A-Infos (en) Hungary, Anarchist Barricade Collective, "Capital and Democracy" ON Jacques Camatte The Democratic Mystification

The relevance of the text published below cannot be a question for all 
those who want to overcome the present weakness of the workers’ 
movement, the loss of direction and the atomization of the working 
class. “Demand the impossible!” – shouted the slogan from the wall in 
May 1968, admitting that the communist world community turned from the 
programme of the struggle into an utopian fog for the masses of our 
class. If the community is an utopia then the lack of community is 
reality. Having been tossed on the ocean of democracy, the proletariat 
put in at Robinson’s island.

In contrast to the former leftist rubbish which turned liberal (nowadays 
there’s an overproduction of such), we don’t regard this as a phenomenon 
which force us to change or abandon the revolutionary programme. It 
belongs into the advancing of capitalism, and it does absolutely not 
abolish those contradictions which prepare the outbreak of the communist 
revolution.

* *

Marx shed light to the economic foundation of the capitalist society’s 
everyday reproduction:

“Thus, what we called the constant value which appeared as a 
presupposition in the case of the individual capital is nothing but the 
presupposition of capital by capital, i.e. the fact that the different 
capitals in the different branches of industry posit one another 
reciprocally as presupposition and condition. Each of them regarded for 
itself can be resolved into dead labour which, as /value, /has /become 
independent vis-a-vis /living labour.”

Marx: The Grundrisse. Notebook V. [Circuit and Turnover of Capital].

The dead labour’s independence and its dominance over living productive 
activity – this necrophilia of capital – yields the present disgusting 
relationship between individuals and the loathsome ideology which 
adheres to it: the practice and the theory of bourgeois democracy.**

“In the money relation, in the developed system of exchange (and this 
semblance seduces the democrats), the ties of personal dependence … are 
in fact exploded, ripped up…; and individuals /s//eem/ independent (this 
is an independence which is at bottom merely an illusion and it is more 
correctly called indifference), free to collide with one another and to 
engage in exchange within this freedom; but they appear thus only for 
someone who abstracts from the /conditions/, the /conditions of 
existence /within which these individuals enter into contact…”

Marx: The Grundrisse. Notebook I. The Chapter on Money (Part Two).

That is the key to the understanding of democracy. Democracy is the 
pseudo-community based on the illusory independence of the 
commodity-owner. So, contrary to the common bourgeois interpretation, it 
is not the political form mostly associated with the ancient Greek 
city-states and some modern societies, but “the behaviour of humans, the 
organisation of those who have lost their original organic unity with 
the community” (Camatte). Because of that, this kind of existence of 
atomized individuals is a characteristic of all class societies, which 
is maintained by the purulent everyday rotation of commodity production.

Democracy assumes different forms according to the forms of productive 
labour and the extension of commodity production. Ancient democracy was 
an inner affair of the ruling class, because only the free citizens were 
commodity-owners (namely owners of the land, the slaves and their 
products). In modern bourgeois democracy everybody is a commodity-owner, 
and the key commodity for the bourgeoisie – labour force – is put on the 
market by the working class. Hence, democracy is total now.

The bourgeois state power has given an official form to the relation 
between commodity-owners. The parliamentary form is the political 
expression of the impersonal power of capital (of the rule of dead 
labour). Capital needs state power because it has so secure itself 
against the revolt of the proletarians, it has to force them to sell 
their labour force to capital in order to obtain the means of their 
existence. The functioning of the parliament develops according to the 
varying balance of forces between the different capitals and according 
to the interests of the aggregate capital. It’s a dynamic form which is 
able to adapt itself to the changing economic conditions. The state can 
support the development of national capital by customs duties and 
allowances. In the parliament, the various factions of capital dispute 
with each other according to their interests.

The political parties – i. e. the parties of the bourgeoisie, including 
the social democratic parties –, have never represented more than the 
alternatives of the development of capital, that means, the interests of 
some groups of the ruling class. The democratic (parliamentary) 
principle was the guarantee, that the political management would not 
separate from the interests of aggregate capital. Such politics which 
led to the slowing down of capital’s development, failed – in the next 
elections at the latest. At the same time, democracy and suffrage are 
means to persuade the bearers of living labour to participate in the 
operating of capital on the political level as well. Since the human 
barrier – the resistance of the living against the dead – is the biggest 
obstacle for capital’s development. So, the political process always has 
to be directed in such a way to avoid the revolt of the proletariat. 
During the elections, the working class declares which capitalist 
sphere’s dominance is the most acceptable for it. The working class acts 
here totally as a part of capital, and its choice is a part of capital’s 
self-management. The worker involved in politics by means of the 
suffrage, becomes a part of capital’s pseudo-community. He/she 
internalizes the democratic behaviour.

