Marxism: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (Mattick, 1978)

by Paul Mattick (1978)

From Marxism: Last Refuge of the Bourgeoisie? by Paul Mattick, edited by Paul Mattick Jr., published by Merlin Press, 1983

In Marx’s conception, changes in people’s social and material conditions will alter their consciousness. This also holds for Marxism and its historical development. Marxism began as a theory of class struggle based on the specific social relations of capitalist production. But while its analysis of the social contradictions inherent in capitalist production has reference to the general trend of capitalist development, the class struggle is a day-to-day affair and adjusts itself to changing social conditions. These adjustments find their reflection in Marxian ideology. The history of capitalism is thus also the history of Marxism.

Obsessions of Berlin (Mattick, 1948)

by Paul Mattick, Partisan Review, Vol.15 No.10, October 1948, pp.1108-1124. [PDF]

As against the terror of the bombs, the actual conquest of Berlin was of lesser significance to its inhabitants. Nevertheless, the artillery tore new holes into the ruins, shot away parts of the surviving buildings, killed many people running for food and water. The spray of machine guns is visible almost on every house, every floor, every apartment door. The tanks ground down the streets and sidewalks. The battle was fought section by section, street by street, house by house. It is said that sixty thousand Russians died in the struggle for Berlin. The estimate may be incorrect, but it reveals the ferocity of the struggle. There are no guesses on the German losses. They lost everything – particularly, however, their illusions about the Russians.

The Permanent Crisis (Mattick, 1934)

Henryk Grossmann’s Interpretation of Marx’s Theory of Capitalist Accumulation

by Paul Mattick, International Council Correspondence Vol. 1, no. 2, November 1934, pp. 1-20. PDF

I.

According to Marx, the development of the productive forces of society is the motive power of historical development. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production, and in changing their mode of production, their manner of gaining a living, they change all their social relations. The transformation of the spinning wheel, the hand-loom and blacksmiths sledge, into the self-tending mule, the power-loom and the steam hammer was not only accompanied by a change of the small individual shops of the craftsmen into huge industrial plants employing thousands of workers, but there also came with it the social overturn from feudalism to capitalism; that is, not merely a material revolution, but a cultural revolution as well.

Mattick and Council Communism in Miserable Times: Critique Between Defeat and Crisis

A reading list by A New Institute for Social Research, 2021

See also: Theses on the Council Concept

A few accounts of the emergence of the tendency

• Pozzoli, “Paul Mattick and Council Communism”
• Bonacchi, “The Council Communists Between the New Deal and Fascism”
• Baum, “The Frankfurt School and Council Communism”
• Canne-Meijer, “Origins of the Movement for Workers’ Councils in Germany”
• Mattick, “Council Communism”
• Roth, Marxism in a Lost Century: A Biography of Paul Mattick

New theory, new practice

• Living Marxism, “Against the Stream”
• Canne-Meijer, “The Rise of a New Labor Movement”

Against and beyond the old movements

• Korsch, “Marxism and the Present Task of the Proletarian Class Struggle”
• Wagner, “Theses on Bolshevism”
• Appel, “Marxism and State Communism”
• Mattick, “Karl Kautsky: From Marx to Hitler”
• Rühle, “The Struggle Against Fascism Begins With the Struggle Against Bolshevism”

The critique of organization

• Pannekoek, “Party and Working Class”
• Mattick, “Pannekoek’s ‘Party and Working Class'”
• Pannekoek, “General Remarks on the Question of Organisation”
• Moss, “On the Impotence of Revolutionary Groups”
• Mattick, “Spontaneity and Organisation”

From depression to fascist war

• Korsch, “Planning New Depressions”
• Living Marxism, “The Future of Unemployment”
• Mattick, “The Great Depression and the New Deal”
• Langerhans, “The Next World Crisis, the Second World War, and the World Revolution”
• Adorno, “Theses on Need”
• Living Marxism, “The Jitterbugs”
• Living Marxism, “The War is Permanent:”Part One, Part Two
• Coffinet, “What Destroyed Democracy?: An Analysis of Capitalist Technology”
• Adorno, “Novissimum Organum”
• Horkheimer, “The Authoritarian State”
• Mattick, “How New is the ‘New Order’ of Fascism?”
• Rühle, “Which Side to Take?”

Mattick’s critical theory vs. postwar society

• Mattick, “Nationalism and Socialism”
• Mattick, “The Economics of Cybernation”
• Mattick, critical introduction to the GIK’s Fundamental Principles
• Mattick, Critique of Marcuse
• Mattick, “Capitalism and Ecology”
• Mattick, “The Crisis of the Mixed Economy”
• Mattick, “The Destruction of Money”
• Mattick, “Authority and Democracy in the United States”
• Mattick, “The New Capitalism and the Old Class Struggle”
• Mattick, interview with Lotta Continua
• Mattick, Marxism: Last Refuge of the Bourgeoisie?
• Marramao, “Theory of Crisis and the Problem of Constitution” 

Serfdom in a Free Society (Mattick, 1946)

by Paul Mattick, Western Socialist, Boston, USA, September 1946

The Road to Serfdom. By Friedrich A. Hayek, University of Chicago Press, 1944 (250 pp.; $2.75).

