#Endnotes 5

Italian Invariance in the 1970s

I will write a summary of ‘Glosses on Humanism’

GPT Summary

This introduction provides an overview of the work of Jacques Camatte and the Invariance circle, particularly focusing on their reception and development in Italy during the 1970s. The text explores several key concepts and ideas:

1. Gemeinwesen: A central concept in Camatte’s work, understood not as a specific community but as a universal “common being” of humanity, encompassing past, present, and future potentials.

2. Critique of militancy: The text discusses how Camatte and others, especially Giorgio Cesarano, criticized both traditional leftist militancy and insurrectionary tactics, seeking a “third path” for revolutionary activity.

3. Species-being and dehumanization: The authors explored the idea of humanity as a species with no fixed essence, and how capitalism leads to a real dehumanization of human beings.

4. Real domination of capital: Building on Marx’s concept of formal and real subsumption, Camatte developed the idea of capital’s “real domination” over all aspects of human life and society.

5. Biological revolution: Cesarano extended these ideas to analyze contemporary forms of revolt, seeing them as expressions of a “biological” rejection of capital’s organization of life.

6. Italian context: The text situates these theoretical developments within the Italian political landscape of the 1970s, discussing groups like Ludd, Councilist Organization (OC), and Comontismo.

7. Legacy and open questions: The introduction concludes by highlighting the ongoing relevance of this theoretical tradition, especially in rethinking political engagement, understanding subjectivity under capitalism, and conceptualizing ways to overcome capitalist social forms.

The text presents these ideas as important contributions to revolutionary theory, offering a critique of traditional leftist approaches while attempting to understand the nature of capitalism’s domination and the possibilities for its overcoming. It suggests that these concepts remain relevant for contemporary discussions of communisation and revolutionary politics.

Editorial Preface

Do not all uprisings, without exception, have their roots in the wretched isolation of men from the community [Gemeinwesen]? Does not every uprising necessarily presuppose isolation? Would the Revolution of 1789 have occurred without the wretched isolation of the French citizens from the community? It was intended precisely to abolish this isolation. But the community [Gemeinwesen] from which the worker is isolated is a community of quite different reality and scope than the political community. The community from which his own labour separates him is life itself, physical and mental life, human morality [Sittlichkeit], human activity, human enjoyment, human being. Human being is the true community [Gemeinwesen] of mankind. […] A social revolution takes the standpoint of the whole because —even if it were to occur in only one factory district — it represents man’s protest against a dehumanized life, because it starts out from the standpoint of a separate real individual, because the community [Gemeinwesen], against whose separation from himself the individual reacts, is man’s true community, human being. Marx