Among the Carpathians, in this little brothel, but also in other parts 
of the world, a lot of members of the working class feel and see the 
total evacuation of local politics. But only a few of them move from 
here towards a conscious communism. Some weep for the former phases of 
capitalist order, others place trust in the international development, 
which “modernizes the backward regions”. In the reality, the thing is 
that capital has outgrown the frames of nation-state, and the politics 
in Hungary cannot do anything else than licking the ass of the 
international giant companies, because natural gas doesn’t grow on 
Hortobágy and one cannot produce “our car” from the apple of Nyírség. 
European integration took place because the movement of capital 
(including variable capital: labour force) had to be intensified, the 
centralization of capital had to be accelerated. Capital destroyed the 
national boundaries, so there’s scarcely any difference between the 
various managements of capital (the programmes of the political parties) 
because it is global capital which rules directly. Politics serve this 
global capital. Those exploited who expect something good from this 
process (liberals and social democrats) or think that it was avoidable 
within capitalism (conservatives, fascists), don’t understand neither 
the functioning of capital nor the present stage of capitalism’s 
development. They are the puppets of capital – they can shake hands with 
each other.

There is also another reason for politics’ evacuation. (In order to 
avoid misunderstandings, we remark that politics have always been the 
means for managing the alienated relationships, so, in this sense, it 
couldn’t have been emptied for the proletariat because it has always 
been empty. If we are still speaking about the evacuation of politics, 
we mean by this the fact that capital needs the mediation of the state 
less and less for the organization of its reproduction, and if it does 
need it – in the case of a war, for example – then it can use this 
mediation practically without any problem.) As far as capital provided 
for the working class only the possibility of biological reproduction 
(this way also reproducing socially the destitute wage-worker), 
capitalism could be kept in motion only by means of direct and permanent 
police terror. But capital went beyond this phase, and today it is 
enough for it to keep the batons in store. Enormous mass of products 
comes pouring onto the working class which serve directly the 
capitalized human being’s needs: culture, entertainment, sex-industry, 
alcohol, Internet, world press, Coca-Cola, bicycle with 24 gears… And 
the advertisement-industry which supports the whole. The rubbish for the 
production of which the working class drudges in the factories and 
offices, comes from the opposite direction when it has left the 
workplace. And the working class is swept away by the flood of 
commodities. “Capital constitutes itself as material community and there 
are no more politics since it is capital itself which organizes men as 
slaves.” (Camatte)

When capital comes to a deep crisis, then it seems to break with the 
democratic principle. During the crisis, a huge mass of constant capital 
loses its value and is not able to function further as capital, to 
produce surplus value by absorbing variable capital. So the crisis of 
constant capital is also the crisis of variable capital, which manifests 
itself in the fall of (real) wages and massive unemployment. Capitalism 
is not able to handle such crises with the usual reconciliation of 
interests between capitals (parliamentarism) and the reconciliation of 
interests between capital and the working class (trade unionism). In 
such cases, the strongest representative of capital undertakes the task 
of capitalism’s re-structuring, for capital’s survival. The main 
elements of this are the destruction of those capitals which have lost 
their value and the destruction of the unnecessary labour-force – open 
or hidden war. Capital uses terrorist means against the proletariat not 
only because, facing the crisis, it attacks capital, but also because 
capital has to get rid of the labour-force which is needless for it. 
Facing this phenomenon, the leftists shout: “Capitalism betrays 
democracy! Capital is capable to sacrifice democracy for its own 
interests!” Some go so far that they try to prove theoretically that 
capitalism can never be democratic. In contrast to this, it is extremely 
important to emphasize that the “anti-democratism” of capital during the 
crises is an absolutely democratic phenomenon. The case is exactly that 
it tries to maintain the commodity-owner individuals, the private 
property. Capital is obliged to infringe the political rights proclaimed 
by capital itself (free press, assembly and speech) if they hinder the 
process of capital’s reproduction (production, circulation or both), and 
democracy between the people is the first precondition for this 
reproduction.

Revolutionary situation is the peak of capitalism’s crisis. If a part of 
the working class refuses the further participation in the market as an 
owner of labour-force, and tries to hinder the movement of commodities 
using strike and sabotage, tries to maintain its life by looting, and it 
attacks the ruling class and its state violently, then the real negation 
of democracy steps on the scene with these acts. Against it, all 
components of democracy start to act with unified force. The last 
reserve of capital, the only massive force which it can now set in 
motion against the communist proletariat, is the democratic part of the 
working class: the police, the army and each worker who is still capable 
to exist within capital (see, for example, the role of the 
social-democratic workers in the crushing of the proletarian revolution 
in Germany after World War I). The role of these elements of the working 
class is not merely that they can be put into armed action against the 
communists, but even more, that they continue to keep capital in motion, 
that they produce day by day the negation of human community, that they 
enclose the revolution in a ghetto.