Full Employment in a Free Society. By William H. Beveridge. W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1945. (429pp; $3,75).

Both these books are dedicated to the “socialists of all parties.” Hayek wants to discourage them, Beveridge tries to offer encouragement. Both writers speak in the name of science and deal with the reality of, and the need for, capitalistic planning. But what appears to Hayek as the road to serfdom seems to Beveridge the highway to a free society.

Russia and Germany prove to Hayek that socialism does not lead to freedom. The most important guaranty of freedom, he maintains, is a system of private property. Planning and freedom cannot go together. Without a labor market and an industrial reserve army, for example, discipline can be maintained only by corporal punishment, for which reason socialism implies slave-labor. The “collective freedom” of which the planners speak is, in Hayek’s opinion, “but the unlimited freedom of the planner to do with society what he pleases.”

Marx and Freud (Mattick, 1956)

by Paul Mattick (1956)

A review of EROS AND CIVILIZATION. A PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRY INTO FREUD. By Herbert Marcuse. The Beacon Press, Boston, 1955, 277 pp., $3.95.

Marcuse’s book renews the endeavor to read Marx into Freud. Previous attempts, by Reich and Osborn for instance, failed miserably. Instead of overcoming a bewailed inertia, Reich’s theories hardly sufficed to sustain a ridiculous private racket. Osborn’s work, a product of the Stalinist popular-front period, designed to attract the petty bourgeois, was soon forgotten by both the Western petty-bourgeoisie and the bolshevik regime. Psychoanalysis did not become part of, or a new basis for, a radical doctrine but merely a way of transferring money from the analyzed many to the analyzing few. By providing a new terminology for the various social “ills,” the ideological inertia, as part of the general inertia of capital stagnation, could at least verbally be ended. The re-interpretation in psychoanalytical terms affected all and everything; literature, the arts, the social sciences and politics. Psychoanalysis, moreover, became an independent branch of social activity developing vested interests of its own. Once installed, it perpetuated itself in competition with other ideological instrumentalities by continuously re-creating “demand” for its services through the discovery of new and more “ills” falling into its domain. It is now part and parcel of the prevailing social structure which commercializes all ideas and makes a business out of tangibles and intangibles alike.

Capitalism and ecology: from the decline of capital to the decline of the world – Paul Mattick

‘Kapitalismus und Okologie’ (1976) by Paul Mattick, translated by Paul Mattick Jr. This article looks at ecological crisis, the Club of Rome’s ‘The Limits to Growth’, and the work of East German philosopher Wolfgang Harich.

The historical character of nature follows from the Second Law of thermodynamics, discovered more than a hundred years ago by Carnot and Clausius, spelling an increase in entropy ending in heat death. Our earthly life depends on the continuous supply of energy from solar radiation, which decreases with increasing entropy, however slowly. The period of time involved is indefinite from the human point of view, too gigantic to be taken into practical consideration. Nevertheless, the entropy law has a continuous, direct influence on the earth and therefore on the fate of humankind. Apart from the sun, the mineral wealth of the earth provides for the satisfaction of human energy needs. Its exploitation, however, hastens the transformation of “free” into “bound” energy, that is, energy no longer available for human use and degrading towards heat death. In other words, the available energy sources can only be utilized once. With their exhaustion human life would come to an end, and indeed very long before the cooling of the sun, as all the natural riches of the earth contain no more energy than two days’ sunlight.

International Council Correspondence / Living Marxism / New Essays, 1934-1943

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Introduction

Brought together here are references to all the publications by the International Council Correspondence-group in Chicago, Illinois, USA, originally named “United Workers’ Party”; the party-name was dropped early 1936. The periodical was published in ever bigger volumes with ever longer articles but appearing ever less frequent, discontinued in 1943.

The whole series of periodicals: International Council Correspondence; Living Marxism (International Council Correspondence); and New Essays, but without the pamphlets, was reprinted in 1970 in five volumes: in photographic reproduction of reduced size without transcription, edition, annotation or source, by the in 2015 still existing Greenwood Reprint Corporation , Westport, Connecticut, under the general title “New Essays”; with a short introduction in the first volume by Paul Mattick sr. (see below).

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The first volume can also be found as pdf at: libcom.org , in a much smaller file of lower resolution and without optical character recognition. For complete scans in a better resolution but also without (searchable) optical character recognition, also see libcom.org , posted by Stephen, 13 May 2014; in September 2015 we were unaware of the existence of this publication as proper references to the whole series and tables of content were missing; since, we have given permission to libcom.org  to reproduce the scans made by us.

An anonymous incomplete table of contents, apparently originally compiled by Bjarne Avlund Frandsen (a source is not given), and amended, with links to html-versions of some of the texts, can be found at marxists.org . One might doubt the attribution of some articles to Paul Mattick; sources are not given.

Another one, with some texts and some French translations attached (1) at: La Bataille socialiste  (libertarian marxist blog).