Introduction

While Jacques Camatte has received recognition from the Englishspeaking world, few have commented on members of the larger circle who contributed to or developed the ideas of the journal Invariance, individuals such as Giorgio Cesarano, Gianni Carchia, Furio di Paola, and Carsten Juhl. This tradition, given the name “radical critique” by Cesarano, had its greatest impact in Italy in the period from 1968 through 1974, during which its adherents populated groups like Comontismo, Ludd, and Councilist Organisation. After Cesarano’s suicide and the self-dissolution of these factions, the tradition’s influence waned until the next wave of struggles were brought to an end in the late 70s. Then a period of reflection opened; balance-sheets were drawn, and “[Cesarano’s] works (especially Apocalypse and Revolution and Survival Manual) were read by many comrades, especially the young”.[^2] In the later period, Antonio Negri wrote polemics against this “pessimistic” thought, while for others like Mario Mieli and Gianni Carchia, the Invariance analysis grounded their own investigations.[^3] It is this context that is most relevant to contemporary debates in the English language, in which a relatively homogeneous narrative dominates the last century of developments in Italian political thought, progressing neatly from Gramsci through Operaismo to Autonomia and finally the post-workerist theorists popularised during the anti-globalisation movement. Crucial to examining this largely post-Bordigist and post-Situationist tradition is that it marks a distinct communist opposition both to insurrectionary militantism and workerism in Italy. While the former was rejected as a sacrificial ideology, the latter was criticised for positing the existence of a proletarian subject position —however sociologically updated as the “mass worker” or “multitude” —that could affirm its own constitutive project. For the post-Invariance tradition, on the contrary, the present contained “nothing human that could be stably posed… as an alternative to capital”. 4 Operaismo, on their analysis, failed to “pose that minimum Marxist objective: the negation of the proletariat”, and to understand the present historical task as “the negation of all the organised structures that restrict being to the cage of professions and economy”. 5 Similarly, the radical acts of the young Metropolitan Indians 6 and Autonomia did not signal the emergence of new subject positions, but were rather themselves the signs of a crisis of subjectivity and of a desire for communism that could only be satisfied by humanity’s destitution of a historically contingent form, capital. 7 This Italian development of Camatte’s thought goes against what are perhaps the three central points of his Englishlanguage reception: (1) that he became an anarchoprimitivist advocate of the pre-capitalist community, (2) that he advocates for a withdrawal from capitalist relations, and (3) that he is an abstract humanist. 8 Rather than offering a systematic reading of Camatte’s work that would aim to absolve him of these three readings, I examine how his work enabled the thinking of communisation as the destitution of capital’s form, developed an ethical but non-quietist understanding of the pro-revolutionary milieu in its relation to the real movement and, finally, offered a non-humanist concept of dehumanisation. In this, Camatte and, to a greater extent, Cesarano take a longer look at the history of domination in a manner that is closer to the history of a civilisation comparable to Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. This was not an abstract exercise, but a way of grasping, largely through their reading of texts by Marx such as the “Urtext of the Critique of Political Economy” and the Grundrisse, the specific historical process through which a very particular form had become autonomous. The aim of such an investigation was not to reject all technology and vestiges of modernity — “a total rejection of the historical product… total retreat” 9 —but to clarify precisely what the potential death of capital might mean through what we could today call the destitution of its essential forms. The overall argumentation of Camatte’s work throughout the 70s is thus neither a form of primitivism, which would seek to return to pre-modern communal forms, nor accelerationism, which would seek to overcome capitalism through a deepening of its contradiction-in-process, but precisely an anti-utopian theory that aims to restore the historical process from that reproductive fixed-point we call capitalism —a process that would develop, from fragmented potentials that exist today, the work of “millions of human beings who have laboured in obscurity for millennia… the immense process of becoming of millions of forces that are crystallised at any given moment”. 10 It is with respect to the latter point that Camatte developed his concept of the Gemeinwesen, which must not be understood as the pre-modern community or even a new universal community of humanity. This concept should be grappled with as a response to his problematisation of humanity’s historical life and what it might mean that it had become blocked. In this, Camatte can be understood on a plane of consistency with the investigations of Walter Benjamin, Aby Warburg, Gilbert Simondon, and Andre LeroiGourhan. The only coherence to such a constellation — these non-humanists who nonetheless spent so much of their lives in the archives of humanity — would be the struggle to understand what it means for mankind to unfold its historical life given that its intellectual and practical capacities are not biological givens but discovered in whatever trans-generational medium contains and transmits the vital remnants of the past —whether images, utterances, technical forms or otherwise. They all understood that the avantgarde affirmation of the machine, indeed of modernity as such, could be compatible with the demand that progress and modernisation be brought to a halt.11 Situated between a confidence that “not even the dead are safe” and that “only a redeemed humanity obtains the fullness of its past”, 12 Camatte and Cesarano argued that the species, in its works and desires, had become really dominated, subjected to an inhuman spectacle by that imperative towards valorisation whose name is capital. For the circle surrounding Invariance came up against the following paradox that remains our own: the law of value dominates life yet somehow our dehumanised species must effect a rupture with the particular mediations of capital in order to reclaim its integral past and “surrender itself joyously to the true divisions and neverending confrontations of historical life”. 13 To this end, it remains fruitful today to revisit Camatte and Cesarano’s Gemeinwesen.