The revolutionaries who want to fight consistently against capitalism, 
cannot make any compromise with democracy. Democracy is the form of 
existence of those who have been alienated from human community, “of 
those who have lost their original organic unity with the community” 
(Camatte). Therefore the communist revolution which means the creation 
of human community cannot be victorious without the total destruction of 
this way of existence.

/Barricade Collective, 2006./

Jacques Camatte *The Democratic Mystification*


The proletariat's assault on the citadels of capital only has a chance 
of success on condition that the proletarian revolutionary movement 
finishes with democracy once and for all. Democracy is the last refuge 
of all disavowals and betrayals, because it is the first hope of those 
who believe in purifying and re-invigorating the current movement which 
is rotten to its core.

I

5.1. The General historical phenomenon

“Social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which misled theory 
into mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the 
comprehension of this practice.”

(Marx, Eighth thesis on Feuerbach)

1.1. Broadly speaking, one can define democracy as the behaviour of 
humans, the organisation of those who have lost their original organic 
unity with the community. Thus it exists during the whole period which 
separates primitive communism from scientific communism.

5.1.2. Democracy was born from the moment that there was a division 
between men and the allocation of possession. That is to say, it arose 
with private property, individuals and the class division of society, 
with the formation of the state. It follows that it becomes increasingly 
pure as private property becomes more general and as classes appear more 
distinctly in society.

5.1.3. It presupposes a common good which is divided-up. Limited 
democracy in ancient society presupposed the existence of the ager 
publicus and slaves who were not men. In modern society this common good 
is more universal ( touches a greater number of men ). It is also more 
abstract and illusory : the homeland.

5.1.4. Democracy in no way excludes authority, dictatorship and thus the 
State. On the contrary, it needs the State as a foundation. Who can 
guarantee the allocation, who can regulate the relations between 
individuals and between them and the common good, if not the State ?

In fully developed capitalist society the State also presents itself as 
the guardian of redistribution from two different angles : it prevents 
the proletariat from nibbling away the surplus-value and it guarantees 
the distribution of this surplus value as profit, interest, rent etc., 
among the different capitalist spheres.

5.1.5. Democracy thus implies the existence of individuals, classes and 
the State; with the result that it is simultaneously a mode of 
government, a mode of domination by one class, and a mechanism of union 
and conciliation.

Actually, in the beginning the economic processes divided men ( process 
of expropriation ) who had been united in the primitive community. 
Ancient social relations were destroyed. Gold became a real power 
replacing the authority of the community. Men were opposed to each other 
because of material antagonisms that could break up society and make it 
impossible. Democracy appeared to be a means of reconciling opposites, 
as the most suitable political form to unite what was divided. It 
represented conciliation between the old community and the new society. 
The mystifying form lay in the apparent reconstruction of a lost unity. 
Mystification was progressive.

In our day, at the opposite pole of history, the economic process has 
led to the socialisation of production and men. Politics, on the 
contrary, tends to divide them, to maintain them as simple surfaces of 
exchange for capital. The communist form becomes more and more powerful 
within the old capitalist world. Democracy seems like a conciliation 
between the past, still acting on our actual present, and the future -- 
communist society. Mystification is reactionary.

5.1.6. It is often said that the seeds ( or some even say the forms ) of 
democracy are to be found in the origins of the life of our species, in 
primitive communism. However it is a misunderstanding to see the 
manifestation of the seeds of a higher form appearing sporadically in an 
inferior form. This "democracy" appeared in very specific circumstances. 
Once these had ended, there was a return to the former mode of 
organisation. For example : military democracy at its beginnings. The 
election of the leader took place at a particular time and for specific 
tasks. Once these were accomplished, the leader was reabsorbed into the 
community. The democracy which appeared temporarily was reabsorbed. It 
was the same for those forms of capital which Marx called ante-deluvian. 
Usury was the archaic form of money-capital which could appear in 
ancient societies. But its existence was always precarious, because 
society defended itself against its solvent effects and banished it. It 
was only when man became a commodity, that capital could develop on a 
safe foundation, and could no longer be reabsorbed. Democracy can only 
really appear from the moment when men have been completely divided, and 
the umbilical cord linking them with the community has been cut; that 
is, when there are individuals.

Communism can sometimes manifest itself in this society, but it is 
always reabsorbed. It will only be able to really develop from the 
moment when the material community has been destroyed.

5.1.7. The democratic phenomenon appears with clarity in two historical 
periods : at the time of the dissolution of the primitive community in 
Greece; and at the time of the dissolution of feudal society in western 
Europe. It is incontestable, that during this second period the 
phenomenon appeared with greater intensity, because men had really been 
reduced to the status of individuals and the ancient social relations 
could no longer unite them. The bourgeois revolution always appears as 
the setting in motion of the masses. From which arises the bourgeois 
problem : how to unify them and fix them within new social forms. Hence, 
the institutional mania and the outburst of right in bourgeois society. 
The bourgeois revolution is a social revolution with a political soul.

