PDF-Version: Programme Communiste – Clarification regarding some Surpassers of Marxism

Under the title “Bordiga et la passion du communisme” [Ed.: English version], Mr. Camatte published in the Cahiers Spartacus some texts of our party, accompanied by a presentation and a “biography” of his own. Shortly afterwards, the “Editions de l’Oubli” published in an incomplete and truncated version, with an introduction [Ed.: English version] by the same Camatte, the second part of our “Economic and Social Structure of Russia Today” [Ed.: Part III in English, French version, Italian version], published from 1955 to 1957 in our organ in Italian language Il Programma Comunista.

When Mr. Camatte left our organisation about ten years ago, at the same time as those who then edited the “Fil du temps”, when he then began to publish under the title “Invariance” an indigestible salad of our texts and its elucubrations, we did not consider it useful to explicitly polemicise him. The political background of his rupture was perfectly clear to us; the positions he represented, we had fought them before, and continued to fight them without needing to mention it. And Mr. Camatte’s personal trajectory interested us so little, that we did not even express our amusement when his so-called “invariance” began to vary openly, and his alleged loyalty to Marx and the Italian left to become open denial and anti-Marxist delirium.

This time, however, we must react against the use and abuse of texts that are our “property”, not in the banal legal sense, but because they are our own. Because it is quite obvious that Mr. Camatte is not content to simply edit these texts. If he publishes them, by speculating on fashion, it is not only to make a little money with a party work, but especially to defuse them, to distort them, to “détourne” them as one says, in short, to draw them to himself. It is against this enterprise that we must vigorously rise up and, to counter it, we will quickly examine how and for what purpose he carries out this détournement.

Bordiga’s Work or Collective Heritage

His first falsification consisted in stripping these texts of their character as party texts and turning them into pages of the work of an individual, Amadeo Bordiga. He must recognise that it does not work alone: “Another element makes it even more difficult to carry out a study on A. Bordiga: it is the dispersion of his work. Moreover, the fact that all post-1945 literature was published in anonymous form facilitated the conspiracy of silence, as it was difficult for most of those who wanted to study his thought to locate what he actually wrote” (Introduction to “Economic and Social Structure…”, p. 7). His renegade status obviously confers conditions on Mr. Camatte. But one of the aims of the anonymity of the party’s publications was precisely this: to prevent people from seeing in them the work or thought of one as such.

When we insist on the impersonal nature of the party’s positions and the collective nature of its work, when we fight individualism in all its forms, we never imagined that all party militants were identical and interchangeable. We don’t, but Mr. Camatte does. He is one of those who gargle with the formula “the individual is shit”, a very useful and effective polemic formula in an age of individualistic exaltation, but which becomes absurd if we take it literally. And today he has the audacity (c.f. “Bordiga et la passion du communisme”, p. 26-27) to attribute to Bordiga his metaphysical negation of the individual, and to treat him from above!

We know perfectly well that the party is made up of men in the flesh, with their particularities, their qualities, their history; but we also know that it must integrate these forces, discipline them, bend them to its positions and place them at the service of its collective goal that transcends them in space and time. We know that “the party” cannot climb on a table to make a speech or sit in front of a typewriter to write an article; but we also know that speeches and articles, like all the activity carried out by such a militant, must express not “his” thought, but the positions of the party, which are the collective heritage of the revolutionary movement, beyond countries and generations. This is not only true for the “rank and file militant” but also, and even more, for a leader, for a party head.

The anonymity of our party publications underlines this aspect, and it was particularly important to insist on it at a time when, by the force of counterrevolution, the instrument of conservation and transmission of this collective class heritage was almost reduced to an individual, obviously supported by a group of old militants soaked in the period of revolutionary struggles in the first post-war period, and by a militant organisation. Only logicians impermeable to dialectics can see a contradiction there.

Bordiga was the leader of the Communist International in which the position of the Marxist left crystallised; the one who had led the struggle against the oscillations, fluctuations and loosenings of C.I. politics; who had in no way participated in its successive abandonments and degeneration, but had opposed it and learned from it; who, in the period from 1927[1] to 1944 that Mr. Camatte characterised “by a withdrawal from political life” had instead functioned as a formidable accumulator, clarifier, concentrator of all the doctrinal, theoretical, political and programmatic positions of the communist movement, and of the experience of gigantic struggles, and of the lessons of defeat and counterrevolution; and who then spread all this knowledge to the young militants, in a burst that can only be compared to a volcanic eruption.

