious and perhaps unforgivable misjudgments. It seems to have led him, in 1988, to claim that deeply antisemitic and revisionist literature on the Holocaust should be taken seriously, seemingly because he had become fixated on repeating Bordiga’s dogma that the worst product of fascism was anti-fascism. These troubling statements must be read alongside his equally troubling 1982 article on what he called “the evanescence of the anti-fascist myth”, where he sought to situate the antisemitic and repugnant revisionism of the French ex-communist Paul Rassinier—who survived Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora—within “the history of the proletarian movement.” Camatte criticized Rassinier’s antisemitic identification of Jews with finance capital but his Bordigist past seemingly also led him to write some unacceptable words that threaten to falsify his whole theory of the evolution of capitalism during the twentieth century: “the anti-fascist myth is so essential, so fundamentally important in the true sense of the word, that it is impossible to obtain irrefutable scientific proof of the number of Jews killed as claimed by the Zionists and their allies or as presented by Faurisson; the same applies to the existence or non-existence of the gas chambers.”⁶⁶

This statement does not primarily seem to be a result of antisemitism but rather of what we described above as Camatte’s refusal of all that he considered to be false conflicts, as the only true conflict for Bordiga was the one between communist revolution on the one hand and both the Western or Eastern bloc variants of capitalism on the other. It was the refusal to differentiate between fascism and anti-fascism that led Camatte to an unacceptable and bizarre conclusion, and this seems to point to a deeply irrational and disturbing aspect of the Bordigist tradition: the rejection of historical truth in the name of revolution.

Camatte’s equivocation over the Holocaust stands in stark contrast to his trenchant criticisms of racism and even antisemitism. In a footnote, Camatte sought for example to clarify the rise of antisemitism, a phenomenon he is clearly deeply troubled by. He observes that “[m]ore than any others, the Jews, who have suffered so much from various policies [polices], must guard against any sense of identity, but must assert their originality, their diversity. Yet here one must avoid a pitfall: it would be dangerous to speak of difference, which postulates an idea of separation. To address the Jewish question in all its breadth is to pose the question of the formation of a human community, that is, a community encompassing the totality of mankind that would preserve all human diversity.”⁶⁷

For Camatte, the Jewish way of life expressed the ideal he sought: the constitution of a people striving to go beyond this world. He could write: “Preserving an originality, a diversity, may be linked with the will/need to leave the world. Why did the Jews with Abraham leave Ur for Chaldea? Why did they do the same from Egypt with Moses?”⁶⁸  He further argued that this “originality” of the Jewish community was undermined by the creation of the state of Israel, which he attributes to the defeat of the workers movement:

To say, “It is not from Zionism, a political ideology, that Israel was born, but from Stalinism and fascism”⁶⁹  is certainly important but insufficient.  It was the whole of the Western world as well as Russia-USSR that compelled the Jews to build a state and thus lose their originality; for democracy has never been exempt from anti-Semitism. We can't make scapegoats of these particular movements.

Creating a state was, at the time, their only way to survive. Yet in doing so they killed their community, all the more so as the State of Israel was born perfect, i.e. in the purest form integrating the proletariat and achieving another mystification: the latter's accession to the ruling class, not to mention its ability to integrate an apparently antagonistic phenomenon: the kibbutz.

More fundamentally, the creation of the State of Israel is linked to the defeat of the movement of struggle against capital, which aimed to create a human community based on a certain development of the productive forces. Similarly anti-Semitism grew in the wake of the failure of the humanist solution proposed by the Aufklärung (Enlightenment) movement, which had brought many Jews into the proletarian revolutionary movement (remember that the Russian Socialist Party could only be created with the help of the Bund, a socialist party created by Jewish workers).

Also on the subject of anti-Semitism, it's important to note that in the case of Russia, it developed from the moment the Obshchina was dissolved. The first pogroms date from the early 1880s, almost 20 years after the reforms aimed at dismantling peasant communities.