During the communist revolution, the masses will have already been 
organised by capitalist society. They will not seek new forms of 
organization but will structure a new collective being, the human 
community. This appears clearly when the class acts in time as an 
historical being, when it constitutes itself as party.

It has been said a number of times in the communist movement that the 
revolution is not a problem of forms of organisation. For capitalist 
society, on the contrary, everything is an organisational question. At 
the beginning of its development, this appears as the search for good 
institutions; at the end as the search for the best structures to 
enclose men in the prisons of capital : fascism. At both extremes, 
democracy is at the heart of this search : first political democracy, 
then social democracy.

5.1.8. Mystification is not a phenomenon planned by the members of the 
ruling class, a hoax that they perpetrate. If so it would be enough to 
have a simple adequate propaganda to eradicate it from men's minds. In 
fact it acts in the depths of the social structure, within social 
relations :

“A social relation of production appears as something existing apart 
from individual human beings, and the distinctive relations into which 
they enter in the course of production in society appear as the specific 
properties of a thing -- it is this perverted appearance, this 
prosaically real, and by no means imaginary, mystification that is 
characteristic of all social forms of labour positing exchange-value.”

( Marx – ‘Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’, Collected 
Works Vol 29 p.289 )

It is thus necessary to explain in what ways reality is mystifying and 
how this simple mystification at the beginning, becomes greater and 
greater and reaches its maximum with capitalism.

5.1.9. Originally, the human community was subject to the dictatorship 
of nature. It had to fight against it to survive. The dictatorship was 
direct and the community in its totality was subjected it.

With the development of class society, the state presents itself as 
representing the community and pretends to embody man's struggle against 
nature. However, given the weakness of development of the productive 
forces, nature's dictatorship is always effective. It is indirect and 
mediated by the state and weighs especially on the most underpriviliged 
strata. When the state defines man, it takes the man of the dominant 
class as the substratum of its definition. Mystification is complete.

5.1.10. Under capitalism, there is a first period when, although the 
bourgeoisie has taken power, capital only dominates formally. Many 
remainders of previous social formations persist, hindering capital's 
domination over the whole of society. This is the epoch of political 
democracy when there is the apology of individual liberty and free 
competition. The bourgeoisie presents this as a means of liberation for 
men. However this is a mystification because:

“In free competition, it is capital that is set free, not the individuals.”

( Marx ‘Grundrisse’, Collected Works V. 29 p. 38 )

“Hence...the absurdity of regarding free competition as the ultimate 
development of human freedom, and the negation of free competition as 
equivalent to the negation of individual freedom and of social 
production based upon individual freedom. It is merely the kind of free 
development possible on the limited basis of the domination of capital. 
This type of individual freedom is therefore, at the same time, the most 
sweeping abolition of all individual freedom and the complete 
subjugation of individuality to social conditions which assume the form 
of objective powers, indeed of overpowering objects -- objects 
independent of the individuals relating to one another. To bring out the 
essence of free competition is the only rational answer to its 
glorification by the prophets of the middle class and to its 
anathematising by the socialists.”

( Marx ‘Grundrisse’, Collected Works V. 29 p. 40 )

5.1.11.

“Democracy and parliamentarianism are indispensable for the bourgeoisie 
after its victory by force and terror because the bourgeoisie want to 
rule a society divided into classes.”

( ‘Battaglia communista’ no. 18, 1951 )

It required conciliation to be able to dominate for it was impossible 
that domination should endure solely through terror. After its conquest 
of power by violence and terror, the proletariat does not need 
democracy, not because classes disappear from one day to the next, but 
because there must no longer be any masking or mystification. 
Dictatorship is required to prevent any return of the opposing class. 
Moreover, the accession of the proletariat to the State, is its own 
negation as a class, as well as the negation of the other classes. It is 
the beginning of the unification of the species, of the formation of the 
community. To demand democracy would imply the need for conciliation 
between classes and that would amount to doubting that communism is the 
solution to all antagonisms, that it is the reconciliation of man with 
himself.

5.1.12. With capital, the economic movement is no longer separate from 
the social movement. The union took place with the purchase and sale of 
labour power, but it led to the submission of men to capital. Capital 
constitutes itself as material community and there are no more politics 
since it is capital itself which organises men as slaves.

Until this historical stage there was a more or less clear separation 
between production and distribution. Political democracy could be 
envisaged as a means of distributing products more equitably. But when 
the material community is achieved, production and distribution are 
indissolubly linked. The imperatives of circulation thus condition 
distribution. However circulation is no longer something completely 
external to production but is, for capital, an essential moment of its 
total process. It is thus capital itself which conditions distribution.

All men fulfill a function for capital which fundamentally presupposes 
their existence. In relation to their execution of this function, men 
receive a certain distribution of products through the intermediary of a 
wage. We have a social democracy. Incomes policy is a means of achieving it.