In truth, it was tempting to make “Bordigism”, to attribute to him all that he gave us, and with what force; he also had to fight to make it clear that a “leader” is only a party instrument, no more effective than others but not “perfect” either.

Against the temptation to attribute everything to the “great leader”, the anonymity of the party’s publications was therefore necessary as a political requirement stemming from the situation and experience. It was sufficient to see what had become of “Leninism” and “Trotskyism” to be convinced of this. Likewise, it was not out of modesty or principle, but seeing the stupid and repugnant cult at Marx’s grave, that Engels demanded to be cremated and his ashes scattered over the sea. Let us recall at this point the astonishment of Krupskaya and Trotsky in the face of the cult rendered to the mummy of Lenin. Party texts bearing a signature are not “personal work” but collective work and heritage. It is true that, even after the phase of appearance and crystallisation of what, for convenience and tradition, we continue to call Marxism, a phase where names were fatally used as its sign, books, brochures, articles, etc., had to be signed insofar as various tendencies were opposed within the revolutionary organisation itself. The delimitation, identification and struggle of these tendencies were based on the work and names of their spokespersons; but these divergences, tendencies, struggles, themselves started from programmatic declarations, theses, resolutions which were rightly anonymous because they were intended to act as impersonal and binding guides of the movement, and ended for the same reason in programmatic declarations, theses, resolutions, of the same nature, aiming to obtain, even if they did not always succeed, the highest degree of homogenisation of the party. That is why, in particular, the imposing body of theses and resolutions of the first Congresses of the Communist International, aiming at re-establishing on granite bases the world communist movement, was anonymous; that is why, all the more so in the complete confusion caused by the Stalinist counterrevolution, the party texts, which express an effort and a desire for homogeneity essential for the rebirth of the class revolutionary movement, have appeared anonymously and are published anonymously, far from the suggestion of the “great names”.

Biography of a Man or a Party

And here come the lost Sorbonnards. For them, the history of parties is the personal biography of their leaders; and the thought of these “geniuses” is the demiurge of the history of these parties. And to lament that “it is still difficult to write a true [sic!] biography of Bordiga…” (Introduction to “Economic and Social Structure…”, p. 7). Poor people! They do not understand that for Marxism what counts is not the biography of such a leader, but the history of a political movement that represents, in a game of action and reaction, a social movement, and in which the “history” of a militant, even of exception, cannot be isolated. What counts is not the “thought” of the “great man” but the positions which, in the development of the movement, find in this or that militant or group of militants their material vehicle. What is important is not the “evolution” of the thought of one such; it is the confrontations, the variations, the clarifications, the rectifications of the positions of the political currents, in dialectical interaction with the ups and downs of the class struggle. It is in this way, and not by attaching ourselves to the biography of individuals as such, be they Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev or Bordiga, that we have undertaken to write the history of the communist left, only part of which has been published in French for the moment. In particular, we study the relations, not always simple, between the Italian left and the Bolsheviks, in a perspective that has nothing in common with that of the “biography” given by Mr. Camatte.

Let us note in passing in it some highly fantastical assertions. Thus we are told that in 1919 “the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly made Bordiga believe that the Bolsheviks did indeed have an anti-parliamentary position” (“Bordiga et la passion du communisme”, p. 205), which suggests that the Bolsheviks were… parliamentarians! Or that “it is very interesting to note that at that time [July 1920] there was a certain convergence between different currents tending to transcend democracy” (ibid, p. 207), currents which would have been represented by Bordiga and … Lukács, Gorter, Pankhurst, Pannekoek, while the Bolsheviks would have been vulgar democrats; in good company, it is true, since he speaks of “the democratic illusion (which Marx and Engels had not been spared from)” (ibid, p. 205). These statements, or the one that claims that the 3rd Congress of the International “ends in a defeat of the movement of the left on a world scale” (ibid., p. 211), the more or less confused assimilation of the Italian left to the KAPD, etc., only reveal the confusionism and political eclecticism of their author. To top it all off, disdaining the history of political parties and currents, Mr. Camatte launches into a Bordiga novel, with formulas of this kind: “In the end, abstentionism and the clash with Lenin in the Second Congress remain as an obsession throughout Bordiga’s life” (ibid., p. 223), or that he “never managed to overcome the debate of 1920” (ibid., p. 224), thus falling into the vulgar and stupid psychological interpretation.