An operation of the species, not the pro-revolutionary

I read of a Rain-King in Africa to whom the people pray for rain when the rainy period comes. But surely that means they do not believe that he can make it rain, otherwise they would do it when the land is “a parched and arid desert.” […] Or again: toward morning, when the sun is about to rise, rites of daybreak are celebrated by the people, but not during the night, when they simply burn lamps. 14

Italian Invariance and the SI

In Italy, the reception of Invariance went hand-inhand with the slow reception of the Situationists and council communism in the early 1970s. Even though the Situationist International was both founded and dissolved in Italy, Debord’s Society of the Spectacle in its entirety did not exist in a readable Italian translation until the late 70s. 15 Thus Vaneigem’s qualitative “art of living” and Debord’s concept of the spectacle were initially received by readers such as Giorgio Cesarano and other young militants already under the influence of Camatte’s largely Bordigist writings. 16 Such theorists and the groups that they founded, like Comontismo discussed below, attempted to develop the concept of Gemeinwesen, which, following Camatte, they developed in terms of its dual sense as a particular community, on the one hand, and its more literal and potentially universal sense of common [Gemein] being [wesen] on the other.17 This concept, related to but distinct from that of species-being, or Gattungswesen, was to provide a unity to the Marxian corpus, explaining (1) the condition of possibility of alienation, (2) the definition of the classless society, and (3) the antinomies of that non-class, the only possible subject of communisation, that in negating itself would negate all classes. Camatte attempted to understand systematically what Negri dismissed as the “literary” asymmetry of Marx’s work: that Marx developed a “theory of the subjectivity of capital, while… he did not develop a theory of the subjectivity of the working class”. 18 For Camatte, the structural unity of Marx’s work was not antagonism but rather, as discussed below, capital’s accession to the material community, on the one hand, and the classless society, on the other, thought by him through the universality of the Gemeinwesen. Marx’s work was understood to move from the description of communism to the accomplishment of capital’s real domination, from his early assertion that “Human being is the true Gemeinwesen of man” (1844 Manuscripts) to his later understanding that “Capital has become human being” (Grundrisse). In Italy, then, the confusion of the spectacle with either a conspiracy or the mass media was avoided; Debord’s analysis could be understood and, indeed, developed through Camatte’s account of real subsumption as the alienation of the species from the Gemeinwesen.19 While Debord, as evidenced in an important letter from 1986, followed the development of these groups closely —and believed that, rather than the Italian SI, it was they who “did the most in Italy to import the spirit of [the French] May and notably among the workers” —he was a quick critic of “the theory of [the Italian group] ‘Comontismo’” with its “aberrant tactical slogan of making oneself ‘teppa’ (equivalent of ‘underworld’ or ‘bad guy’)”. 20 He summarises the group’s trajectory through a dark joke based on a telling mistranslation: in a French appeal for solidarity with Italian political prisoners, the line “the most beautiful [that is, proletarian] youth die in jail” becomes “others [that is, pro-revolutionaries] spend their youth in prison”, whereby a traditional description of capital’s domination becomes an elegy for the wasted youth of the pro-revolutionary minority. 21

Ludd, OC, Comontismo

Both Ludd and the Councilist Organization (OC) were formed and dissolved during the same brief interval between 1969 and 1971. Beginning with the SI journal’s termination and the state-linked Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan, this period emerges at the end of the cycle of struggles paradigmatically linked to the Parisian May. Through an ironic inversion, it was the Ludd group that principally existed as a theoretical organ weighed down by “cultural baggage”, while, through the contingencies of extended stays in jail, the innocuously named but heavily persecuted Councilist Organization (OC) developed an everyday practice and understanding of criminality. 22 Looking towards the growth of populations excluded from the production process, the OC came to understand “the reality of the new forms of expression of the modern proletariat” in “the reality of a criminal and subversive practice of the everyday”, but largely expressed itself in terms of councilist ideology. Ludd, on the other hand, was a national space for discussion, with membership across Turin, Genoa, Rome, Milan, and Trento, and with a prominent publishing house La Vecchia Talpa [the old mole], most notable for its critique of councilist ideology. 23 Active between 1972 and 1973, Comontismo represented the short-lived synthesis of Ludd’s critique of councilism with the OC’s analysis of the “modern proletariat’s new forms of expression… in the criminal subversion of the everyday”. 24 From their reading of Invariance, they posited the “sense of communism” as the “realisation of the Gemeinwesen”, which was a “human essence that cannot be understood in an eschatological, metaphysical, or moral sense, but as the natural and social ground in opposition to the reified world of commodities in which all the alienated human senses have lost their capacity to sense that which is to come”. 25 As discussed below, this is broadly consistent with Camatte’s understanding thereof, which draws more thoroughly on philosophical discussions of humanity’s participation in a common substance than it does on a sociological definition of the particular community. Yet the name of the group already contains its ownmost antinomy: it is the “translation of Gemeinwesen, Com-ontos, of being”. On the one hand, Comontismo was the “community of intent and action” constituted by “individuals that… place themselves outside of this society and against its mechanisms”.26 They were “qualitative and conscious individuals” with a “mode of life” such that “every partiality, every separation… tends dialectically to resolve itself”. 27 On the other hand, Comontismo was “the most complete expression of the nascent ‘human class’ (historical heir to the revolutionary proletariat), negator of capital” that must “live, extend, radicalise and concretely organise the negative that the world of capital has inside itself”. A particular group, then, that “finds its own finality in the realised community of human being, thus in the world of the qualitative, of what is authentic and properly liveable for man” that “will be the actualisation of the real human community”. Comontismo itself was understood to be nothing but the “real movement that suppresses existing conditions” that would bring “the destruction of the fictitious community of capital and of the installation of the total community” through the “re-appropriation” of the Gemeinwesen.28

