Jacques Maurice Camatte (; 18 February 1935 – 19 April 2025) was a French writer and theorist. He began his intellectual career as a leading figure in the ultra-left Bordigist movement, a doctrinaire current of Marxism. After breaking with Bordigism following the events of May 1968, he developed a radical critique of Marxism itself, capitalism, and industrial civilisation. His work became highly influential on anarcho-primitivism.
Camatte's thought is best known for its periodisation of capitalism. Drawing on Karl Marx's concept of the subsumption of labour under capital, Camatte argued that capitalism had moved from a "formal" to a "real domination" over society. In this later stage, which he termed the "domestication" of humanity, he contended that capital had become a self-perpetuating "material community" that remade all social relations in its image, effectively absorbing the proletariat and neutralizing class conflict. Consequently, he rejected the traditional Marxist focus on proletarian revolution.
Camatte's later work proposed a pessimistic theory of the "wandering of humanity," in which the human species' separation from nature, beginning long before capitalism, had culminated in a totalising industrial society. He abandoned Marxism as an ideology of productivism and called for humanity to "leave this world" by abandoning technology and urban life to rediscover its lost communal essence, or Gemeinwesen, in harmony with nature. In his final decades, he lived a life of rustic simplicity, putting his philosophy into practice.
Early life and political development Jacques Maurice Camatte was born in Plan-de-Cuques, near Marseille, France, on 18 February 1935. His childhood was marked by poverty and trauma; his mother was institutionalised for mental illness, and he spent five years in a home for abandoned children. He later recalled this period as instilling in him a sense of the "repression of naturalness" and a profound questioning of adult "wickedness," experiences that he saw as formative for his later political and theoretical trajectory, particularly his concepts of threat and madness. In 1953, while in high school, he met Otello Ricceri, an Italian worker and communist who had fled fascism and who introduced him to the thought of the Italian Marxist theorist Amadeo Bordiga, a principal figure of the communist left. Camatte was drawn to Bordiga's intransigent opposition to both Western capitalism and the Soviet Union, and his revolutionary stance against colonialism and all forms of nationalism.
Bordigist period Camatte began a correspondence with Bordiga in 1954, meeting him the following year. He became a member of the International Communist Party, which was founded by Bordiga, and later recalled being drawn to its theoretical power and its communal atmosphere, in which intellectuals and agricultural workers mixed. He began attending party meetings throughout Italy from the age of eighteen, and described his first personal meeting with Bordiga at age twenty as a "luminous" experience, remembering him as a powerful and affectionate figure who embraced comrades upon their arrival. He became fluent in Italian and maintained intellectual relationships with Italian thinkers including Giorgio Cesarano, Gianni Collu, and Piero Coppo.
During the 1960s, Camatte's work was firmly situated within the Bordigist current of the ultra-left. He worked as a teacher of earth and life sciences in Toulon and Rodez. In early texts such as "Origin and Function of the Party Form" (1961), co-written with Roger Dangeville, Camatte articulated an orthodox Bordigist position. He argued that a disciplined, unitary communist party equipped with an invariant programme was necessary to prepare for proletarian revolution. This party would act as an "organ of foresight" and a "prefiguration of communist society". After seizing power, the party would establish itself as a "social brain" to guide the transition to communism, rejecting democracy in favour of what Bordiga termed "organic centralism". This anti-democratic stance was further developed in "The Democratic Mystification" (published 1969), in which Camatte defined democracy as a mechanism for class rule that organises individuals who have lost their "original organic unity with the community".
A consistent theme throughout Camatte's work, originating in this early period, is his emphasis on the Marxian concept of Gemeinwesen (a German term meaning "common essence" or "communal being"). For Camatte, Gemeinwesen represents the true social nature of humanity, which has been lost under class society but which can be glimpsed in the proletariat's potential to overcome the bourgeois dichotomy between the individual and society.
Break with Marxism
Camatte broke from the International Communist Party in 1966. According to his later account, the split was precipitated by both organisational and political disagreements. He resisted a turn away from Bordiga's principle of "organic centralism" toward what he saw as a more rigid, activist style of organisation. He also disagreed with the party's increasingly uncritical support for anti-colonial movements, which he felt ignored the bourgeois nature of their leadership. The final break occurred after a contentious meeting in Paris, where Camatte rose and declared the meeting a "masquerade". He founded the journal Invariance in 1968, naming it after Bordiga's concept of the "invariance of Marxism" to signal his continued fidelity to Bordiga's theoretical project, in contrast to his former comrades who had started a journal named after another Bordigist concept, Le Fil du temps (The Thread of Time).