The purpose of this work is obvious. The texts he wants to use and détourne, Mr. Camatte can still not present them for what they are: the collective heritage of a political movement, a party. He tries to make them the heritage of an individual, open to all individuals.

“Passion for” – or “Struggle for” Communism

Of course, Bordiga’s texts resist this “individualisation” by themselves and shout out their character as party texts, but obviously to varying degrees. Mr. Camatte has therefore made a selection, and the title of his collection is already significant. It is certain that in the work of restoring Marxism undertaken by our party after the Second Imperialist War, the characterisation of communism and its “lower stage”, socialism, in the face of Stalinist falsifications and general misunderstanding, was one of the most important tasks, and still is today. But what for us is only one aspect of the doctrine and programme, inseparable from the rest, Mr. Camatte makes it the alpha and omega of a so-called “Bordigism”. According to him, it was Bordiga who finally discovered and affirmed the non-mercantile nature of communism, which is utterly false, and it is this “passion for communism” that would characterise him, which is just as false.

It is obvious that in any true communist militant, the “passion of communism” manifests itself as a passion for the revolutionary struggle for communism, and as a passion for the indispensable instrument of that struggle, the communist party. As for Mr. Camatte, he claims to be “communist” only to deny the class struggle and the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat that leads to it, and to deny the instrument of this struggle, the party. We wouldn’t even bother with him if he didn’t try to justify this double negation (not at all dialectical!) by using our party texts.

From Invariance to the Renewal of Marxism

When we want to identify the positions defended by Mr. Camatte, we come up against a difficulty that is not their anonymity, but their inconsistency. In his mind, moreover, this is not a weakness but a strength: “The desire for coherence sometimes operates like inertia” (ibid., p. 11), he reproaches Bordiga. This is certainly a reproach that cannot be addressed to Mr. Camatte, to whom deliberate incoherence allows the widest trenches to be crossed without momentum. On the fundamental question of invariance, for example, he writes: “Some will tend to classify Bordiga’s work among the manifestations of absolute dogmatism […] because they will not have understood a fundamental point: if there is invariance of Marxism, it is not because the latter, as a theory of the proletariat […] would still be valid because society would have remained identical to itself since 1848 […] but because it is an anticipation […] because the theory contains the forecast of the whole course of the historical development of capital and the modalities according to which the maturation of social relations was to facilitate [sic] the becoming [sic] of communism. Marx expressed the generic solution and outlined the phases that human society had to go through to achieve it” (ibid., p. 30-31).

In this passage, Mr. Camatte seems to take up in his account our conception and our claim of the invariance of Marxism. But it’s only a dupery, since elsewhere he reproaches Bordiga for simply explaining Marx, for limiting himself to a hermeneutic (interpretation of sacred texts) instead of launching into innovation: “Unfortunately, simple hermeneutics can’t suffice when you have to face novelty. This is the difficult point” (ibid., p. 6). In other words, theory has foreseen everything – except what is new, and therefore “it is necessary to do a new theoretical work” (ibid., p. 32). For “what is imposed on us is no longer the restoration of Marxism. It has been fully realised” (Introduction to “Economic and Social Structure…”, p. 19). What remains to be done, contrary to what has been said above, is therefore to “surpass” Marxism, that is to say to throw it overboard again: “the real domination of capital forces us to consider another way out than the one, which has been sought up to now” (ibid., p. 19), since both “it now appears that the movement towards socialism can no longer be considered from the stages indicated by Marx” (“Bordiga et la passion du communisme”, p. 23).

This is how this so-called “invariance theorist” asserts that Marxist theory has foreseen everything – except, small detail, that it will have to be renewed! And that he recognises that “Bordiga’s merit was to be able to maintain the pole of the future, communism, even if, [listen carefully!] right now we see it differently” (Introduction to “Economic and Social Structure…”, p. 19).