Critique of the Racket and the Civil War

Cesarano himself came to express one of the most powerful critiques of this tendency. He grasped that the Comontisti insurrectionaries, despite their rejection of councilism as a hypostasised form and their theoretical understanding of the contemporary conjuncture, remained stuck in a routine of the “nostalgic repetition of insurrectional creativity”. 29 The Comontisti ideology of “teppism” was but “the obsolete style of the political militant” as there is not “any comportment or line of conduct that can be defined as revolutionary in itself… such a pure stylisation of conflictuality is like the ‘realisation of a work of art’”. 30 Following Vaneigem’s Treatise on Living for the Younger Generations, Cesarano emphasised the ethical imperative to reject any neo-christian figure of the pro-revolutionary founded upon sacrifice and militancy. He sought to distinguish the spectacular civil war of the militant from the revolt of the “proletarian body of the species”, evidenced by the very real and escalating manifestations of negativity at the time. 31 By this, Cesarano did not mean to critique the intentions of the Comontisti, whose actions would otherwise appear inseparable from the more generalised insurrectionary situation that had developed only a year prior during the so-called Italian “Hot Autumn” of 1969. On the contrary, he attempted to articulate a third path for the pro-revolutionary between militancy and quietism: the real movement is not to be found in the proliferation of forms of revolt already identified in the past, but located in the potential self-transcendence of every “form of politics which arises from even minimal conflict with the ‘concrete’ given”. 32 The Comontisti’s illegalism “drown[ed their] own project of being in a simple and caricatural disobedience to the normative as such”. 33 Cesarano thus sought to conceive of a path towards revolt that passed first of all through the capitalised individual’s damaged subjectivity and the struggle for their needs and indeed happiness, a matter developed more rigorously in his final book Survival Handbook, which draws heavily on Lacan and the anti-psychiatric tradition. 34 Cesarano critiqued the Comontisti for blocking the emergence of the “true struggle” by presenting their own acts as exemplary, perpetrating the “infamous spectacle of civil war” that “continues to usurp the places, the modalities and time of revolution”. 35 The revolutionary process, argued Cesarano, “can never again take the exclusive traits of the civil war”, but rather must find the sense of a “disaggregation actively pursued”, only conceivable if in fact these impulses find expression at the level of the species. 36 According to Cesarano, then, what is crucial is not the auto-affirmation of a particular institution or party as standing in for the negative of the world, but the revolt of the species as remainder to the process of capitalist subsumption. Comontismo, a paradoxical “criminal gang — historical party —human community”, was the result of an exclusionary gang-form well-defined through its own criteria of militancy, posing as the human community at war with the inhuman who stood apart. Through the valorisation of criminality as such, they remained incapable of offering a critique of those subjectivities emerging from social disintegration —themselves above all —and thus functioned as a sort of Operaismo in negative.

