Everything about Paul Mattick totally explained
Paul Mattick (born
13 March 1904, died
7 February 1981) was a
Marxist political writer and activist.
Early life
Born in
Pomerania in 1904 and raised in
Berlin by class conscious parents, Mattick was already at the age of 14 a member of the
Spartacists'
Freie Sozialistische Jugend. In 1918, he started to learn as a
toolmaker at
Siemens AG, where he was also elected as the
apprentices' delegate on the
workers' council of the company during the
German Revolution.
Implicated in many actions during the revolution, arrested several times and threatened with death, Mattick radicalized along the left and oppositional trend of the German Communists. After the "
Heidelberg" split of the
Communist Party of Germany (KPD; a successor to the Spartacist League) and the formation for the
Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD) in the spring of 1920, he entered the KAPD and worked in the youth organization
Rote Jugend, writing for its journal.
In
1921, at the age of 17, Mattick moved to
Cologne to find work with
Klockner for a while, until
strikes, insurrections and a new arrest destroyed every prospect of employment. He was active as an organizer and agitator in the KAPD and the AAU in the Cologne region, where he got to know
Jan Appel among others. Contacts were also established with intellectuals, writers and artists working in the
AAUE founded by
Otto Rühle.
With the continuing decline of radical mass struggle and revolutionary hopes, especially after 1923, and having been unemployed for a number of years, Mattick emigrated to the
United States in
1926, whilst still maintaining contacts with the KAPD and the AAUE in Germany.
In the USA
In the USA, Mattick carried through a more systematic theoretical study, above all of
Karl Marx. In addition, the publication of
Henryk Grossman's principal work,
Das Akkumulations - and Zusammenbruchsgesetz des Kapitalistischen Systems (1929), played a fundamental role for Mattick, as Grossmann brought Marx's theory of accumulation, which had been completely forgotten, back to the centre of debate in the workers' movement. To Mattick, Marx’s "critique of political economy" became not a purely theoretical matter but rather directly connected to his own revolutionary practice. From this time, Mattick focused on Marx’s theory of capitalist development and its inner logic of
contradictions inevitably growing to crisis as the foundation of all political thoughts within the workers’ movement.
Towards the end of the 1920s, Mattick had moved to
Chicago, where he first tried to unite the different German workers' organisations. In
1931, he tried to revive the
Chicagoer Arbeiterzeitung, a newspaper steeped in tradition and at one time edited by
August Spies and
Joseph Dietzgen, but without success. For a period, he joined the
Industrial Workers of the World (known as the IWW or Wobblies), who were the only revolutionary union organization existing in America that, in spite of national or sectoral differences, assembled all workers in
One Big Union, so as to prepare the general strike to bring down capitalism. However, the golden age of the Wobblies' militant strikes had already passed by the beginning of the thirties, and only the emerging unemployed movement again gave the IWW a brief regional development. In 1933, Paul Mattick drafted a programme for the IWW trying to give the Wobblies a more solid ‘Marxist’ foundation based on Grossman’s theory, although it didn't improve the organization's condition.
After some unsuccessful attempts to exercise an influence from the outside on the
Leninist United Workers Party, itself a split from the
Proletarian Party, Mattick finally founded a
Council communist group in 1934 with some friends who were originally from the IWW as well as with some expelled members of the UWP. The group kept close contacts with the remaining small groups of the German/
Dutch Left communism in Europe and published the journal
International Council Correspondence, which through the 1930s became an
Anglo-American parallel to the
Rätekorrespondenz of the Dutch
GIC(H). Articles and debates from Europe were translated along with economic analysis and critical political comments of current issues in the US and elsewhere in the world.
Apart from his own factory work, Mattick organized not only most of the review's technical work but was also the author of the greater part of the contributions which appeared in it. Among the few willing to offer regular contributions was
Karl Korsch, with whom Mattick had come into contact in
1935 and who remained a personal friend for many years from the time of his emigration to the United States at the end of
1936.
As European Council Communism went underground and formally "disappeared" in the second half of the thirties, Mattick changed
Correspondence's name - from
1938 to
Living Marxism, and from
1942 to
New Essays.
Like Karl Korsch and Henryk Grossman, Mattick had some contact with
Horkheimer's
Institut fur Sozialforschung (the later
Frankfurt School). In 1936, Mattick wrote a major sociological study on the American unemployed movement for the Institute, although it remained in the Institute's files, to be published only in
1969 by the
SDS publishing house
Neue Kritik.
World War II and after
After the United States' entry into
World War II and the post-war
Mccarthyism, the left in America experienced repression. Mattick retired at the beginning of the 1950s to the countryside, where he managed to survive through occasional jobs and his activity as a writer. In the postwar development Mattick took part in only small and occasional political activities, writing small articles for various periodicals from time to time. From the forties and up through the fifties, Mattick went through a study of
John Maynard Keynes and compiled a series of critical notes and articles against
Keynesian theory and practice. In this work, he developed Marx’s and Grossman's theory of capitalist development further to meet the new phenomena and appearances of the modern capitalism critically.
With the general changes of the political scene and the re-emergence of more radical thoughts in the sixties, Paul Mattick made some more elaborated and important political contributions. One main work was
Marx and Keynes: The Limits of Mixed Economy from 1969, which was translated into several languages and had quite an influence in the post-
1968 student movement. Another important work was
Critique of Herbert Marcuse: The one-dimensional man in class society, in which Mattick forcefully rejected Marcuse's thesis that the
proletariat, as Marx understood it, had become a
mythological concept in advanced capitalist society. Although he agreed with Marcuse's critical analysis of the ruling ideology, Mattick demonstrated that the theory of one dimensionality itself existed only as
ideology. Marcuse subsequentially affirmed that Mattick's critique was the only serious one to which his book was subjected.
Later life
Up through the seventies, many old and new articles by Mattick were published in different languages for various publications. In the academic year 1974-75, Mattick was engaged as visiting professor at the "Red"
University-Center of Roskilde in
Denmark. Here, he held lectures on Marx’ critique of political economy, on the history of the workers movement and served as critical co-referent at seminars with other guests such as
Maximilien Rubel,
Ernest Mandel,
Joan Robinson and others. In
1977, he completed his last important lecture tour of the
University of Mexico City. He spoke in
West Germany only twice: in 1971 at Berlin and in 1975 at
Hanover.
In his last years, Paul Mattick thus succeeded in getting a small audience within the new generations for his views. In 1978, a major collection of articles from over forty years appeared as
Anti-Bolshevik Communism.
Paul Mattick died in February
1981 leaving an almost finished manuscript for another book, which was later edited and published by his son,
Paul Mattick Jr., as
Marxism - Last Refuge of the Bourgeoisie?.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Paul Mattick'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://paul_mattick.totallyexplained.com">Paul Mattick Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