These jugglings between invariance and novelty, between continuity and difference, obviously tend to give credence to the idea that the true continuator of Marxism is… Camattism, and that “Bordiga” constituted the intermediate link between the two. Hence the now reserved and ambiguous attitude of Mr. Camatte with regard to his god of yesterday: he was no more than his own precursor! He can credit him (quite wrongly!) with the “merit” of having thrown points out of Marxism, but he must reproach him for his shyness, his refusal to leave it completely: “Bordiga perfectly expressed the dominant ideas of the communist movement such as it developed after the Russian revolution and, at the same time, he expressed what this movement is, transformed into an ideological diaphragm: the real process of becoming, that is, not interpreted by Bolshevism or Leninism, of society. But his struggle against Leninist [sic], Trotskyist and Stalinist [all on the same level!] deformations definitely hindered his investigation. His resolve to absolutely refrain from innovation, to restrict himself to commentary, to proving that everything has already been explicitly set forth, led him to remain within his limits” (“Bordiga et la passion du communisme”, p. 5-6). Imagine, here is a man who only wanted to be a Marxist, when he could have become… a Camattist; a man who “deliberately set limits for himself; he did not produce what he was potentially capable of producing. That is why his work, which is about the future, was inhibited or disguised” (ibid. p. 6). Or again, about fictitious capital: “Without going so far as to delimit this fictitious quality of capital, Bordiga did, however, address this task; this is why his works are full of starting points for new research, which were never brought to further development because they were inhibited by the organisational inertia of the International Communist Party…”(ibid. p. 30).

Fortunately, Mr. Camatte is here. Mr. Camatte who, while reproaching Bordiga for having been “responsible for the survival of a mystifying past, cloaking this future” (ibid., p. 11), desperately tries to cling to him, both to continue a tradition and to détourne that tradition towards him.

Fictitious Capital and Universal Class

It is time to say a few words about Mr. Camatte’s “new” theory of “new” facts, and especially to see how he constructs that theory. He effectively takes as “starting points” Marxist affirmations that reflect real trends in society; but he isolates these affirmations from the whole theory, he ignores the contradictory historical process in which these trends manifest themselves: he elevates these affirmations to the absolute, and considers these tendencies as already realised. It is the old metaphysical and logical method, unable to grasp and represent a dialectical process.

We can cite a classic example of the application of this method, not so far from Mr. Camatte’s ideas; it is Kautsky’s “ultra-imperialism” theory. The latter also “started” from incontestable Marxist affirmations, expressing the tendency of capital to concentration and political as well as economic centralisation; and, in his head, he pushed this tendency to its “logical” conclusion, imagining a super-state concentrating and centralising the imperialist oppression and exploitation of the whole world. Lenin deflated this “theoretical discovery” by simply putting this tendency in its place; for if the tendency to the super-state does exist, the opposite tendency, the centrifugal tendency, also exists; through the analysis of the “newest” facts (and we are trying to do so, too) Lenin confirmed the good old theory that knew both tendencies, and foresaw that the contradiction between the two and the social upheavals that this contradiction produces, increase as capital concentrates.

If Kautsky is still cautious and measured in the use of this metaphysical method, Mr. Camatte pushes it straight to the end and to the absurd. Bordiga who “refuted those who thought that the development of automation is a practical refutation of Marx’s theory of value“, as he rightly says, he reproaches that he “did not, however, extract all the logical consequences of the affirmation that living labor time tends increasingly to decline in the capitalist mode of production, that the activity of the worker is becoming almost superfluous” (ibid., p. 21). A remnant of modesty made him put in this an “almost”, but this is only a formal concession on his part! In reality, his criticism is not so much addressed to Bordiga as to history, which persists in not realising the “logical” consequence of… this statement, and which has not yet made the work of the workers “completely” superfluous. However, “the party is anticipation”, so Mr. Camatte suggests that the “logical” development of this trend is already a given.

To our assertion that the tendency of capital is to reduce the share of living labour in products and thus dialectically thwart the law of value which is the basis of its existence, an assertion which expresses the fact that capitalism is contradictory and that its contradictions are increasing, Mr. Camatte opposes the “logical” idea of already superfluous labour, of value already eliminated by capital itself, so that “from one day to the next it is possible to really destroy value” (ibid., pp. 21-22).

More generally, because capitalist society historically tends dialectically (i.e. contradictorily) towards communism, Mr. Camatte draws the “logical” consequence that “in the final phase of capital, […] capital imitates the society of the future and realises some of the immediate demands of the proletariat” (ibid., p. 30). He goes even further in bold anticipation and is not afraid to say that “capital has in fact [sic!] entered the stage of transition and, in a way, the lower stage of socialism” (ibid., p. 23). Thus, taking as a “starting point” a text that shows that there is no socialism in Russia, Mr. Camatte discovers that capital has achieved socialism everywhere. It had to happen!

It will do even better. Starting from Marx’s and Engels’ analysis recalled by Bordiga, which shows that the development of capital tends to eliminate the figure of the classical capitalist, and from Bordiga’s Marxist demonstration that in certain circumstances the capitalist mode of production can develop without a classical bourgeois class, he deduced from this, and reproached Bordiga for not doing so, that “if it were so, the capitalist mode of production could itself go beyond the classes, absorbing them, putting all men into slavery” (Introduction to “Economic and Social Structure…”, p. 13).

