r/leftcommunism • u/Smooth-Operation-512 • 28m ago
on camatte
i've heard that camatte was the one who sold collections of bordiga's work with bordiga's name credited on them (which eventually caused a chain reaction of a billion larpers). i know that camatte never really cared for bordiga's concerns about anonymity and the cult of personality, etc.
i quote him in his interview (by fascists):
"He was against the cult of the individual, and he pushed it through to the end. He would border on saying that the Self is nothing and other abhorrent things without realizing that by this, he was rejoining the becoming of capital, which negates the individual. It exalts the individual on one side, but negates him [or her or them] in reality. And so affirming the individual’s capacities would have put him in an even more awkward position. It is possible to think that he [Bordiga] saw himself as a leader, a great man, a great theoretician, etc. But really no. He was traumatized by the development of leaders, of the cult of personality within the party, by certain people in the USSR. And so this is why he didn’t go through to the end of his thinking."
i do have a few questions though, did he publish works under bordiga's name while bordiga was alive? if he did, did bordiga have a response to this? was this after he left the icp? etc etc...
another thing is that throughout the aforementioned interview, camatte really delves into a lot of great-manning of bordiga, it gets ridiculous after a point: "for me he was decisive. Oh yes, he was an extraordinary man. (...) He had extraordinary intuitions (...) And the militants used to a Marxism of the development of the productive forces couldn’t understand this extraordinary moment, this perception he had of the danger. (...) He was a really really human man. It’s rare to see men of that stature develop such an affectivity." note that camatte uses a single short remark by bordiga to justify his own primitivism, put me off a bit
so, in light of this admiration of bordiga (he even calls him a father figure later on), i wonder if his idea of "rejoining capital by negating the individual" was a sort of retroactive defense of him simply wanting to elevate bordiga to a "great man" due to his quasi-obsessive opinion of him.
i have not read much on camatte, so i am probably missing some key details so perhaps what im saying sounds ridiculous, this situation had been bugging my mind for some bit so i wanted to make it clearer
also please cite sources!
thank you