"Camatte locates Marx's idea of communism, above all else, in the notion of community. A communist is concerned with the position and well-being of human community, above the interests of money or capital, above the concerns of any one individual or nation. Camatte observes that the concept of community in Marx's work is the Gemeinwesen, which always indicates a being-together with others. Gemeinwesen may refer either to (a) an ideal typical communal being, a community of shared human aspiration, or to (b) community such as it is. Therefore, there is the Gemeinwesen as it is, and then there is the ideal Gemeinwesen we may discuss as possible and desirable.
When Camatte thinks about the possible and desirable Gemeinwesen, he does not think about the Gemeinwesen of capital. Camatte reads Marx's Capital, Vol. 1, as 'the study of the domestication of men by capital; the birth of the workers' subordination to capital.' Capitalism is destructive and corrosive to the healthy Gemeinwesen since it instrumentalizes community, positioning community in the service of capital. Camatte therefore declares that 'the human community is only realizable if men and women abandon the world of capital... This will allow them to undertake a different dynamic.' This reflects Camatte's contention that a real human community cannot exist within and according to a world organized by the logic of capital and that a healthy sociality — the Gemeinwesen — will need reasons for being other than reasons of money and capital.
A basic premise of sociology: no human person exists as an isolated individual, for each person is developed individually only in relation to other human beings in a shared social world. This common social world includes many things, such as language, cultural-valuational norms, customs and practices, and complex systems of interaction (for example, various divisions of labor observable in the family).
Against this premise, individualist capitalist thinking interprets reality as if each individual is personally responsible for who she is and for her lived reality, as if each person is her own private property. The mythology of spectacular capitalism casts all forms of interdependence as evidence of weak-willed parasitic or lazy dependency, and all forms of cooperation as insufficiently ambitious or competitive. This is one of the ways that the communist Gemeinwesen is devalued already at the level of prepolitical sensibilities in capitalist society. The Gemeinwesen of a healthy human community would be, in practice, a constraint on capital and is therefore intolerable to it. Capital has long sought total autonomy from the real needs of human community.
This problem is exacerbated by the actual liberation of the economy from real needs. Guy Debord wrote well about this historic liberation in The Society of the Spectacle. Debord analyzed the 'autonomous economy' as follows:
The economy's triumph as an independent power inevitably also spells its doom, for it has unleashed forces that must eventually destroy the economic necessity that was the unchanging basis of earlier societies. Replacing that necessity by the necessity of boundless economic development can only mean replacing the satisfaction of primary human needs, now met in the most summary manner, by a ceaseless manufacture of pseudo-needs, all of which ultimately come down in the end to just one — namely, the pseudo-need for the reign of an autonomous economy to continue...
Here, Debord observes that the capitalist economy's greatest victory in the twentieth century was its liberation from the historic purposes of all preceding economic activity. Throughout history, economics encompassed the organization of human activity for the satisfaction of human needs. In any earlier epoch, if you wanted to explain the primary organization and activity of the people within any community, you would find that people do what they do largely (not wholly) in order to satisfy the primary needs of community members. That was, at least, the fundamental historic purpose of economic activity. But that orientation has been mutated by capital, which viewed the old economic concern about satisfying human needs as a fetter on accumulation."
- Richard Gilman-Opalsky, from The Communism of Love: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Exchange Value, 2020.