5.1.13. In the period of the formal domination of capital ( political 
democracy ) democracy is not a form of organisation opposed as such to 
capital, it is a mechanism used by the capitalist class to attain 
domination over society. During this period all the organisational forms 
included in this struggle achieved this same result. That is why the 
proletariat can also can for a certain time intervene on this terrain. 
On the other hand, oppositions can also occur within the same class, 
between the industrial and financial bourgeoisies, for example. 
Parliament is therefore an arena where these various interests clash. 
The proletariat can use parliament as a platform to denounce the 
democratic mystification and can use universal suffrage as a means to 
organise the class.

When capital arrived at its real domination, and constituted itself as a 
material community, the question was resolved : it seized the State. The 
conquest of the state from inside no longer poses itself because it is 
no more than :

“a formality , the haut goût of popular existence, a ceremonial. The 
estates element is the sanctioned, legal lie of constitutional states, 
the lie that the state is the people's interest, or that the people is 
the interest of the state.”

( Marx, ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Law’, 
Collected Works V. 3 p. 65 – the word people is substituted for nation 
to match the French translation cited in the original )

5.1.14. The democratic state represents the illusion of control over 
society by man ( that man can direct the economic phenomenon ). It 
proclaims man sovereign. The fascist State is the realisation of this 
mystification ( in this sense it can appear as its negation ). Man is 
not sovereign. At the same time, this is in fact, the real acknowledged 
form of the capitalist state : the absolute domination of capital. 
Social unity cannot exist with a divorce between theory and practice. 
Theory said : man is sovereign; practice affirmed : it is capital. Only 
insofar as the latter had not come to dominate society absolutely, was 
there possibility of imbalance. In the fascist state reality subjugates 
the idea to make a real idea of it. In the democratic state the idea 
subjugates reality to make an imaginary reality of it. The democracy of 
capital's slaves suppresses mystification the better to achieve it. The 
democrats wish to highlight it when they believe it can reconcile the 
proletariat with capital.

Society having found the being of its oppression ( which abolishes the 
duality, the reality/thought imbalance ), it is necessary to oppose to 
it the liberatory being which represents the human community : the 
communist party.

5.1.15. Hence most nineteenth century theorists were statists. They 
thought that they could resolve the social facts at the level of the 
state. They were mediatists.

Only they did not understand that the proletariat not only had to 
destroy the old state machine, but also had to put another in its place. 
Many socialists believed that it was possible to conquer the state from 
inside and the anarchists believed that one could abolish it from one 
day to the next.

Twentieth century theorists are corporatists because they think that it 
is only a matter of organising production and of humanising it to 
resolve all problems. They are immediatists. This is an indirect proof 
of the theory of the proletariat. To say that it is necessary to 
reconcile the proletariat with the economic movement, is to recognise 
that a solution can only emerge on this terrain . This immediatism 
arises from the fact that communist society is forever strengthening 
inside capitalism itself. It is not a question of reconciling the two, 
but of destroying the power of capital, its organised strength , the 
capitalist State, which maintains private monopoly when all economic 
mechanisms tend to make it disappear. The communist solution is mediate. 
Reality seems to evade the state, it is necessary to highlight it and, 
at the same time, to indicate the need for another transitory state : 
the dictatorship of the proletariat.

5.1.16. The development towards social democracy was discounted from the 
start :

“While the power of money is not the relation of things and men, social 
relations have to be organised politically and religiously.”

( Marx )

Marx always denounced the swindle of politics and laid bare the real 
relations :

“Therefore it is a natural necessity , the essential human properties 
however estranged they may seem to be, and interest that hold the 
members of civil society together; civil , not political life is their 
real tie.”

( ‘The Holy Family’, Collected Works Vol. 4 p. 120 )

“Precisely the slavery of civil society is in appearance the greatest 
freedom because it is in appearance the fully developed independence of 
the individual, who considers as his own freedom the uncurbed movement, 
no longer bound by a common bond or man, of the estranged elements of 
his life, such as property, industry, religion, etc., whereas actually 
this is his fully developed slavery and inhumanity. Law has here taken 
the place of privilege.”

(‘The Holy Family’, Collected Works Vol. 4 p. 116)

The question of democracy only remains in another form as the false 
opposition between competition and monopoly. The material community 
integrates the two. With fascism (= social democracy), democracy and 
dictatorship are also integrated. It is a means for overcoming anarchy.

“Anarchy is the law of civil society emancipated from diverse 
privileges, and the anarchy of civil society is the basis of the modern 
public system, just as the public system in its turn its the guarantee 
of that anarchy. To the same extent that the two are opposed to each 
other they also determine each other.”