In the trap, then, Bordiga, who strongly recalled that capitalism could not even reach a “pure” state to the point of eliminating the middle classes.

In the trap, Engels, who showed that the most “pure”, the most totally concentrated and depersonalised capitalism (which is unrealisable) would still be capitalism, which would only come closer to socialism through its increasingly explosive contradictions. Engels, who said that social classes are not the causes, but the products of production and exchange relationships.

In the trap, especially, the old Marx, for whom only the dictatorship of the proletariat and the destruction of the capitalist relations of production could abolish the classes! In the trap, Lenin, in the trap the entire communist movement, Ubu-Camatte[2] “deduced” that capital itself can surpass classes.

What are we saying, “it can”? It’s already done! The classes are outdated, there is no bourgeoisie, no petty bourgeoisie, no proletariat, there is only one single “universal class” oppressed by capital!

Well, well, if there are no more classes, there will be no more class struggle; what will overthrow the domination of capital? Does Mr. Camatte at least give us the prospect of a struggle of this universal class against the capital that enslaved it? Not even that. Because, at the same time as it surpassed the classes, “capital exceeded its limits by becoming fictitious capital” (“Bordiga…”, p. 30). So go fight against a fictitious capital! And, of course, it is from the same Bordiga “that we left to understand what fictitious capital was, and finally come to the affirmation that capital is only a representation” (Introduction to “Economic and Social Structure…”, p. 13). In other words, “starting” from the observation that, in certain circumstances, capital that does not yet exist and that perhaps never will, can function as capital, we, Jacques Camatte, have understood what fictitious capital is: We have discovered that capital has become fictitious, and we affirm finally that capital is only a representation.

Hilarious! Yes, he left Marx and Bordiga, he left so well, that he arrived at the opposite ends! For Marxism, capital is a social relationship, a real relationship between men, above all in production; a contradictory relationship that generates antagonistic classes that reproduce it, but whose struggle, culminating in revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, must lead to its material destruction. For Mr. Camatte, it is only a representation, that is to say an idea which “parasitises the brain of each one” (“Invariance”, II, 2); and here we are in 1845, in the most beautiful days of the German ideology so mocked by Marx and Engels: let us free the brains of the men of the representations which parasitise them … and they will be free. It’s simple, but it still had to be thought of!

Once again, we would not even speak of Mr. Camatte if he did not claim to reconcile these irreconcilable positions, if he did not try to build a bridge from one to the other, and to build that bridge precisely with our Marxist texts. And, perhaps even more important than fighting this attempt, it is important for us to see how it proceeds, to protect us against “slippages” which, without going so far, risk diverting us from our path.

***

We have already seen two aspects of his method, the fact of isolating a tendency from a dialectical process and developing it in the abstract, and the fact of “anticipating” and considering this logical development as already achieved. It has a third aspect, all the more dangerous because it also serves as a vehicle for others: it is the passion for formulas, the act of gargling with words or phrases that have become magic formulas, of repeating formulas by clinging to their letter and forgetting their real meaning. We may be told that all we have to do is not use formulas that could be détourned in this way. But that’s impossible.

The Passion for the Formula

The workers movement has always used slogans, propaganda formulas which, without being absolutely precise and rigorous, express well what they want to say. We can cite, for example, the classic “expropriation of expropriators” and “abolition of private property!” that people have turned against us by equating socialism with… nationalisations. Moreover, it is impossible for a sentence to correctly express the dialectical relationship of a complex reality; inevitably some aspects will be more accentuated than others.

In any case, the “formulist” finds his happiness everywhere and swoops in. Let Engels use the “good old German word Gemeinwesen (community)”, and here he takes that word, fills his mouth with it and repeats it to the point of disgust, putting God knows what in it. Explain that capital tends to deny the law of value, talk about the credit of “fictitious capital”, he throws himself on these expressions and revels in them until he convinces himself that value is abolished and capital has become fictitious. And so on…

***

He works in the same way in the question of the party. Indeed, one of the formulas that we used and that we are using about the party says, “the party is the programme”. And it is a formidable formula, a red bullet shot in the mouths of all immediateists, workerists, spontaneists and activists. Of those who think that it is the “revolutionary will” that defines a party; of those who believe that it is its sociological composition; of those who believe that “the movement is everything and that the goal is nothing”; of those who have neither firm principles nor defined policies, but expect the masses to discover them spontaneously; of those who call on all “revolutionaries of good will” to unite in the belief that the programme will emerge democratically. It was necessary, and it is necessary to launch this shock formula to affirm that what defines a political party is its programme, that is, its historical goal and the ways and means that lead to it.

