Paul Mattick

Paul Mattick (born March 13, 1904 in Stolp , Pomerania ; † February 7, 1981 in Cambridge , Massachusetts ) was a German economist , councilor communist and political writer . Mattick emigrated to the USA in the 1920s, where he was an active member of the Industrial Workers of the World . He worked on a theory of the capitalist crisis and criticized the works of JM Keynes , particularly his claim that state intervention could solve economic crises.

life and work

Paul Mattick was born in Pomerania in 1904 and grew up in a left-wing family in Berlin . At the age of 14 Mattick was a member of the Free Socialist Youth (FSJ) of the Spartakusbund . He began an apprenticeship as a toolmaker at Siemens in 1918 , where he was elected to represent the apprentices on the company's workers' council during the November Revolution .

Mattick, who was involved in many actions during the revolution and who was arrested several times and threatened with death, contributed to the progressive radicalization and left-wing opposition tendencies of the communists in Germany. As part of the split in the "KPD (Spartacus)" in Heidelberg, he joined the newly founded Communist Workers' Party of Germany (KAPD) in the spring of 1920 . He was involved in the publication of a newspaper of the "Red Youth", the youth organization of the KAPD.

At the age of 17 - that is, in 1921 - Mattick moved to Cologne to work for Klöckner for some time until strikes, riots and his new arrest ruined any prospect of further employment. During his activity as an organizer and agitator of the KAPD and the General Workers Union (AAU) in the Cologne area, he met Jan Appel , among others . In addition, he made contact with intellectuals, writers and artists from the General Workers' Union - Unified Organization (AAUE) founded by Otto Rühle .

In 1926 Mattick emigrated to the USA because he had been unemployed for a number of years and because of the continuing decline of the radical mass movement and the associated hopes for a revolution, especially after 1923. However, he maintained his contacts with the KAPD and AAU in Germany.

In the USA, Mattick systematically dealt with the theoretical foundations, above all the works of Karl Marx . The publication of Henryk Grossmann's major work, The Law of Accumulation and Collapse of the Capitalist System in 1929 was an important event for Mattick. In it, Grossmann brought Marx's theory of accumulation, which had been completely forgotten, back into the focus of discussions in the labor movement. For Mattick, Marx's "Critique of Political Economy" took, instead of a purely theoretical aspect, a direct influence on his own revolutionary attitude.

From that time on, Mattick focused entirely on Marx's theory of capitalist development, its inherent contradicting logic and its inevitable crisis as the basis of the political thought of the labor movement.

Towards the end of the 1920s, Mattick moved to Chicago , where he sought to unite the various German-born workers' unions. In 1931 he tried to bring the Chicagoer Arbeiterzeitung back to life, a very traditional newspaper that had been published at times by August Spies and Josef Dietzgen . However, there was no success.

Mattick became a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The IWW was the only revolutionary association in America that wanted to unite all workers across state and sector boundaries with the aim of preparing a great blow to overthrow capitalism. The best time of this organization with militant overthrow attempts had already come to an end in the early thirties, so that only the burgeoning unemployment movement brought the IWW a short-term regional boost. In Chicago in 1933 Mattick drafted a new program for the IWW in which he attempted to give the organization a more solid Marxist foundation on the basis of Grossmann's theory. A German-language IWW pamphlet completed in 1933 at the same time as the NSDAP “ seized power ” read : The death crisis of the capitalist system and the abandonment of the proletariat .

In 1934 Mattick founded the United Workers Party , together with friends from the IWW and a few excluded from the Leninist Proletarian Party , which was later renamed the Group of Council Communists . This group kept in close contact with the remaining German and Dutch groups of left communists in Europe and published the journal International Council Correspondence . This developed in the course of the thirties to the Anglo-American parallel to the council correspondence of the Dutch Group of International Communists (Holland) (GIC (H)). Articles and debates from Europe were translated and published, along with economic analyzes and critical political commentary on current affairs in the US and the rest of the world.

In addition to his work in a factory, Mattick not only organized the technical aspects of the editorial work, but was also the author of most of the articles that appeared in this newspaper. Among the other authors who liked to regularly contribute to the edition was Karl Korsch , with whom Mattick had come into contact in 1935 and with whom he had a close friendship for many years after his emigration to the USA in 1936.

When European council communism officially disappeared in the second half of the 1930s and was pushed underground, Mattick renamed the correspondence : From 1938 it was called Living Marxism and from 1942 New Essays .