The Species, The Common, and Real Domination

Expression is a hypothesis, an interpretation that comes to be justified by the primigenial mechanism of memory. Its product is conditioned by the persistence of and by its community with the extra-representational immediacy of something that “was” first and that will be again afterwards —even if in another form… Expression is the universal interpretive principle. Memory conserves something and manifests it: it is appropriate to call this the expression of something that was first.37

Gattungswesen and the Species

As Invariance stressed, the affirmation of the human that is necessary to the communist line is not a matter of hypostasising any past, present, or future community, but rather of standing in a particular continuity with the entire history of humanity while recognising a very real and ongoing dehumanisation. In this way, Invariance enabled a theoretical shift away from the too psychological and humanist discourse of alienation: rather than a purported reconciliation with a lost human essence, they advocated for the development of the species’ innumerable possibilities and forms of living —its countless possible natures. 38 This was to try and find another ground for the political, as the potentially antagonistic struggle over manners of living that would neither culminate in a clash of civilisations, nor a unified cosmopolitan society. This development is located in the way that Camatte, and Cesarano after him, attempted to think the relation between the species and the Gemeinwesen. Invariance’s position must be distinguished from humanism as the presupposition of a fixed human essence, of a determinate figure of man etched in the sand, whether ahistorical or to be realised at history’s end. Humanism, the triumph of Humanitas, has never been concerned with reversing a very real decadence of the human. It is rather the belief in humanity as a self-sufficient species composed of individual persons, who hold on to thinking as their most prized possession since birth. The history of humanism is inseparable from that of society and capital alike. It follows that longue durée in the West from the ancient political communities through the Roman societas generis humani to the French société civil. From “living well” atop the slaves, to the spread of (Roman) citizenship against the barbarians, to the achieved universality of rights and the market with its own inhuman remainder relegated to slums and refugee camps. With each step one finds, on the one hand, the contingent history of those impersonal forces that, expropriating all particular communities, progressively produce that depoliticised population which will, in modern times, become dominated by the law of value; and, on the other, the exterminating logic of humanism’s biopolitical racism eradicating an outside that it refuses to recognise. It is within these successive definitions of humanity’s determinate essence, and the sequence of groups or national communities that have established themselves as the embodiment thereof, that we see how a determinate human essence has always been constituted alongside a genocidal division between Homo humanus and Homo barbarus. 39 In this long history, a logical problem of the totality mixes with a political reality of domination. For a paradox poses itself in thinking the possible unity of the human species which is neither defined by any particular essence nor as anything like a united community. Where the state and the market present at once the expropriation of particular communities and their reunification at a juridical level, Camatte and especially Cesarano instead attempt to think the ontological problem of a non-exclusive unity to the species. To explain this point — “the paradox that radical critique deepens and sets off from” —Cesarano cites a passage from Theodor Adorno which defines humanity as “that which excludes absolutely nothing”, for:

If humanity were a totality that no longer held within it any limiting principle, then it would also be free of the coercion that subjects all its members to such a principle and thereby would no longer be a totality… only with the decomposition of the principle of totality that establishes limits… would there be humanity and not its deceptive image. 40

Humanity, for Camatte and Cesarano, is a collection without presupposition or condition of belonging, without spatial or temporal borders, that, cutting across all past and given social forms into the future, involves no possible exclusion of the modalities that human existence might take. In this way they sought to understand both the struggle of humanity against a particular historical form that has been globalised (“it is all of humanity perceived through time that is hostile to capital” 41 ) and what the historical life of this species could be as its own constant “autopoetic” self-overcoming. 42 Yet, if the species is neither united by a determinate essence nor any particular social form, what non-religious or utopian sense could this common or generic being of the species possibly have? “Invariance varies”, Camatte claims, but “only as the affirmation of the human community’s becoming”.43 The fabled invariance is affirmed as the Gemeinwesen which cannot be a “human nature” or a transhistorical anthropological invariant but rather the “corpus in which the diverse human generations can rediscover one another in perceiving their difference… the common being of humans in their becoming [and] a form that this common being can take”. 44