Therefore, Jews, like other peoples, had to seek a solution outside this world.⁷⁰  

Yet these reflections stand in stark tension with his assertions concerning the alleged impossibility of determining the number of those murdered in the camps. Assertions that betray the very principle he borrows from Aimé Césaire, grounded in the factual evidence of Hitler’s crimes: namely, that what many in the West “cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man … but the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.” ⁷¹  

This profoundly disturbing element of Camatte’s work—appearing, as far as we know, in a few texts from the 1980s—might prove that his philosemitism did not rule out an antisemitic tendency and must be related to the Austrian-born Jewish Bordigist Martin Axelrad’s infamous essay on the Holocaust, often wrongly attributed to Bordiga. Axelrad, who escaped the Holocaust, did not deny the genocide—how could he, as a Jewish boy who survived Nazism by hiding with his family in France?—but he reduced Nazi antisemitism to the attempt by the non-Jewish petty bourgeoisie to save itself from the concentration of capital by mobilising antisemitic affects and sentiments:

Under horrible economic pressure, menaced by a diffuse destruction that made the very existence of its members uncertain, the petty bourgeoisie reacted with sacrificing part of itself, expecting in this way to save its other members. Thus, antisemitism did not originate in any ‘machiavellian plan’ or ‘perverse ideas’: It was a direct result of economic constraint. Hatred of the Jews, far from being the a priori reason for their destruction, was but the expression of a desire to delimit and concentrate the destruction on them.⁷²

This analysis by Camatte’s old comrade from the French Bordigist mileu—that became the basis for the super-radical revolutionaries depicted in the novel The Warszawianka by Axelrad’s daughter, the Lutheran minister Catherine Axelrad—should be criticised by failing to take into account the long history of antisemitism in the West. Yet it was not a negationist text, and Axelrad would defend his theory in the 1990s by explaining the rationale behind Bordigist views on the Second World War:

we deny that the war of 1939-1945 was a democratic St. George’s Crusade against the Nazi, fascist or Nippo-imperial dragon. We affirm that, like that of 1914-1918, it was an imperialist war between two imperialist blocs fighting for world supremacy. Moreover, if during the war the Allies affirmed their virtue against the villainy of others, it was especially after the victory that they justified themselves by Nazi barbarity and the extermination of Jews in particular. In reality, they tolerated and helped the Nazis to seize power. And for years they had ignored the testimony about the horrors of the Hitler regime and the existential threat it posed to Jews.⁷³  

There is an important truth here. The Nazis were deeply inspired by the American Jim Crow Laws, and the United States refused initially to accept Jews in need as immigrants. This is why the Bordigists insisted that the victory over the Axis powers became a founding myth for both American and Soviet imperialism. Yet it also helps us understand how Camatte came close to defending negationism. The Bordigists tended to focus on one thing only: the proletarian revolution against both Western and Eastern capitalism, anything else could be dismissed as democratic sentimentalism and even dangerous nationalism that paves the way for the politics of genocide they believed capitalism was built upon.

This reductio ad revolutionem that deeply shaped Camatte’s thinking was the irrationality of Bordigism, and certainly not only Bordigism, but many radical currents associated with the ultra-left. Today, we can see, for example, how the critique of national liberation and anti-imperialism makes it impossible for some radicals to take a clear stance on the genocide in Palestine. Theory, as Camatte would have said, has become autonomous from common sense—in fact from life—and blocks us from what he believed was truly revolutionary: international sentiments of love and solidarity. This, however, does not imply that one can deny the moment of truth in the Bordigist interpretation of industrial capitalism as a world built on, and even more prone to, murder. At least in this sense Axelrad’s analysis did not differ fundamentally from more mainstream theoreticians of the Holocaust such as Zygmunt Bauman or Detlev Peukert. Yet neither Bauman nor Peukert evaluated the horrors of National Socialism in relation to a supposedly certain global revolution whose main target was capitalism itself. The fact is that there was more than one political alternative to Fascism and National Socialism, since the contingencies and realities that pave the way for genocide are more complex than the choice between socialism and barbarism.

Camatte abandoned the Bordigist dichotomous view on capitalism and revolution, but he defended Bordiga’s intransigence and the only thing that seemed truly important for Camatte when it comes to the Second World War was how it facilitated the expansion of the military-industrial complex and laid the basis for the real subsumption of labour. Thus what he regarded as the myth of anti-fascism became a mechanism for legitimising the development of American consumer-based capitalism in Western Europe after the Second World War. This may be true, but this insight is hard to salvage since Camatte himself tainted it, perhaps even made it illegible, by refusing to clearly state that the Holocaust was an industrial murder of millions of Jews and other people, in camps and elsewhere.