In addition to Karl Korsch and Henryk Grossmann, Mattick was also in contact with Max Horkheimer's Institute for Social Research , which later became the “Frankfurt School”. In 1936 Mattick wrote an extensive sociological study about the American unemployment movement for this institute, in whose archive it was stored until it was published in 1969 by the SDS publishing house "Neue Critique".

After the US entered the Second World War and the ensuing campaign of persecution against the intellectual left, Joseph McCarthy did away with it, after which Mattick withdrew from political life in the early 1950s. He moved to the country, where he kept himself afloat by doing odd jobs and writing. In the post-war period Mattick, like others, only occasionally took part in minor political activities and from time to time wrote short articles for various magazines.

Beginning in the 1940s through the 1950s, Mattick devoted himself to the works of John Maynard Keynes and wrote a number of critical comments and articles on Keynesian theory and practice. In the context of this work he further developed Marx's and Grossmann's theory of capitalist development in order to critically encounter new phenomena and appearances of modern capitalism.

In the wake of the general changes in the political landscape and the resurgence of more radical ideas in the 1960s, Paul Mattick made some sophisticated and important political contributions: One of the main works is Marx and Keynes. The Limits of Mixed Economy (1969), which, translated into several languages, had quite a big influence on the post-sixty-eight student movement. Another important work was Critique of Herbert Marcuse - The one-dimensional man in class society , in which Mattick resolutely rejected the thesis that the proletariat in Marx's understanding had become a “mythological concept” in an advanced capitalist society. While agreeing with Marcuse's critical analysis of the prevailing ideology , Mattick argued that the theory of one-dimensionality itself only existed as an ideology. Marcuse subsequently confirmed that Mattick's criticism was the only serious criticism that his book was subjected to.

By the late 1970s, there were numerous new and old Mattick articles in various languages ​​in a wide variety of publications. In the academic year 1974/75 Mattick received a visiting professorship at the “red” University of Roskilde in Denmark . There he lectured on Marx's criticism of political economy and the history of the labor movement and took part critically in seminars by other guests such as Maximilien Rubel , Ernest Mandel , Joan Robinson and others. In 1977 he finished his last important lecture tour at the University of Mexico City . He had his only two appearances in what was then West Germany in 1971 in Berlin and in 1975 in Hanover.

In these last years of his activity Mattick succeeded in winning some followers for his worldview from younger generations. In 1978 an extensive collection of his more than forty years of activity appeared under the title Anti-Bolshevik Communism .

Paul Mattick died in February 1981, leaving an almost completed manuscript for another book, which was later revised by his son and entitled Marxism - Last Refuge of the Bourgeoisie? appeared.

Paul Mattick was married to Ilse Mattick (1919–2009) since 1945. Their son, the philosopher and economist Paul Mattick jr. , was born in 1944.

Selected Works

• Criticism of Herbert Marcuse. The one-dimensional man in class society . From the American by Hermann Huss. European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main 1969.
• Lenin. Revolution and politics . Essays by Paul Mattick, Bernd Rabehl , Juri Tynjavow and Ernest Mandel , Frankfurt am Main, 1970.
• Marx and Keynes. The limits of the “mixed economic system” . European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main 1974.
• Critique of the Neo-Marxists and other articles . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1974.
• Spontaneity and organization. Four attempts on practical and theoretical problems of the labor movement . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt 1975.
• Anton Pannekoek , Diethard Behrens, Paul Mattick: Marxist anti-leninism . Ça-Ira, Freiburg 1991.
• The revolution was a great adventure for me. Paul Mattick in conversation with Michael Buckmiller , Unrast Verlag, Münster 2013.

literature

• Gary Roth: Marxism in a Lost Century. A Biography of Paul Mattick , Leiden 2015.

Web links

• Literature by and about Paul Mattick in the catalog of the German National Library
• Paul Mattick Internet Archive (German) in the Marxists Internet Archive
• Paul Mattick Internet Archive in the Marxists Internet Archive
• International Council Correspondence, content 1934–43

Individual evidence

1. ^ Industrial Workers of the World. Program and tasks. The death crisis of the capitalist system and the tasks of the proletariat. Marxists Internet Archive , accessed January 2, 2017 . 
2. ↑ http://iisg.nl/archives/en/files/m/10760610full.php#N100AE