Gemeinwesen and the Common

As the above quote indicates, Gemeinwesen is an ontological notion. In English, it is this dimension of Camatte’s works that has been lost in translation. Camatte’s reasoning remains unintelligible if, as seen in most English-language commentaries and indeed translations, Gemeinwesen is understood as a particular community. 45 For Camatte, communism is not the revindication of the human being, but rather of human being. For, according to him, particular communities “cannot simply live as a collection of human beings”; 46 there must be a pre-individual and impersonal common movement or substance. Particular communities, then, would exist as singular ways of individuating this substance. Camatte understands the pre-individual Gemeinwesen precisely as that medium in which particular communities past, present, and future unfold and communicate themselves, through their linguistic and technical production —or, at the limit, even conflict. The Gemeinwesen is nothing less than the generic mode of existence of human potential: the manner in which forms, paradigms and technical means of living persist —Marx’s “book of human powers”. 47 In the Gemeinwesen, “all the varied productions of the past —art, philosophy, science — are fragments. Elements of the vast despoliation of human beings as well as attempts to remedy it”.48 In the history of philosophy, Camatte’s problem is most comprehensible in terms of the post-Averroësian tradition, which attempts to think the manner in which human thought takes place not as a matter of individual cognition, but rather through contact with a common intellect.49 Camatte, drawing upon Bordiga and the seminal French anthropologist of technology André Leroi-Gourhan, 50 understands one of Marx’s essential insights to be what the latter calls “universal work” or “the universal character of every human being’s thought”. 51 It is the “social brain” that is our own as much as that of the “species”, as “the summation of all the beings that encircle us and that preceded us”. 52 Bordiga’s “Content of the Communist Program” affirmed the centrality of this line to Marxism:

In Marxism, production does not only conserve the single human animal but is a circuit for its reproduction. […] Every brain does not pulse only with the sensations of its own life, but also those of its progenitors… [so] does everyone think also with the brain of the other, living together. […] For us, true materialists, there is a collective brain, and the social human will be a development, unknown to the old generations, of the social brain. That one thinks with the heads of others is a positive fact, both ancient and contemporary. 53

For both thinkers, history is not to be understood as a process that progressively “swallows past possibilities” 54 , but as an electrical field and site of tensions, a result of “the work of millions who have laboured in obscurity of millennia… the immense process of becoming of millions of forces”. 55 Even if, in Bordiga’s own words, today the “historical ‘field’ is a cesspool” where “person-molecules” pretend to be the subject of history, the truly historical will “fly all along its line of force”. 56 That line (and the notion of the Gemeinwesen) points towards a world in which the dead labour of the past would not dominate the present, which is not to suggest that praxis would be sui generis but always an unworking of what once was. Here we glimpse the full sense of what it means that, on the one hand, the “human being… only is by superseding the given to which it can never be reduced”, and, on the other, that the Gemeinwesen, is “non-human” —that the human to be affirmed, the human that is the locus of the communist project, has no nature. 57 That is, the human is precisely located in this multiplicity of possible relations to, and forms of, its non-human exterior (the common), and not defined by an innate possession or faculty, such as its “rationality” or “creativity”. 58 Here we begin to see, on Camatte’s reasoning, the sense in which this dimension of historicity could be blocked by modern forms of domination —where capital could insert itself in separating human praxis from its works —just as much as how the presupposed communities of the past, regarding themselves as eternal, could mask the emergence of this dimension in its fullness. Camatte argues that the accession of humanity to the Gemeinwesen with the end of class society must be distinct from the precapitalist plurality of social substances or “anthropomorphised property” analysed by Marx in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Rather, it signals the end of the epochal dissemination of presupposed or reified ways of living, in reference to that “closure of prehistory” discussed by Marx. 59 The Gemeinwesen is neither a future global society nor a return to the premodern community, but rather the common substance that allows for the development of a sense of the political that would be non-identical to the illusions of bourgeois democracy. Here, once again, we find that the more we explore the concept of the Gemeinwesen, the more we understand the very real possibility —and, of course, reality— of dehumanisation, and the terrible difficulty of grasping the nature of that operation that could destitute the material ground of separation