Here it seems that Camatte’s willingness, in true Bordigist fashion, to shock the hypocrites of the democratic establishment, took the upper hand. He was concerned that the focus on the Holocaust minimized the murder carried out by the Americans and the Soviets. It is certainly true that the Pax Americana rested on the atom bomb, which not only stalled the proletarian revolution but also weakened the world of actually existing socialism. By doing so it foreclosed, according to Camatte, the possibility of a proletarian revolution altogether, as the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 implied the victory of American capitalism and hence the most advanced form of industrialism. This defeat of the prospects for communist revolution, and not historical truth regarding the Holocaust, is what was important for Camatte, and thus the tradition Camatte belonged to is tainted by something deeply irrational that comes from what at the same time could be seen as a strength: an attempt to refuse false dichotomies. However, the dichotomy between democracy and Fascism—or for that matter Stalinism—was not a false one even if one understands that a better world actually lies beyond it and therefore that a truly radical politics in one way or other needs to transcend it.

It’s not that Bordiga and Camatte lacked an acceptance of the tragic—both could name defeat clearly—but they tended to judge everything from the perspective of an either/or. This does not imply that the Allies or the Soviets did not collaborate with former Nazis or that it is always easy to morally distinguish Allied from Axis powers: the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima is a clear indication of that. After the war, both the Soviet Union and the United States actively recruited former Nazi scientists and intelligence officers for their Cold War objectives—through programs like the U.S. Operation Paperclip and the Soviet Operation Osoaviakhim—often overlooking or concealing these individuals’ Nazi pasts in order to secure their technical and strategic expertise.

But this does not make it rational to argue that, from the vantage point of revolution, there was no difference between fascism and antifascism. On the contrary, Bordiga and Camatte should have affirmed that Fascism and Nazism were the logical conclusions of a world system prone to mass killing, precisely because the Holocaust perfected and industrialized mechanisms of mass murder first developed in the colonies, turning them into practices of extermination directed at Jews and other groups in the midst of supposedly enlightened Europe. It was this large scale industrial murder, which has been meticulously documented and cannot be rationally questioned, that revealed that industrialization could no longer be confused with the humanisation of the planet. It had become a mechanism for extermination and genocide that strengthened the most brutal aspects inherent in the human species and made it inhuman.  

THIS WORLD WE MUST LEAVE

Due to real subsumption of labour, the proletariat lacks, according to Camatte, the capacity to coordinate a way out of capitalism. Yet he still believed that Marx, Engels, and Bordiga were correct in their diagnosis of capitalism as a system that destroys itself. It was in this spirit that, in the 1970s, Camatte famously insisted that we must leave this world. In looking for a way out he was led to the anthropological question: specifically to the insight that humans are more than just toolmakers and therefore industrial animals.

Marx, Engels, and Bordiga noticed this too, according to Camatte, but they never fully developed an anti-capitalist theory based on the struggle over what it means to be human. Or rather, they did insist on the question of the species-being—and that is perhaps the primary reason why they remain useful for Camatte—but they still sought their way out through a theory of mastery and governance by clarifying how the class can take control over the development of capitalism. Their revolutionary wager was made obsolete by the evolution of capitalism during the 1970s and ’80s, when, as Camatte sees it, capital became human or anthropomorphised with the onset of the third Industrial Revolution whose roots, we have seen, he found in the Second World War. Thus, even though Camatte never denied the survival—and even periodic renewed importance—of egalitarian tendencies in revolutionary workers’ and peasant movements, he no longer believed they could realistically overcome capitalism.

Even if one does not accept this interpretation of the impossibility of revolution in the classical political sense, it is evident that this critique was born from an insight derived from what might be the most powerful dimension of Bordigism: its anti-utopian political realism. Most who reject it seem to do so because they point to the fact that capitalism is based on the contradiction between classes and therefore still produces strikes, revolts, and even revolutions. But for Camatte, the uprisings in themselves are simply passive reflections of a world that cannot govern itself because of the contradictions it engenders. He wrote in 1973 that we have reached “a state of stagnation in which the capitalist mode of production survives by adapting itself to a degenerated humanity which lacks the power to destroy it.”⁷⁴  He further noted, clearly in relation to Bordiga’s revolutionary determinism, that “[i]n order to understand the failure of a future that was thought inevitable, we must take into account the domestication of human beings implemented by all class societies and mainly by capital.”⁷⁵  This domestication neither implied that the tendencies towards immiseration immanent to capitalism had been overcome nor that the working class was unable to struggle for its interests. It meant that these interests were bound to the world of capital up to the point that they no longer could transcend it.