(‘The Holy Family’, Collected Works Vol. 4 p. 117)

5.1.17. Now that the bourgeois class, which led the revolution which 
allowed the development of capital, has disappeared, and been replaced 
by the capitalist class which lives on capital and its valorization 
process, capitals domination has been assured ( fascism ) and because of 
this there is no longer a need for a political conciliation, since it is 
superfluous, but for an economic conciliation ( corporatism, doctrine of 
needs etc. ), and it is the middle classes which are adepts of 
democracy. Only the more capitalism grows, the more the illusion of 
being able to share management with capital vanishes. All that remains 
is the demand for a social democracy with political pretensions : 
democratic planning, full employment etc.. However by creating social 
security, while trying to maintain the full employment that it claims, 
capitalist society achieves the social democracy in question : that of 
slaves to capital.

With the development of the new middle classes the demand for democracy 
takes on a tinge -- only -- of communism.

5.1.18. What has been written above deals with the European/North 
American area and has no validity for the countries where the Asiatic 
mode of production for a long time predominated ( Asia, Africa ) or 
where it still dominates ( e.g. India ). In these countries, the 
individual has not been produced. Private property could appear but it 
could not autonomise itself; it is the same for the individual. This is 
related to the geo-social conditions of these countries and explains the 
impossibility of capital developing itself there, as long as it has not 
constituted itself as community. To put it another way, it is only when 
it has reached this stage that capitalism will be able to replace the 
ancient community and thus conquer immense zones. Only, in these 
countries, men cannot behave as in the West. Political democracy is 
necessarily avoided. One can have, at most, only social democracy.

This is why in those countries most racked by the implantation of 
capitalism we have a double phenomenon : a conciliation between the real 
movement and the ancient community, and another with the future 
community : communism. Hence the difficulty in dealing with these societies.

In other words, a whole immense section of humanity will not know the 
democratic mystification as it is known in the West. This is a positive 
fact for the coming revolution.

With regard to Russia, we have an intermediate case. We can note with 
what difficulty capitalism was established there. It needed a 
proletarian revolution. There too, western political democracy did not 
have a basis for development and we may note that it cannot flourish 
there. As in the contemporary West, we will have social democracy. 
Unfortunately over there also, the counter-revolution brought poison in 
the form of proletarian democracy and, for many, the involution of the 
revolution is to be sought for in the non-realisation of democracy.

The communist revolution will begin again, by recognising these facts 
and granting them their full importance. The proletariat will 
reconstitute itself as class and thus as party, in this way superseding 
the cramped limits of all class societies. The human species will 
finally be unified and form a single being.

5.1.19. All historical forms of democracy corresponded to stages of 
development where production was limited. The various revolutions which 
followed one another were partial revolutions. Economic progress was 
unable to take place, and to advance, without the exploitation of a 
class occuring. We may note that since antiquity revolutions have 
contributed to the emancipation of an increasing section of humanity. 
From which arose the idea that we are moving towards perfect democracy, 
a democracy gathering together all men. As a result many are in a hurry 
to make the equation : socialism = democracy. It is true that it is 
possible to say, that with the communist revolution and the dictatorship 
of the proletariat, a greater section of humanity than before enters the 
domain of this ideal demoracy; and that by generalising the proletarian 
condition to the whole of society, the proletariat abolishes classes and 
achieves democracy ( the 'Communist Manifesto' stated that the 
revolution is the conquest of democracy ). However it is necessary to 
add, that this passage to the limit, this generalisation, is at the same 
time the destruction of democracy. Because at the same time, the human 
mass does not remain constituted with the status of a simple sum of 
individuals, all equivalents in right if not in fact. That can only be a 
reality for a very short moment of history, due to forced equalisation. 
Humanity will constitute itself in a collective being, the Gemeinwesen. 
This is born outside the democratic phenomenon, and it is the 
proletariat constituted as party which transmits this to society. When 
one passes on to future society, there is a qualitative change, and not 
merely a quantitative one. For democracy is “the anti-marxist rule of 
this powerless quantity, for all eternity, to become quality”. To demand 
democracy for post-revolutionary society is to demand impotence. In 
addition, the communist revolution is no longer a partial revolution. 
With it, progressive emancipation finishes, and radical emancipation is 
achieved. Here again there is a qualitative leap.

5.1.20. Democracy is based on a dualism, and is the means to surmount 
it. Thus it resolves the dualism between spirit and matter, which is 
equivalent to that between great men and mass, through delegation of 
powers; that between citizen and man, through the ballot paper and 
universal suffrage. In fact under the pretext of the accession to 
reality of total being, there is a delegation of the sovereignty of man 
to the state. Man divests himself of his human power.

The separation of powers requires their unity and this is always done by 
violation of a constitution. This violation is founded on a divorce 
between situation in fact and situation in right. The passage from one 
to the other being assured by violence.

The democratic principle in reality is only the acceptance of a given 
fact : the scission of reality, the dualism linked to class society.