Real Party or Idea of Party

Obviously, there have been people to take the formula “to the letter” and reduce the party to the programme; you have to be “logical”, right: if the party is the programme, then the programme is the party.

In short, against toads who, under the pretext that they jump, think they are eagles, we have launched the formula “the bird – it’s the wings”. And it is true that it is the wings that characterise the bird: no wings, no bird. But the formula becomes stupid if you take it literally and “identify” the bird with the wings. A pair of wings flying alone is not a bird, it is an abstraction, an “angel” if you will. Strictly speaking, a bird is not wings; it is an animal that has wings, an animal with all that that entails, bones, muscles, a head, a beak, a gizzard, a cloaca, etc. Likewise, the party is not the programme: it is a militant organisation that “has” the communist programme like the bird has wings.

It is true that this organisation suffers the repercussions of the class struggle and that, in a period of counterrevolution, it can at the limit be reduced to its simplest expression, to a tenuous thread that ensures continuity and transmits the gains of the past to the new revolutionary generation. But if one has to accept and endure this state of “disembodiment” of the party, which remains “party” insofar as it fulfils its function in this situation, it is absurd to idealise it, to consider it as its “normal” state and to indulge in it.

There were people to do it! If they could believe for a time that they had something in common with the left, that is, with Marxism, it was because we were effectively reduced to this state of virtual disembodiment, and that fact went against the affirmations of principle that we never stopped defending. While for us the party – armed, it goes without saying, with the right theory, the right programme, the right principles, the right tactics and the right organisation – must not “be”, but tends to become the effective direction of proletarian struggles, these people have transformed it into abstraction, into an archivist of revolutionary positions. Even those of them who have not fallen into the Camattist delirium have completely falsified the Marxist conception of the party, which they reduce to the role of an educator, of an illuminator of consciousnesses, if not to an even more derisory role of an editor of the complete works of Marxism, of a vulgariser of the doctrine in pocket collection.

It is certain that the repetition of the formula “the party – it is the programme” was certainly not the cause, but the means of this deviation that we fought at the time (see In Defence of the Continuity of the Communist Programme the theses of the years 1965-66) and that we fight tirelessly. One of the lessons we must learn from this experience is that, if we have to use lapidary formulas, propaganda formulas, condensed formulas, we must never let them become “magic” formulas, recipes, sentences whose incantatory repetition stifles the spirit in favour of the letter.

Evidently, Mr. Camatte was a champion of the party-programme in the sense of party-idea or idea-of-party. It was because he could not overcome this idealistic vision that he finally had to leave the party. It is very funny to see him say today that Bordiga’s work “is also, at the beginning, one of the components of our assertion that at the present time any political organisation […] is or is turning into a racket” (Introduction to “Economic and Social Structure…”, p. 13). What he claims to have discovered there is in reality his real starting point: the refusal of a real party, the refusal of an effective political organisation. Far from being the premise of this refusal, the theory of “fictitious capital” and “universal class” was fabricated after the fact to justify it.

That said, we ask for nothing more than to ignore Mr. Camatte as we have done for years, and to let him paddle quietly under the real domination of fictitious capital, in the individualism of the universal class. On one condition, however: that he doesn’t try to splatter Marxism with his shit!

Source: Programme Communiste N°67 – July 1975

[1] Date of his arrest and deportation. Moreover, in his letter to Korsch of 28 October 1926 (reproduced in Il Programma Comunista No. 21, 1971, and which we shall shortly publish in the columns of this review), Bordiga noted that the task of the moment was not “organisation and manoeuvre”, but “elaboration of a political ideology; one which is left-wing and international and based on the revealing experiences undergone by the Comintern”, and took note of the enormous difficulty – subsequently becoming an impossibility – of “any international initiative” on these bases and in this sense. In fact, a general balance sheet of the “lessons of the counterrevolution”, which was barely in its infancy at the time without excluding the appearance within the world communist movement itself of forces capable of counteracting its not too distant course, could in the end only be drawn during a long and tormented cycle, one of whose aspects was isolation.

[2] A reference to Alfred Jarry’s “Ubu Roi“.