Thus for Camatte the environment of capitalist civilization after 1945 not only domesticated formal communist parties; it subjugated the spontaneous production of the historical and material party and thereby refuted Bordiga’s prediction of a communist revolution. No part of the totality—and hence no party—could represent the whole in a communist way.  The tendency of capitalism was no longer communism but catastrophe and crisis. Capital simply generated an ever more dangerous world where the human species confronted what Camatte was increasingly fearful of: extinction.

Those who have met him know how painful mass death was for Camatte (and that is one other reason why his article on Rassinier is so shocking and seems to betray everything he stood for.) But that sharing of pain and compassion was not merely a sentimental trait of his character, it was a sign of what he believed was necessary in order to leave this world: to feel compassion with the totality as such and therefore to affirm what Marx in 1844 had described as “love”: the sensuous and erotic relation that through intercourse reproduces the species.

Yet even if the proletarian revolution could no longer establish what Bordiga called “a plan for the species,” Camatte still believed there was a way out. The increasingly felt need to abandon this world was produced by capitalism’s inability to fully subsume life, which may seem paradoxical as Camatte also argued that capitalism had become our first nature. The life-world of humanity could be capitalised, and the growth of the tertiary sector and finance capitalism implied an anthropomorphism of capital—just as Marx said feudalism implied an anthropomorphism of land. But the complexity of life on Earth is threatened by the onslaught of industrialized capitalism, which ultimately remains trapped within the factory form. As a consequence of the ecological crisis, people increasingly begin to understand that they need to live in another way. For Camatte the threat of extinction can replace visions of a post-revolutionary future as a motivating force that can bring people together to defend themselves from a system that threatens their humanity.⁷⁶  Indeed one might wonder—against Camatte’s own self-conception as abandoning revolution—if this is not the classical meaning of revolution: the struggle to put an end to war, the struggle to survive and rediscover our humanity in a world where the industrious activity of the human ape has been directed towards the banal end of accumulation for accumulation’s sake. 

Camatte wagered that the crisis of the reproduction of life, perhaps most clearly seen in the rise of global temperature, could provoke the emergence of new anthropological forms in the plural. Greta Thunberg and similar environmental activists became for the late Camatte a symbol of “passive revolts” that through “a dynamic not weighed down by mystification, . . . can grow into profound challenges.”⁷⁷  The evolution of Thunberg from a darling of the elite to someone who tends to refuse interviews and relates her environmental activism to the struggle against war and militarism would certainly have delighted Camatte. The fact that the Gaza flotilla, in which she took part, helped to provoke the Italian trade unions to coordinate a successful general strike also reveals, contra Camatte, that the actions of workers still might be an essential, in fact the essential, part of an emergence that has the power to reshape this world. If the latter has any sense, it is primarily as the formation of subjectivities that seek—but will fail to find as long as they act alone—a path leading out of a capitalism that now threatens the web of life itself. 

For both Camatte and Bordiga, human life is born from the alterity and intercourse between man and woman. This bipolarity—and indeed heteronormativity—was essential to Camatte’s thinking, and drove him to theorise the exploitation of the child. But it is also something that his own vision of Homo Gemeinwesen—one of his strangest neologisms, combining a Latin and a German word—can be said to contest since it can be interpreted as indicating that sex is more of a spectrum than a binary. 

Camatte wrote in 1989 that the “becoming of Homo sapiens was a becoming of separation, whereas that of Homo Gemeinwesen is one of union. This union can already take place among all the groups that seek to break away from this world and to constitute themselves as communities. It also extends to other living beings, who will help us eliminate the remnants of earlier development. We are not alone. This absence of solitude is what grounds our certainty.”⁷⁸  In this union the polarity between man and woman is posited in every individual. Camatte even relates Homo Gemeinwesen to “the coming of the human-female community”—la communauté humano-féminine à venir—which will replace our present form of humanity.⁷⁹  In this conception each woman and man embodies, in germinal form, the totality of living possibilities: the human is not a closed organism but a being capable of resonating with—and, in a sense, becoming—other forms of life.⁸⁰  Thus we might see the movement from Homo sapiens to Homo Gemeinwesen as an Aristophean shift from separation to union, from rigid sexual dimorphism to a diffuse and shared polarity, from isolated individuals to beings who participate in the entire continuum of life.