5.1.21. Often some wish to oppose democracy in general, an empty 
concept, to a form of democracy which would be the key to human 
emancipation. Now what is a fact, whose characteristic is not only in 
contradiction with its general concept, but must be its negation ? In 
reality theorising a particular democracy ( proletarian democracy for 
example ) still evades the quantitative leap. Indeed, either the 
democratic form in question really contradicts the general concept of 
democracy, and thus is really something else ( why, then, call it 
democracy ? ), or it is compatible with this concept, and there can only 
be a contradiction of a quantitative nature ( for example that it 
includes a greater number of men ), and, because of this, it does not go 
beyond the limits of the concept, even if it tends to push them back.

This thesis often appears in the form : proletarian democracy is not 
bourgeois democracy, and one will talk of direct democracy to show that 
while the second needs a break, a duality ( delegation of powers ), the 
first denies this. The future society is thus defined as being the 
realisation of direct democracy.

This is only a negative negation of bourgeois society, and not its 
positive negation. It still wants to define communism as a mode of 
organisation that would be more adequate to various human 
manifestations. But communism is the affirmation of a being, the true 
Gemeinwesen of man. Direct democracy appears to be a means for achieving 
communism. However communism does not need such a mediation. It is not a 
question of having or of doing, but of being.


*Commentaries, critical remarks*

* *

Writing “The Democratic Mystification”, Camatte didn’t intend to create 
an independent article but a chapter of his essay entitled “The 
Communist Revolution” – that’s the reason for the way of numbering the 
paragraphs. (The whole work ultimately wasn’t finished.) We publish 
below our remarks for the different paragraphs – in the spirit of the 
communist programme’s further clarification.

/Barricade Collective/

* *

5.1.3 Homeland (as a common property which in the reality is divided-up 
between the capitals of the given country) appears as a precondition for 
capitalist democracy as long as the productive forces of the given 
capitalist state are dominated by national capital. In the present phase 
of capitalism, it is international capital which dominates, so the 
concept of homeland is increasingly ideological, and the nationalist 
fractions of local small capital lean on it. It’s enough to refer to the 
activities of the Eastern European (Slovakian, Hungarian, Polish) 
populist forces…

5.1.5 One can read the history of “gold’s becoming a real power” in 
Jonathan Willams’ “The History of Money”. The communist description of 
this power’s social and economic development can be read in Marx’ 
“Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”.

5.1.8 Nature appears as a dictator, as a hostile power above the people 
when class society and private property have already been established, 
and man has been alienated from other people as well as from natural 
environment. Hence we cannot speak about the dictatorship of nature in 
primate communism, because nature is a part of the community.

5.1.10 The excellent article of the Internationalist Communist Group, 
entitled “Against the Myth of the Democratic Rights and Liberties” gives 
us a useful help to see clearly, how democracy’s myth and reality works 
in capitalism. We cite some longer passages from this text.

“In the sphere of circulation of goods, there are no classes; everybody 
is a citizen, everybody appears as buyer and seller of goods, equal, 
free and owner. Even when we buy or sell our own manpower, we are in the 
paradise of human rights and liberties. Each one is aiming at his own 
private interests in the reign of equality, liberty and private property.

Liberty: because the buyer and the seller of goods (including manpower) 
do not obey to any other rule than to their own free will.

Equality: because in the world of merchandise, everybody is a buyer and 
a seller, and everybody gets a value to the value contained in the goods 
he is selling, exchanging equivalent against equivalent.

Property: because each one appears, in the world of exchange, as an 
owner of his merchandise and he can only dispose of what belongs to him.

As free and equal owners, all citizens contract relationships giving 
rise to a natural brotherhood, which is the lawful reflect that 
guarantees liberties, equality and the identical possibility for each 
man to own goods. Any buying or selling of merchandise is the result of 
a free will contract between men who, because of the merchandise, are 
owners, free, equal and like brothers.”

So, this kind of “liberation” of people is nothing else than the gradual 
self-fulfillment of capital’s democratic dictatorship through the 
expansion of commodity production.

After the reign of glamours,. let’s see the real process.

“The seller of working force is a worker, whether he believes in god or 
in democracy. In the factory he is nobody's equal, he is free of 
nothing, owner of nothing, not even of whet he manipulates. If he wants, 
the worker can imagine that his citizenship is only interrupted, that 
his qualities, liberties and properties have been left in the cloakroom 
and that he will get them back when he gets out. But he is completely 
wrong. In his eight (or more) hours of work, he consumes raw material 
and machines to produce usage values that remain property of the capital 
and in the other sixteen hours, during his holidays, he consumes food, 
beer, football or television to produce another usage value: his working 
force, which will be used only in valorizing the capital. Outside of the 
mystical and ephemeral paradise of circulation and of free elections, 
the worker remains a worker, whether he likes it or not; even when he 
fucks (whether by pleasure or to grow a family) he is only working force 
and valorization of the Capital. As such, he is neither equal, nor free, 
nor citizen, nor owner at any moment of his life. He is only a salaried 
slave. Even before he tries to organize himself to defend his worker's 
interests, he has already all equality, property and liberty against him.”

