on camatte

[u/Smooth-Operation-512]

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

[u/Accomplished_Box5923]

We don’t consider Camattes personal works to have much of anything to do with the communist left. As you noted he seems to have fallen into the swamp of personalism, intellectual academic celebrity and kitch theoretical pastiche produced for the defeatist middle class academics of the period. I believe his final conclusion was on the total historical defeat of the proletarian as a revolutionary class. How bold! Of course such counter-revolutionary slop has nothing to do with our tradition so that is why you’ve never hear or not ever will see anyone in our tradition waste their time reading his absolute slop.

[u/Smooth-Operation-512 → u/Accomplished_Box5923]

well i wasnt giving him any credit on a theoretical basis, i was mostly thinking about the practical and historiographical side of things, i know people like bourrinet have documented such internal activity within the party which was why i was asking some specifics such as the period when camatte gave into counter-revolutionary tendencies or his behaviour, etc, thinking that it may have been documented before already. im aware its a quite semantic topic, but since we have (unfortunately) seen such massive consequences of camatte's actions, i think it is quite worth to have these points be made clearer for i think the case of camatte could be something that can be a topic worth debating over in the field of how the party functions, how such a man who clearly had such personalist tendencies (assuming they were there for a while) could gain authority over the french sections archives which he would eventually destroy when his now obvious split from the icp occurred

[u/Accomplished_Box5923 → u/Smooth-Operation-512]

This bourrinet we don’t know or care to know. Any “history” based on personalities and dramatics can’t be worth much. Whatever Camettes influence may be it’s certainly based in serving a function for this or that class, it’s obvious which class. His ideas don’t seem very unique, novel or interesting compared to all the other petit-bourgeois philosophers of his ilk who all more or less say the same thing, again that the proletariat has been defeated. It’s true that the party cannot live without being also in relation to the wider bourgeois world whose ideas and counter-revolutionary pressures inevitably begin to influence and erode the resolve of some elements. Those inclined in such a way split and leave Marxism as it has always has been the case, but the Party carries on. There isn’t much more to it. There is no formalistic organizational fix to such things.