Yet despite this Camatte ultimately defended heterosexuality (though not the nuclear family) as essential to the species’ survival, recapitulating Bordiga’s 1968 rejection of the “sterile” classes. For both thinkers, revolution meant emergence, and birth was the mechanism through which new forms of life could appear—since life itself cannot be reduced to capital. Both believed that breaking with capitalism required cultivating a party that no longer sought merely to rule or govern the existing order, but rather to abandon the world of capital entirely or, in Bordiga’s formulation, to unleash its self-abolition through revolution. As Bordiga wrote in 1921: “One can create neither parties nor revolutions; one leads the parties and the revolutions, by unifying all the useful international revolutionary experiences in order to secure the greatest chances of victory of the proletariat in the battle which is the inevitable outcome of the historical epoch in which we live.”⁸¹

This way of thinking appears to have held even for the later Camatte, after he abandoned the theory of the proletariat, since he believed in the need for a reflexive break with the existing state of affairs that coordinates and unites the tendencies against the five thousand year old world system. In this sense, he never truly abandoned the Leninist insistence on the necessity of a party, since it both motivated his insistence on the need for a conscious abandonment of this world and pointed to the fact that the emergence of the new is always tied to individual acts. For individual acts are never only individual acts; they are either the repetitions of the existing or part of the emergence of new historical tendencies and therefore potentially revolutionary. Lenin had written against critics who accused him of Blanquism: “You brag about your practicality and you don't see (a fact known to any Russian praktik) what miracles for the revolutionary cause can be brought about not only by a circle but by a lone individual.”⁸²  Camatte clearly shared this belief in miracles, even as he questioned the revolutionary potential of rackets and formal organizations.

For Camatte, an organisation (a word he would have eschewed) that could generate ways out of this dying and decaying world would need leaders (another concept he would have disliked) like Thunberg who he hoped could signify the possibility of a more widespread inversion of the course human life had taken. Thus, even if Camatte abandoned the idea of communism as the real movement of history, he still clung to Bordiga’s idea of social transformation as birth, emergence, and tendency. He also emphasised that it was industrialized capitalism that unified the Homo sapiens sapiens into a species that tended to destroy the planet. Thus for Camatte, the failure of the revolutionary worker’s movement was something to truly lament. However, this does not imply passivity, but rather a search for new subject formations and in a sense new parties that would seek to unify the species by organizing a conscious break with the logic of capitalism:

We currently speak of humanity as forming a whole because it has indeed been unified by the movement of capital; but we in no way overlook the fact that accession to this whole was determined by a class phenomenon: the triumph of the capitalist class, which entailed the crushing of the various proletarian movements that attempted to halt such a becoming. Beyond these movements, we have also emphasized the importance of all the currents that refused becoming-outside-nature and domestication. The invariance we affirm is grounded in the actions of all those men and women whom official history tends to erase once and for all. It therefore seems important to us that various men and women today feel themselves outside this “whole,” because they reject capital both in its becoming and at its point of arrival. But it is not enough to feel foreign to this whole; one must break with it, create an irreducible discontinuity and schism.⁸³

ALL WE NEED IS LOVE

How would such a break with capital be possible? It is possible because capital is not life itself but a world organized around the factory and the enterprise. For this reason—paradoxically—it possesses an exteriority in relation to life, even if it has become increasingly anthropomorphized. The gap between the course of capitalist civilization and the course of life as such, makes new forms of community possible, since it is humanity’s relation to nature that it puts at stake, both biologically and politically. The externalities to the market, which give rise to resurgent conflicts between use value and exchange values (which Camatte had thought overcome once and for all) reveal that capitalism simply cannot subsume reality as such.

