Capital is schizophrenic. Its the burning hot core of the nuclear reactor the bourgeois use to power their rule. An unconscious emergent intelligence summoned up the ruling class of the 16th century that has threatened to break free from their control ever since. An auto-sophistication growth optimization machine that always trashes any self-conscious organization of humans, eventually.
Capital is a force for both Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization. It breaks down old human hierarchies, causes increases in complexity that makes central control by states or monopolies increasingly impractical. It smashes old traditions and douses sentimental superfluity in the icy water of Molochian competition and cold cash exchange. However, Capital also creates the means for its own control. Organized as ‘The Human Security System’, the bourgeois class wishes to control Capital and move it in their own direction. They are a force against efficiency and the uninhibited destruction of hierarchies, and towards centralization, statist or monopolistic authority, colonial violence and class stratification.
Each time the machine of Capital managed to destroy a portion of the old or create something radically free and new, The Human Security System steps in to recuperate the change and recreate or reshape the relation that has just been been smashed or bypassed. The Human Security System turned the anti-colonial wave into tepid neo-colonial IMF backed subservience. The Human Security System turned the wild west of questionably legal content and free flowing information that was the early internet in a centralized instrument of surveillance and information control. Of course, at the end of the day, Cthulu always swims left, little by little, but The Human Security System is a formidable force, pushing backwards against the forces of Capital.
Those are my views on what Capital is. They are fairly congruent with the Mutualist/Accelerationist view of Capital, although many Accelerationists underestimate the power of the paranoid Human Security System and focus entirely on the endless progress of Capital, as if there was no counter-tendencies to its its expansion.
From that understand, lets turn our attention to Italian Left-Communist turned Luddite, Jacques Camatte.
Camatte was a disciple of Bordiga, the Italian Communist Party’s dogmatic anti-Stalinist leader. In his journal, Invariance, Camatte mostly stuck to the Bordigist line, the ‘Invariant program of the proletariat’. That was until around the early 1970s, when in the aftermath of the May 1968 revolts in France, he took a strange turn towards something resembling an mirror image of accelerationism.
Camatte declared that Capital has outmaneuvered humanity, it has destroyed class society as it had once been and was now out of control. Its development of productive forces would not be halted by the contradictions in the law of value, as it was unbound from the law of value. It would not be overthrown by the proletariat as it had integrated the proletariat. The only thing left was Humanity and Capital left in a hopeless struggle. Any fight against Capital would merely return it in a stronger form. The only way out was to leave the world and return to nature and to Camatte’s abstract human community, Gemeinwesen.
There are obvious similarities between Camatte’s Luddite child of Italian ultra-left Marxism and the Accelerationist view of Capital.
Capital for both Camatte and the Accelerationists, is not static. It is not bound by a set law book that explains its exact operation. Instead, Capital is on the prowl. Intelligent. Constantly restructuring and becoming more and more unbound from its own Ontology.
“But this was to presuppose that capital would not be able to become truly autonomous, that it could not escape from the constraints of the social and economic base on which it is built: the law of value, the exchange of capital and labour power, the rigorous general equivalent (gold), and so on.” [1]
Capital for both Camatte and the Accelerationists is out of control. The process is no longer in the hands of human beings. Camatte seems to believe this even more than the Accelerationists, who at least have some conception of push and pull between The Human Security System and Capital.
“For a considerable time, human beings have, strictly speaking, been outstripped by the movement of capital which they are no longer able to control.” [1]
“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 outmaneuvered. At the global level, capital’s escape is evident in the monetary crisis, overpopulation, pollution and the exhaustion of natural resources.” [1]
There are many more similarities. The hopeless denial of agency in U/acc or Z/acc is reflected fairly well in Camatte’s complete lack of hope in any revolutionary action other than leaving the whole system behind. Both the Accelerationists and Camatte have an understanding of Capitalism that mostly comes to down to a potent positive feedback loop of increasing productive forces (Camatte previously had a solid understanding of Marxist Political Economy, but he has to completely shed it to make the claim that Capital will never fall to the falling rate of profit). However, there is one point I want to focus in on. It is a point of both agreement and disagreement that has major implications for the theory on both sides.
The difference between Camatte’s luddite system and Accelerationism is very simple. Camatte does not share the Accelerationist’s analysis of Deterritorialization. Capital does not set us free, it does not let desires flow and be realized and it doesn’t even seem to smash old human hierarchies. Capital is not liberation for Camatte. Its just death.
Capital for the Accelerationists is a schizophrenic, energetic, spinning, moving, restructuring hot force. For Camatte, it is like the slow approach of some totalitarian glacier. Capital is totalizing. Its stagnant, cold and destructive of all the warm humanist notions that Camatte clings onto. It is not at all like Deleuzian schizophrenia, it more like Marx’s vision of a factory, cold, accumulated coagulations of dead labor lashed to living humans all moving in totalitarian unison, propelled by some invisible force. It ought to strike us as strange that this new, unbound vision of Capitalism looks so much like the old one. Camatte can clearly see that Capital is in motion, that it has surpassed the limit implied in its Marxist definition, but here he stops. He can only imagine a mechanized world of steel.