Real domination of capital Camatte's major work from this transitional period, Capital and Community (1968), was a lengthy exegesis of Karl Marx's writings, particularly the "Results of the Immediate Process of Production", the then-non-canonical "unpublished sixth chapter" of Das Kapital. In this text, Marx distinguishes between the "formal subsumption" and "real subsumption" of labour under capital. Formal subsumption occurs when capital incorporates existing labour processes, while real subsumption involves capital reshaping the labour process itself to increase relative surplus value. Camatte interpreted this distinction as the key to understanding the entirety of Marx's work. He chose to translate Marx's term Subsumtion as "domination" rather than the more literal "subsumption" to emphasize that capital had become the active agent in the relationship, not the worker.
Camatte argued that in the phase of real domination, capital becomes a self-perpetuating, autonomous power that remakes all of society in its image. According to his analysis, the "autonomization of exchange value" in the form of money gives rise to a single, abstract social relation that constitutes capital as a "material community". This process was cemented by the historic "defeat of the proletariat" in the 1920s, after which capital could complete its domination. For Camatte, this process went beyond the factory to encompass the integration of all social relations into capital's logic. Capital becomes the "material community," an "animated monster" that seizes "all the materiality of man" and reduces human beings to "pure spirits who now receive their substance from capital." Camatte argued that under these conditions, "Men who have become pure spirits can rediscover themselves in the capital form without content." This process, which he termed the "domestication" of humanity, became the central object of his critique.
Post-1968 turn to primitivism
The social and political upheavals surrounding the events of May 1968 marked a fundamental turning point for Camatte. Influenced by the rise of councilist and anarchist currents that rejected traditional party structures, he decisively broke with the Leninist party form. In his 1969 letter "On Organization," Camatte argued that all political parties, including the Bordigist organisations, had degenerated into "gangs" or "rackets" that function as "illusory communities" and merely reproduce the logic of capital. He criticised the unthinking valorisation of violent negation within anticapitalist milieus, which he argued could lead to a "repressive consciousness" that blocked genuine revolt. He rejected all forms of political representation as an "obstacle to a fusion of forces" and called for revolutionaries to pursue theoretical development in an "autonomous and personal fashion".
By 1973, in texts such as "The Wandering of Humanity" and "Against Domestication", Camatte had completed his break with Marxism. He argued that capital had now achieved total, real domination over society. In this new phase, capitalism had overcome the law of value and its tendency toward crisis, and had effectively negated the existence of social classes through the universalisation of wage labour, creating a "collection of slaves of capital". For Camatte, it was no longer the proletariat that was exploited, but "humanity" as a whole. He came to see the historical workers' movement as inherently reformist, arguing that the working class's struggles had only served to further its integration into the capitalist community. Reflecting on this period, Camatte identified the moment when the number of unproductive workers in the United States surpassed that of productive workers in 1956 as a key turning point, confirming for him that the proletariat was ceasing to be the revolutionary class.
Camatte directed his critique at Marxism itself, which he accused of being a theory of development that glorified the growth of productive forces. This developmentalist project, he argued, was part of the "wandering of humanity" away from its natural communal being. This "wandering," he contended, began not with capitalism but with humanity's original separation from nature. According to Camatte, this break was not a malicious act but a necessary choice made in response to objective threats to the species' survival, such as natural disasters and predators. This separation led to the development of agriculture, animal husbandry, private property, patriarchy, and the state. Concluding that Marxism was simply another apology for industrial society, he declared that "it becomes increasingly imbecilic to proclaim oneself a Marxist".
Later thought In his post-Marxist work, Camatte replaced the project of proletarian revolution with the broader goal of "re-establish[ing] community", a direct return to his concept of Gemeinwesen. He argued that this new revolution would entail a complete break with humanism, scientism, and technology, which he saw as determined by the capitalist mode of production rather than being neutral tools. Instead of dominating nature, humanity must seek "reconciliation with and regeneration of nature". In his 1989 text "Émergence et Dissolution," Camatte outlined a "program for the regeneration of the biosphere". Its proposals included a halt to the construction of new roads and cities; an end to hunting, fishing, and large-scale animal husbandry; the abolition of tourism and professional sports; and the abandonment of nuclear power. More broadly, the project implies the "destruction of urbanization" in favour of multiple small communities, the diminishment of the transportation system, the end of monoculture, and a halt to population growth.