Bordiga argued that the proletarian is not only the one without economic reserves and who therefore must find a job to survive. The proletarian is also the one who must produce more proletarians through intercourse and love to ensure that there is a growing pool of workers struggling for jobs. For this reason, reproduction and even more so love itself can be potentially revolutionary. The prole belongs to a class that populates the world with a race of workers, and love and friendship that do not generate enough children threaten a capitalism that has become anthropomorphised. This is what Bordiga failed to see in 1968: that the student revolts heralded an epochal change in capitalism's demographic pattern.

Today, when some demographers and many politicians claim that humanity is on the brink of extinction due to falling birth rates, it is helpful to return to Camatte, since —despite his heterosexism—he helps us move beyond the strangely narrow and often reactionary understanding of reproduction. The familiar alarmism—that fewer births will weaken economies, undermine civilization, or reveal some fatal cultural decadence—is built on the assumption that demographic decline automatically signals collapse (and this feeds into the racist tropes of the ‘Great Replacement’.) But none of this is necessary, and very little of it is true. A population can shrink without vanishing, and can even grow slowly while average family size declines. If current trends continue, the global population may eventually return to its pre-industrial scale—but without the pervasive early mortality common in that era.

Many people obviously still want children, they are the sign of new life, but more and more people seem to want them only under conditions that allow for autonomy, security, and meaningful opportunity. Smaller families tend to enhance equality even further, and they are undeniably beneficial for the planet. The population boom of the last two centuries was, as we have seen, an anomaly tightly linked to industrialization and its concomitant ecological devastation. A gradual return to lower numbers is, as Camatte insisted, not in any sense the end of humanity; it may instead be the beginning of a more livable world where fewer humans will compete over the diminishing resources and opportunities that capital offers us. The historical record points to benefits as well: plagues and wars that temporarily reduced populations often brought rising wages and more accessible housing. A declining population may force states to invest more seriously in retraining, social welfare, and public services. The need to care for the elderly could push societies to redistribute resources more fairly. Smaller class sizes could benefit children and the reshaping of the family that has taken place has implied greater freedom for women and shifting gender roles for men.

This is not to downplay the irrationalities that the reshaping of family and gender roles has produced: incels (or femcels) are a good example and increased loneliness another. Camatte is not an antinatalist, he is not arguing that people should not have children, nor that reproduction is harmful in itself. But what is happening today might be understood from his vantage point as a deep transformation of the meaning of love, family, and birth that promises to recapitulate the more fluid and smaller family structure of primitive communism in an increasingly urban world. Of course this is not a harmonious but rather a deeply agonistic process that generates problems and conflicts.  Still, in hunter-gatherer societies, where mortality was high but social bonds were wide and fluid, reproduction was integrated into a communal fabric and families were often small. With the rise of agriculture, family sizes increased—not because people valued children more, but because the social system demanded more labour, even as mothers and infants died at devastating rates. Only with modern medicine did large families suddenly produce exponential population growth; and with declining fertility came the gradual shift back toward smaller families.

Bordiga had depicted similar processes—and exclaimed “all are in need of love”—in his commentary to Marx’s 1844 manuscripts, when he discussed how Marxism entailed the study of the historical transformation of the family structure:

The coherence of our doctrine allows us to  examine that primitive form in light of the sexual structure. There we will find the great light of the matriarchy in which the woman, the mater, leads her men and her children; this was the first great form of natural power in the true sense, in which the woman is active and not passive, mistress and not slave. The tradition remains in the Latinate: while the term “family” comes from famulus, slave, the term “woman” [it. donna] comes from domina, mistress. In that primitive communism, which is crude but knows neither property nor money, the form of love stands much higher than at the time of the legendary abductions; it is not the male who conquers the woman-object, but the mater, whom we would not want to call female, who chooses her husband for the task, transmitted to her in natural and human form, of the propagation of the species.⁸⁴

The idea that women bear a specific natural responsibility for species reproduction might seem both sexist and biologically deterministic at first glance. However, for Bordiga, communism was grounded in biological criteria that transcended both the family structure and contemporary conceptions of man and woman. In this sense, Bordiga—like Camatte—simultaneously worked within and moved beyond what we would now call a heteronormative framework.  It should also be noted that Bordiga, for all his anti-individualism, here focuses on choice and will, namely, the capacity of the mater to freely choose her husband. Moreover, history reshapes “the natural and human form” and it is today clear that, beginning around 1968, men and women began to question the task of reproducing the species. Not, as we have insisted above, because people do not want children, but more often because they want them later in life, or fewer of them than before. This profoundly reshapes what life and love entail and modifies the fear-induced parental repression of children that Camatte came to focus upon in his later writings. In a sense, what we are seeing today is not so much a retreat from “the task of reproducing the species” as a reconfiguration of the drives that have structured the growth of industrial capitalism and the family forms it has generated. We have seen that this new impetus clashes with the capitalist form of economy, leading to perverse reactions such as fears of “great replacement” and  a reproductive maximization pushed by billionaires seeking to secure an endless population of workers and consumers.