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Among the original group in Chicago: Paul Mattick, Rudolf (Rüdiger) Raube, Carl Berreitter, Al Givens, Kristen Svanum, Allen Garman (edited Paul Mattick’s essays), Frieda Mattick; later joined by: Karl Korsch, Walter Auerbach (author and co-author with Paul Mattick), Fritz Henssler (negociated possible mergers with other journals), and the New York group: Walter Boelke, Wendeling Thomas, Hans Schaper, Emmy Tetschner, Mary MacCollum. Living Marxism in Chicago in the late 1930’s: Jake Faber, Emil White, Sam Moss, Dinsmore Wheeler (edited Paul Mattick’s essays), Fairfield Porter (financial contributor), Ilse Mattick (2). A regular outside collaborator was Anton Pannekoek. Finally there was Jos. Wagner. For a somewhat “sociological” yet informative introduction to this group, see: The Council Communists between the New Deal and Fascism / Gabriella M. Bonacchi (1976).

Field Notes: February 2017

Editor’s Note

by Paul Mattick

No one could call globalization a failure: To the succession of the hottest years ever must now be added the achievement of a distribution of wealth in which eight men (six of them Americans) own the same wealth as the 3.6 billion people who make up the poorer half of humanity.

 

Elephant Blues

by Pavlos Roufos

Shortly before Donald Trump’s electoral victory, a bizarre alliance of sorts emerged: from one side, military and foreign policy bureaucrats, neocon hawks and politicians, mainstream liberals and their favorite press outlets (Financial Times, New York Times, the Economist, etc.); from the other, left-wing militants, anti-racist activists, social justice warriors, and other fans of democracy.

Standing with Syrians: An Open Letter to an Anti-Imperialist

by Philip Rizk

Eva is a real person whom I have known since 2007, as described in this article. But in this text Eva stands for many politically engaged individuals, whether outspoken or silent supporters of the Syrian regime and its allies. I will not re-post her photo here. In a world flooded with images, it is important to maintain our ability to imagine a moment.

 

Passing Notes with Refugees

by Ilana Simons

The Iranian refugees in Calais sewed their mouths shut and went on a twenty-five-day hunger strike, after authorities destroyed the tents they were living in while they waited for asylum.

A Communist Life

by Felix Baum

Along with the return of economic crisis and social struggles around the world, the term “communism”—supposedly discredited once and for all by the experience of Russia and its satellite states in the 20th century—seems to be enjoying a certain comeback in recent years. Conferences on “the idea of communism” attract significant crowds, books by professed communists like Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek find readers and grab media attention. However, more often than not this (surely limited) comeback does not seem to be driven by a genuine desire to retrieve the emancipatory content the term carried in the writings of Karl Marx and like-minded critics, as well as in practical movements from the 19th century onwards. Rather, maîtres-penseurs like Badiou and Žižek prefer to pose as enfants terribles, defending Maoism and flirting with Bolshevik terror, hence reaffirming precisely the unholy traditions with which a “communism” for the 21st century would have to break.

In his new biography of Paul Mattick, a German-born worker who immigrated to the United States in 1926 and later emerged as one of the most important radical critics of his time, Gary Roth tells the story of a largely forgotten current in the 20th century that early on made a rupture with the statist caricatures of communism to which today’s media-savvy leftist intellectuals are still holding fast.¹ Noting that this story is about “bygone eras in which a radicalized working class still constituted a hope for the future,” Roth steers clear of melancholy and nostalgia, instead seeking a justification for his work in the more recent reconfiguration “of the world’s population into a vast working class that extends into the middle classes in the industrialized countries and the pools of underemployed agricultural workers everywhere else.” In fact, though far from constituting a sustained, consistent assault on existing conditions, some recent struggles of parts of this class, most notably the “square movements” that spread from North Africa via Europe to Istanbul, exhibit certain traits—horizontal self-organization (or “leaderlessness), direct mass action against state forces, a focus on occupations—that point much less to the Bolshevik-Leninist tradition than to the one Roth describes, commonly referred to as council communism, though the resemblances should certainly not be exaggerated.

Automattick

Paul Mattick

Interview with Lotta Continua 1977

Question: We seem to be entering into a new period of serious economic and social crisis. What are the new features of this period, in comparison with the 1930’s?

Answer: The basic reasons for the current crisis are the same as those which caused all previous capitalist crises. But all crises have also specific features with respect to their initiation, the reactions released by them, and their outcome. The changing capital structure accounts for these peculiarities. Generally, a crisis follows in the wake of a period of successful capital accumulation, wherein the profits produced and realized are sufficient to maintain a given rate of expansion. This state of capitalistic prosperity requires a steadily increasing productivity of labor, large enough to offset the relative decline of profitability resulting from the changing capital structure. The competitive and therefore blind pursuit of profit on the part of individual capitals cannot help but ignore the changing capital/labor composition of the social capital. The crisis erupts, when an arising disproportionality between a required rate of profit for the social capital and its necessary rate of accumulation forbids its further expansion. This underlying but empirically unascertainable discrepancy comes to the fore in terms of market relations as a lack of effective demand, which is only another expression for a lack of accumulation on which the effective demand depends.