In the following text, Maxence Klein responds to the death of French communist theorist Jacques Camatte. For those interested, several additional <u>interviews</u>, <u>texts</u>, <u>commentaries</u> and <u>sustained studies</u> of and on Camatte can be found on our site.
<hr>Other languages: Français
Few people concretely incarnate their own theory. Few communists have taken the search for a way out of the defeats of the 20th century so far. Rare are the materialists brave enough to trek back to the origins of the human species in order to better understand the limits of the present. But above all, how many men have espoused such an intransigent anti-individualism — and yet so strangely solitary —as that which drove Jacques throughout his life? He had neither ego nor superego. Only that impish smile and, of course, that gaze of inexhaustible generosity.
Meeting him was like stumbling upon an unexpected geological formation: a peaceful cave, patiently carved by the passage of time, offering refuge for those of our generation searching for shelter — searching for continuity with the reality of communist doctrine. Always ready to retrace the course of his life, he showed how it always formed a single movement with his theoretical journey [cheminement]. He knew how to recount his itinerary without ever sinking into anecdote or justification. He was simply there.
I remember a seminar in some secluded house in central France, a few years ago. Two whole days, from ten in the morning until evening, listening, discussing, thinking. There must have been about twenty of us, at most. He spoke of his theory — inextricably linked to all his life. He took the floor to talk about his theoretical life — which was inextricably linked to his life itself. He recalled how his troubled childhood propelled him into the quest for the common good, into an urgent search for a community of equals. He spoke of the International Communist Party and his training there.1 And of course, of Bordiga, his guiding light. His uncompromising Neapolitanism shone through in some of his jokes, a self-conscious crudity, told between train stations on the way to a congress, amidst cafés and familiar names: Marx-Engels, Lenin. And always, lurking in the background — or rather on the horizon — was this idea of the invariance of communist theory, cleaved to like a narrow ridge line. Bordiga, he said, could be dogmatic: but this was a virtue in a counter-revolutionary period where the gates of Heaven were locked shut, when former comrades have fallen, the survivors at best erring, at worst betraying. Which amounts to the same thing, since Jacques no longer wished to succumb to enmity — that resentment toward the living and the dead.
With unwavering consistency, Camatte refused what he had referred to since the 1970s as “political rackets,” and always with the same visceral rejection. He became a timeless figure, deciphering the future within the deepest recesses of the past. For him, origins were not a point of departure from which to flee, but points of orientation: they also indicated the end. Not a return to the same, but the resolution of the contradictions opened up by history itself — those born of the unfinished, wounded realization of the human species.
How then could I forget these few lines that still move me: “The human being is the true Gemeinwesen of man. This means that in communist society there is no longer a state; the principle of authority, organization and coordination of men is the human species. It is a return to primitive communism, while integrating the intermediate stages of evolution.”
I learned to be communist in his heresy. What I understood thanks to him is that as communists we don’t just know history, we also know the future: a world without classes and without a state. Perhaps even without a party. Unless the “party,” in its purest sense, refers to the last organ responsible for defending humanity — not against politics, but against the blind and catastrophic forces of nature.
Much has been said about Jacques. Few truly accompanied him during the final phase of his journey. Few understood that, for him, it was a way of mourning the workers’ movement. He began this process long ago, and perhaps this was, at bottom, the meaning of his life’s work. It was not a renunciation, but a lucid break, an uprooting: to face and confront the end of a world head-on in order to continue searching, in spite of it all, for a way out. If he leaves behind hundreds of readers scattered around the world, it is not because he founded a school or handed down a tradition: it is because he dug, alone, in the ruins of a promise until a new possibility was uncovered. Confronted by the apocalyptic character of his epoch, Jacques proposed a simple yet implacable alternative: either reinvest in politics against this economy, a realistic but already compromised solution; or else Exodus, the great departure. Not escape, but rupture. Not abandonment, but withdrawal as the supreme form of loyalty. This world he left today: sorrow. This world of which we are irrevocably the heirs: hope.
First published at <u>Éditions la tempête</u>, April 21 2025.
Translated from the French by Ill Will.
Maxence Klein / Ill Will
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