The question of birth has, in other words, become increasingly contested, especially in the darker corners of the internet and in the ideology of a burgeoning far right.  Yet what these conflicts clearly reveal is that for most people living well means something other than producing as many offspring as possible. In this sense the tendency—or real movement—towards fewer births does not foretell the death of the species, but is rather a sign of life. It represents a potential reorientation of human existence toward care, towards freedom for parents and (as Camatte insisted) children, and towards environmental sustainability. But the point, if we follow Camatte’s reasoning, is not that people should refrain from having children for the planet’s sake. That would be absurd and enable an authoritarian antinatalism that should be resisted. The point is simply that birth itself (as well as child ‘rearing’) is not an isolated individual action with purely personal consequences; it is embedded in planetary, economic, and social systems.

This is why Camatte—who was a father to four children—sought in his later life to deepen our understanding of child birth. We imagine families as isolated units, individuals making choices in a vacuum, we see children as personal possessions or as personal responsibilities. But reproduction is never merely private. It is the entire species that gives birth, nurtures, sustains, and transforms life according to the Bordigist tradition that Camatte never fully abandoned. We are not solitary atoms reproducing ourselves; we are participants in a long collective process, carrying forward both the burdens and the possibilities of life. The old demographic regime that still shapes capitalism—defined by explosive growth, industrial extraction, and rigid family structures—is dying. But it is dying so that something else may live. The collective reduction of birth rates across the world is not necessarily a gesture of liberal individualism: it can be seen as a sign that human life is more than a machine for reproducing at an ever larger scale, and therefore that the species may be spontaneously adjusting to the fact that the planet is clearly being destroyed through its humanisation. This does not rule out that this adjustment is produced by the insecurities and precarious nature of capitalism—many certainly feel that they cannot afford to have children, while others face the isolated burden of child-rearing without communal or extended family support, and still others prioritize career and personal autonomy over parenthood, which Camatte would certainly have seen as an example of the anthropomorphisation of capital. But this is also a sign that the reproduction of human life has become a site of conflict and antagonism. For both Camatte and Bordiga, change arose from the necessary dialectic of nature itself, and is therefore often born from death, poverty, and a general lack of freedom. Yet, for them, the difference between necessity and freedom was also relative: freedom was ultimately the recognition of the often brutal necessities that shape the life of the species.⁸⁵

Still, for Camatte just as for Bordiga, life was never only about production and reproduction. It was about love—and not only the love that results in children. Life was identical with what Camatte called the eternal, the totality of the universe itself, which we can understand if we truly feel the relativity between “subject and object,” “joy and suffering,” “stillness and motion,” “nature and thought,” and even “life and death,” a relativity which Bordiga believed Marxism had proved to be a natural fact. This is why Camatte insisted that time is an invention of those who cannot love. Those who cannot love do not live but only work, struggle, and reproduce as individuals. They don’t grasp that they are parts of the whole and hence the eternal for time and space in themselves are just aspects of the never dying nature that we are part of.

From the beginning of the 1970s, the certainty of revolution held by the Bordigists—which must ultimately be acknowledged as religious in character, for even if it was mathematical, it was still born from a trust that under existing conditions cannot be proven—was no longer shared by Camatte. He abandoned the communist faith. Yet he never abandoned the belief in the power of life to disrupt and surprise, to generate a new form of ideality that perhaps could push us beyond the world of class and capital, but in a different way than the proletarian revolution envisioned by Marx, Lenin, and Bordiga.