Domination and the Biological Revolution

We have seen how the concept of the Gemeinwesen was understood by Camatte as a relation between the universality of the species and the common, rather than as a valorisation of the pre-modern community. We now turn towards the manner in which this concept shifted Marxist discussions of subjection and revolt, primarily examining his turn away from the notion of the real or formal subsumption of the production process towards that of capital’s formal or real domination. For Camatte, the concept of real domination emphasises a dimension of Marx’s thought that had been lost in the then new translations of texts such as “Results of the Immediate Process of Production” and the Grundrisse.60 The German concept Subsumtion, especially as developed in Marx’s unpublished drafts and notebooks, has two components: the submission of the particular and the domination of the concept. In French and Italian, however, the term was initially translated as the “submission” of labour to capital, 61 placing the emphasis on the working class’ action rather than its domination by capital. As Camatte concludes, “we have always preferred to use the expression of real or formal domination (while understanding that that implies the submission of the proletariat) because the principal, dominant, subject is in fact capital. It isn’t for nothing that Marx wrote Capital and not Proletariat”. 62 More importantly, Camatte sought to emphasise that the relation of subsumption is not just either an act of domination or submission, but a process by which capital “includes” or “appropriates to itself” the life process of the species as its own substance —and thus something on the order of an anthropological transformation. 63 The Invariance circle looked across the Marxian corpus to understand the development and eventual real domination of capital as the unity and completion of two movements: “the expropriation of communities, creating the proletariat” and “the autonomisation of value”.64 Fundamental to such a reading is the chapter on pre-capitalist social forms in the Grundrisse which recounts “how [human] activity was externalised, autonomized and made into an oppressive power which dissolved communities… [and developed] classes”.65 That humanity lives in relation to a material community, then, and not to either a Gemeinwesen or a plurality of particular communities, signifies that it has been totally reduced to living in relation to a form embodied in “the dead, crystallised element, the work of millions of human beings exteriorised in the form of fixed capital that founds the community”. 66 Individuals, argues Marx in the “Urtext”, have “given themselves reified being through their products” for whom “their Gemeinwesen itself appears as an external thing”, so that “on the one hand, [they are] not subsumed under any naturally evolved community and, on the other, they are not consciously communal individuals subsuming the Gemeinwesen under themselves”. 67 In these key texts for Camatte —the “Urtext” and “Results of the Immediate Process of Production” as well as “Forms which Precede Capitalist Production” — we are able to look upon the historical production of the population as that living, vital material, certainly not liberated as social labour, but rather organised and managed, inscribed into the process of social reproduction and denied any but the most desperate capacities to resist. Within Marx’s own categories, this transition is tied to the passage from the primacy of absolute surplus value, generated through the direct extension of the working day, to that of relative surplus value, extracted through the devaluation of labour power by “revolution[ising] out and out the technical processes of labour and the composition of society”. 68 From education to the state, there is a movement to “replac[e] all the preexisting social and natural presuppositions with its own particular forms of organisation which mediate the submission of the whole of physical and social life to its real needs of valorisation”. 69 In this way, the transition is linked to humanity’s increased dependence on the capitalist production process, both in terms of the production of necessary goods and the provision of work. The development of capitalism towards the stage of its real domination coincides with the production of a depoliticised population as a brute matter only present to be consumed by fixed capital for its reproduction. As Marx argued, “production does not simply produce man as a commodity, the human commodity, man in the role of commodity; it produces him in keeping with this role as a mentally and physically dehumanised being… Its product is the self-conscious and self-acting [human] commodity”.70 Workers thereby become “capitalised” and consider themselves as capital that must bear fruit — Homo oeconomicus. We find after universal proletarianisation not a collective or socialised worker qua revolutionary subject, but a human being who “is despoiled and tends to be reduced to its biological dimension”. 71 It is this element of Camatte’s work that contributed towards the most interesting aspects of his reception in Italy, especially as present in the work of Giorgio Cesarano. Indeed, Apocalypse and Revolution can be considered as a systematisation of Camatte’s writings of the time that deepens the anthropological dimension through a theory of anthropogenesis. The Survival Handbook, on the other hand, is a more original work that, drawing on Lacan and the anti-psychiatric tradition as much as on Adorno, attempts to think in a more decisive manner the “economy of interiority” and how “human beings who have internalised capital adapt to its life process”. 72 By turning to the latest results of psychoanalysis and empirical anthropology, Cesarano represents one attempt to move beyond the consciousness and representation-based theory of alienation one can still find in Camatte. At the same time, drawing upon concepts derived from the pages of Invariance as much as his own experience, Cesarano developed a clear understanding of contemporary forms of revolt, which no longer appeared restricted to the traditional workplace. Even if there has been a mutation of the species, a universal proletarianisation that has defined the human as worker, this subsumption into capital can never be completed and there remains a heterogeneous mass: the “necessary pollution” that is the “corporality of the species… irreducible to the people of capital”. 73 Fundamental to Cesarano’s analysis is the everincreasing devaluation through which, alongside surplus capital, surplus populations are produced as excluded from the production process and thus from capital’s new humanity. In a 1971 pamphlet “1970: Danzica and Stettino as Detroit”, Cesarano located the paradigmatic experience of 1968 not in the Parisian student-worker strikes of that year, but in the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. that took place across the United States —understood as the most mature site of capital’s real domination where the exclusionary process is most visible, “manifested in racial and national factors”. 74 For Cesarano, the species, in the course of its everyday survival, finds that capital’s fictitious Gemeinwesen can only be individualised in one manner, and that this “cannot comfort human beings and give them energy to support their situation, except for a suicidal energy”. 75 The manifestations of this energy are to be found in various forms of seemingly mad and gratuitous violence that are the only human forms that can be given to the concrete destruction of humanity. Hence the increasingly desperate character they take whereby, against capitalist totalisation —“the survival of death in the non-life of all” —the real movement responds with “the organic totalisation of its own radical revolt against the death of all” at a level that “all the bodies of the species know instinctively”. 76 As Cesarano develops in his unfinished major work: Every time a ‘crazy’ man launches a violent protest against the prison in which he is held and declares that what exists does not exist or is false, the imagination is at work. This ‘every time’ is becoming ‘always’. In the increasing rates of crime, neurosis and insanity, in the increasingly more frequent collective explosions of ‘unmotivated’ rage, in insubordination… in the insidious absenteeism, we see an intermediate stage on the road that the imagination is taking… that will put an end to the capitalist utopia, to prehistory, and allow the commencement of history as an equilibrium of existence and being. 77 Cesarano was here able to develop a non-romantic understanding of the “biological revolution” that, against the Comontisti, certainly had no need for propagation or apology by pro-revolutionaries, who had succumbed to “the alibi of the ‘necessity of the struggle’”. 78 Rather, the struggles carried out by this heterogeneous remainder to subsumption, where “resistance” to any particular identity becomes a universal “fact of the species”, are meant to dispel the anguish of every present figure and social identity, every predication —especially that of the militant. Such acts and the enthusiasm increasingly found for them constitute the sublime sign of this seemingly universal and almost biological rejection of capital’s organisation of life —and thus of the utopian dimension of capital’s own development projects.