“The true liberty, property and fraternity of democracy implies 
therefore a permanent situation of anti-proletarian violence. Repression 
is one of the indispensable elements of imposition, reproduction and 
extension of democracy. A long time ago, Marx used to denounce the 
sacred trinity “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” as equivalent to 
“Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery”. Even more, the paradise of pure 
democracy – where no one would complain of these liberty, equality, 
property, fraternity – implies a higher level of realization of 
democracy, which also implies the full use of the terroristic machine of 
the democratic state with its various forms. For that, for example, 
there is no organic change between the liberal and the fascist form of 
the state, but only a process of purification of the state in its 
tendency to reach the inaccessible democracy.”

5.1.11 The critique of this point can be found in the remark to the 
5.1.15 point.

5.1.13 When the bourgeoisie achieves the political dominance in the 
bourgeois revolution, the masses of the proletariat fight often yet on 
the far-left of the bourgeoisie. The process in which the elements of 
the proletariat rupture with the bourgeoisie can also be seen in the 
disintegration of the bourgeois parliament’s radical fraction. (See, for 
example, how the communist movement around Babeuf came into 
contradiction with the forces of bourgeois revolution. “Only the rich 
experiences which he gained during the French revolution – and, above 
all, the experiences of the Jacobin dictatorship – made it possible for 
Babeuf to make the next decisive step on the way of the forming of his 
revolutionary-communistic world-view. But communism – contrary to the 
statements of Albert Mathiez – wasn’t merely an “external façade” for 
Babeuf before the revolution, because already in this period, the plans 
of the fundamental transformation of the society stood in the centre of 
his thoughts.” (V. Dalin)) But in the process of rupture and becoming 
communist, the proletarian elements recognized not only that they cannot 
make common cause with the party of the radical bourgeoisie, but also 
that they must reject its system of institutions – democratic parliament 
–, too. Hence, the proletariat can never use neither democracy, nor the 
parliament. The social-democratic and Bolshevik visions about their 
temporal usefulness must be swept away. When Camatte wrote his text, he 
hadn’t yet finished with these visions totally, hence the tacticist 
political schemes of Lenin can be found in the essay.

5.1.15 The proletariat cannot enter into the state, it can only destroy 
it. The communist revolution does not create a new system of 
institutions – it creates the world human community. Because of this, 
the dictatorship of the proletariat doesn’t mean a new (even 
transitional) state power. If the proletariat tries to seize the state 
power – whatever be the meaning of this –, in the reality, it becomes an 
enemy of communism. The practice of bolshevism has shown the 
counter-revolutionary nature of the flirting with the state power.

5.1.17 What is called here ‘middle class’ by Camatte, is the sum of 
those groups which operate the extensive social-economic functions of 
that state which is present in the here examined phase of capitalism. In 
the reality, these do not constitute a class, but they are a part of 
capital’s management apparatus. Camatte says about the extension of the 
state’s social functions, that it takes on a tinge of communism. This is 
a totally false, social-democratic interpretation of communism, which 
points towards Djilas…

5.1.19 It is false when Camatte calls the dictatorship of the 
proletariat “an ideal democracy”. He borrows the false scheme which was 
outlined by Marx in “The Critique of the Gotha Programme”. According to 
this, by the generalization the proletarian condition to the whole of 
society, on the “first stage of communist society”, the “law of 
inequality” dominates – because of the differences in individual 
abilities and capacities –, and – after the abolition of the division of 
labour –, when “labor has become not only a means of life but life's 
prime want… only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be 
crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each 
according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” But the 
dictatorship of the proletariat – as Camatte correctly says – is the 
destruction of democracy. And this means the immediate abolition of all 
bourgeois rights – so, communism has no different phases –, hence the 
unified human activity for the satisfaction of human needs arises at the 
same time as the communist world community. Moreover, such a 
justification of the citate from the Communist Manifesto (with which we 
also absolutely disagree) supports the survival of that false conception 
in the movement, against which the whole writing is directed. This 
dogmatism, this unacceptable uncritical Marx-apology leads to the fact 
that some movement militants are unable to go beyond the false theses of 
Marx from 1848, and they conserve the contemporary weaknesses of the 
movement.

============================================================

/But the community from which the workers is //isolated// is a community 
of quite different reality and scope than the //political// community. 
The community from which //his own labor// separates him is //life// 
itself, physical and spiritual life, human morality, human activity, 
human enjoyment, human nature. //Human nature is the true community of 
men//. Just as the disasterous isolation from this nature is 
disproportionately more far-reaching, unbearable, terrible and 
contradictory than the isolation from the political community, so too 
the transcending of this isolation and even a partial reaction, a 
//rebellion// against it, is so much greater, just as the //man// is 
greater than the citizen and human life than political life.///

/ /

*/Marx: Critical Notes on the Article: "The King of Prussia and Social 
Reform. By a Prussian"/*
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