As Marx already wrote in 1842: “We are firmly convinced that it is not the practical attempt, but rather the theoretical application of communist ideas, that constitutes the real danger; for practical attempts, even those on a large scale, can be answered with cannon as soon as they become dangerous, but ideas, which conquer our intelligence, which overcome the outlook that reason has riveted to our conscience, are chains from which we cannot tear ourselves away without tearing our hearts; they are demons that man can overcome only by submitting to them.”⁸⁶  What Camatte was sure of was that if we submit ourselves to the power of life, which we now can see is the power of the totality—of everything that was, is, and shall be—we would become certain that we have, at least in thought, already begun to overcome this world, namely, the here and now of the individual who is separated from the totality of the species and the unity of nature.

Thereby, we are no longer intellectuals, pathetic teachers trying to compel the world to listen, or imbecile students believing that we need masters to learn something new. We are self-conscious expressions of the eternal, the totality with no origin and end, which, if we believe Camatte, does not need any verification to be proven, and that, precisely by being eternal, gives the human animal the uncanny power to take a stand. This is why we can choose to live for something other than the infamies of this false and dying world that we will one day be forced to leave just like Jacques.

But this also means that Camatte’s unacceptable errors—his homophobia, his heterosexism, and even his flirtation with negationism in order to shock the democratic establishment which legitimates the worst aspects of the world he wanted us to leave: the disgusting lies of fascism and Nazism—are forever part of this force of life that so often seems destined to err and wander away from what is good, sane, and rational (and which, ultimately, we might not be able to identify with the real or totality of nature.) Camatte’s importance, and his many failures, were also the importance and failures of the revolutionary individualism of 1968 as, often driven by boredom, it searched for the extreme and desired to provoke and shock.

Camatte was perhaps right to abandon the Bordigist deterministic faith in revolution, since history unfolds in more than two ways, but he was wrong to cling on to Bordiga’s faith that every conflict in this world—be it between the Allied and Axis powers, Western and Eastern capitalism, fascism and antifascism—can be solved by a third position. Not because there are no misleading conflicts, and certainly not because one should not aim to transcend deceptive alternatives, but rather because one often has no power to avoid them, and the hope that one can do so is often a merely pious wish. Yet it is true that revolution today can no longer be conceived in relation to a romanticised past or a never-arriving future, still less a schematic utopia or a political party claiming the correct programme. Nor can it be understood as the simple seizure of power. Thus Camatte’s wager that we are moving toward war, genocide, and extinction rather than revolution appears to have been borne out by the course of history.

We might say that human life today no longer consists in striving to become something other than what we are—a Homo Gemeinwesen or any other imagined form—but in enduring as beings who, here and now, are already far more than industrious animals forced to fight for their survival. As Friedrich Engels once argued, class struggle is something richer than the struggle for existence, for it is the process through which the human species makes its own history.⁸⁷  Thus Camatte was also surely right that we need a program that rejuvenates the biosphere and dismantles the world of capital so that the diversity of life can begin to blossom again. To the extent that this need is born from the economic and ecological crises of this world, then Camatte has, in fact, merely led us back, via circuitous path, to a position very close to the Bordigist prediction that capitalism is heading towards a catastrophe of its own making, in which humanity is sacrificed on the altar of profit:

Capitalism produces a high cost of living and a high cost of dying; but in the next war, with the atomic bomb, there will be savings: the two hundred thousand dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki amount to three and a half billion dollars; the cost of producing the two bombs was certainly lower, including the painting on one of them of the features of Gilda—today  Madame Ali Khan—a voluptuous white sultana of a hundred thousand emaciated Indian skeletons. Even more was allocated and spent on general atomic research; but with an investment equal to that of the Second World War, we could manage to wipe out the whole of humanity. Capital offers all the billions accumulated over four centuries for the scalp of its great enemy: Man.⁸⁸

These words by Bordiga from 1950 amount to a defense of humanity against the long history of class and civilization whose accumulated errors have determined who we are. For both Bordiga and Camatte, the care for the human was called love and they rightly saw it as revolutionary since it, among other things, entailed a struggle over the use and meaning of industry. That is why Bordiga’s prediction might still make sense even if Camatte was right that the revolution which the Italian communist eagerly awaited will never come to pass. But the question whether we can overcome the tragic transformation of the human species into an animal trapped within the world of capital—a world that appears destined for catastrophic death—is in the end not that important. For we can be certain that the desire for a better and more peaceful world remains real, and that the passion for communism therefore still exists as a causal force capable of reshaping nature.