What Remains

I have attempted to give a theoretical introduction to the Invariance circle’s contributions throughout the 1970s with an emphasis on their Italian reception. The latter problematisation of the contemporary conjuncture became the basis for the most critical positions in post1977 Italy, in the period of reflection that opened after the eradication — whether by violence, imprisonment, penitentism, or heroin —of the movements. This post-Bordigist perspective was important in such a context, not as an expression of communist melancholy, but in order to produce a space of critique from which it might be possible to rethink the political. This is most evident in Furio di Paola’s important article from 1978, “Dopo la dialetica”, which traces a line from Camatte, Cesarano and the tradition of “radical critique” through to then contemporary feminist practices. The latter groups, such as those surrounding Lea Melandri’s journal L’erba voglio, sought, through the critique of individual and group subjectivity, to dissipate “the old phantoms of the ‘political’ that continue to operate as the mystical paralysis of a social body that subsists only through the effective interventions of the technologies of capital’s domination”. 79 Fundamental is everything that is not said: all that was left to subsequent generations, especially our own. Crucially, three lines of inquiry remain open: (1) how to render concrete the ontological ground of capital’s real domination in the relation between subjectivity and the dialectical movement of history — subjectivation; (2) what, if any, is the place of the pro-revolutionary after the collapse of militancy, the party, and gauchism alike —that is, does a specifically political vocation remain?; and finally, (3) following Bordiga’s own “original content of the communist program”, what does it mean to destitute those particular historical forms, from property to money, that constitute us as capitalised individuals separated from the common? 80 How one answers these questions determines how contemporary strands of communisation might be distinguished. It determines, as well, how one might avoid melancholic resignation in the face of the community of capital —as much as any impatient substitution for the unrealised human community, or hypostatisation of apparent revolutionary processes.

— Cooper

Reading group discussion

[[‘Transition’]]

Camatte

[[Proletariat and Gemeinwesen]]

Camatte

[[‘Marx and Gemeinwesen’]]

Jacques Camatte, Revue Invariance (1977)

[[Excerpts from ‘Apocalypse and Revolution’]]

[[‘Provocation’]]

[[‘Glosses on Humanism’]]