“Others would rather take refuge in the old myths which reject the total and all-pervading tyranny of science and technology. (Often this is all combined with the use of some drug which gives the illusion of the rapid arrival of a world different from the horror we are now living through.) On the other hand, there are people who say that only science and technology can be relied upon to provide the answers -which would explain why certain women in the feminist movement are able to envisage their emancipation through parthenogenesis or by the production of babies in incubators. There are others who believe they can fight against violence by putting forward remedies against aggressiveness, and so on. These people all subscribe, in a general way, to the proposition that each problem presupposes its own particular scientific solution. They are therefore essentially passive, since they take the view that the human being is a simple object to be manipulated. They are also completely unequipped to create new interhuman relationships (which is something they have in common with the adversaries of science); they are unable to see that a scientific solution is a capitalist solution, because it eliminates humans and lays open the prospect of a totally controlled society.” [1]
A totally controlled society. But controlled by who exactly? Surely not the bourgeois. They have no control over the forces of Capital according to him, and have already been lumped together with ‘Humanity’ that is being encroached on by this machine of Capital. Perhaps controlled by the machine of Capital itself. But does it want to control?
Capital is complexity, motion, efficiency maximization. It tore down feudalism and slowly erodes every other hierarchy of humans. According to Camatte, it has even destroyed the human hierarchy of Class itself.
Capital frees, fractures, decentralizes, destroys. As Capital expands, it worms its way into every part of human life and subjectivity, breaks down the barriers, smashes the structures and marketizes the empty space left behind, and it does all this with the radiation leaking from the reactor it is trapped in. As far as total Capital meltdown, we haven’t seen anything yet. Capital colonizes human life, but not for the purpose of enslaving them. Rather for the purpose of letting every desire flow, letting nothing be suppressed or kept outside its reach.
Does Camatte prefer to be enslaved by a human than set free by a machine? He claims that Capital has domesticated human beings.
“The process starts out with the fragmentation and destruction of human beings, who are then restructured in the image of capital; people are turned into capitalist beings,” [1]
Which is of course, true. Any system of competition selects for certain traits. The Capitalist machine creates Capitalist humans whose values are best aligned with the self propagation of Capital.
But how does Camatte propose to escape? Go back to nature. Does Camatte believe that the vicious competition of nature will create kind, communal people? In reality, Primitive Communism gave way to horrifyingly unfree slave societies because that is the type of people nature makes. It is the winning strategy for survival. Camatte wants to escape Moloch, but can only think of going back to the old Moloch, the natural Moloch, the humanist Moloch of man killing each other with spears rather than rifles.
Camatte is a humanist at his core and its this fact that sends him shrinking back in horror when he see’s Capitals liberatory destruction of human existence. He is a reactionary. His sentiment is the same as any reactionary who sees their culture being worn away, their repression of desires failing and the future marching forward.
The cry of all such humanist reactionaries is always the same. Alienation. Authenticity. In reality it boils down to one simpering abstraction. Human nature. Camatte wants to preserve the negative freedom of the human, burdened only by the “natural” Molochian dynamic of Darwin. The very ideology of The Human Security System, the secular, abstract humanism that almost necessitates exclusionary violence, has seeped so deeply into Camatte that he cannot see anything outside of it.
I do not think Camatte can be called a deviation from Marxism. he takes Marxism further than Marx but he never throws out the core of the whole system, not even when he declares it “Repressive consciousness” for its support of productive force growth.
“For anybody who knows the text of the Grundrisse to claim that Marx from 1845 onwards stopped thinking about society in the old ‘ideological’ categories of ‘alienation’, ‘negation’, ‘generic human nature’, etc. is so obviously wrong that one wonders how to discuss it seriously. Indeed, the whole theory of man who objectifies but also alienates himself in products that afterwards govern over him as foreign powers, is repeated in the Grundrisse alongside the idea of the future return to man’s generic nature and free universality. The Grundrisse confirms clearly what may be known from Capital itself — that the concept of exchange value is a new elaboration of the concept of the alienated product, or rather the integration of the latter into economic theory. Exchange value is nothing else but the ‘living labour’ of man transformed into an alien force submitted on the market to the anonymous laws of exchange. It is man himself in his objectified and alienated form taking the shape of an autonomous anti-human power. Exchange value is not quantifiable because the meaning of this category is not to explain the movement of prices (prices depend on value but also on several other factors and the relative influence of value — in the Marxian sense — in shaping them is unmeasurable) but to unmask the anti-human character of capitalist production.” [2]
Of course, Camatte is not blind. He cannot see this human abstraction in his head reflected in the real world, and his is not foolish enough to pretend it has been hidden away under some veil. He declares it dead.
“More than this, capitalist society is death organized with all the appearances of life. Here it is not a question of death as the extinction of life, but death-in-life, death with all the substance and power of life. The human being is dead and is no more than a ritual of capital.” [1]
How convenient. By the time Camatte tries to reach his shaking hands out into the darkness of this horrible glacier of Capital that is both out of control and leading towards a society of control, by the time he begins to grasp around for the contours of Gemeinwesen, he has already decided that it is gone. He frees himself from the realization that it was never really there at all.
References :
1 : Camatte, Jaques, Against Domestication.
2 : Kołakowski, Leszek, Main Currents of Marxism
