Paul Mattick, council communist

Photograph: 1934

MATTICK, PAUL (13.03.1904 – 7.02.1981), alias PAUL KLEIN, LUENIKA, born in Stolp/Słupsk (Pomerania, today Poland); he grew up in Berlin in a left-wing family. At the age of 14, Mattick was already a member of the Free Socialist Youth (Freie sozialistische Jugend) of the Spartacus League. 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 had been involved in many actions during the revolution, and arrested and threatened with death several times, shows the progressive radicalization of the communist left-oppositional youth in Germany. As part of the split in the KPD (Spartacus) in Heidelberg, he joined the newly founded KAPD in the spring of 1920. He was involved in the publication of the newspaper Die Rote Jugend, organ of the KAJ.

At the age of 17 (in 1921) Mattick moved to Cologne to work at Klöckner for a while, until strikes, riots and his re-arrest ruined any prospect of further employment. During his work he was a strong organizer and agitator for the KAPD and the Allegemeine Arbeiter-Union (AAU) in the Cologne area; he met Jan Appel*, among others. He also made contacts with intellectuals, writers and artists from the AAUE led by Otto Rühle* and Franz Pfemfert*.

In 1926 Mattick emigrated to the USA, seeing that he was already unemployed for several years, and because of the continuing decline of the radical mass movement and the associated hopes of a proletarian revolution, especially after the disaster of the “October 1923” uprise. However, he maintained his contacts with the KAPD and AAU in Germany.

In the USA, Mattick systematically studied the theoretical foundations, above all the works of Karl Marx. The publication of Henryk Grossmann’s main 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 had a direct influence on his own revolutionary attitude, rather than a purely theoretical aspect.

From this time onwards, Mattick concentrated entirely on Marx’s theory of capitalist development, its inherent contradictory logic and its inevitable crisis as the basis of the political thinking of the workers’ movement.

Towards the end of the 1920s, Mattick moved to Chicago, where he sought to unite the various labor organizations of German descent. In 1931, he tried to revive the Chicagoer Arbeiterzeitung, a very traditional newspaper that been published for a time by August Spies (1855-1887), killed by the American bourgeoisie, and Josef Dietzgen (1828-1888).

Mattick became activist of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The IWW was the only revolutionary organization in America that wanted to unite all workers across state and sector borders with the aim of preparing a major strike to overthrow capitalism. However, the best period of this organization with militant attempts to overthrow capitalism had already to an end in the early 1930s, so that only the burgeoning unemployment movement the IWW a brief regional boost.

In 1933, Mattick drafted a new programme for the IWW in Chicago, in which he attempted to create a more solid Marxist foundation for the organization on the basis of Grossmann’s theory. For Mattick, the new period was that of the “death crisis of capitalism”. In this phase of death crisis, the trade unions turned out to be weapons of capital:

 “In the final phase of capitalist society, the trade unions no longer have a function to fulfill, nor do they have a function under communism. They have reached their objective limit. However, this does not mean that they have disappeared, since ideologies are always adapted to conditions. But they are becoming counter-revolutionary, trying to help capitalism get back on its feet in order to save their own lives. A well-functioning capitalism is a matter of life and death for the trade unions. That is why the trade unions become strike-breaking organizations, that is why they try to divert the real class struggles by treacherous horse-trading with the employers”.

A German-language IWW pamphlet completed in 1933, at the same time as the NSDAP’s seizure of power, was entitled: Die Todeskrise des kapitalistischen Systems und die Aufgabe des Proletariats. In this pamphlet, Mattick showed that the German working class had been completely disarmed by the myth of democracy:

 “But instead of weapons, they were given the phrase of democracy. And so we see the working class of Germany striding from defeat to defeat, amidst the rain of bullets and between the bayonet points with which the ruling class supported its rule and had it protected by its lackeys, with only a song of praise for democracy on its lips...

 “The effect: the German working class agrees with the death sentence against them because it is based on was decided “democratically”.

 “In view of this state of affairs we ask the workers, the entire working class, whether they are now able to recognize that the phrase of democracy hurled into the world is not a question of the form of government, but exclusively a question of the continued existence of capitalism and logically a question of the downfall of the working class? Let us ask further whether there can be democracy at all under capitalist-economic conditions?”.

In 1934, together with friends from the IWW and some expelled members of the Leninist Proletarian Party, Mattick founded the United Workers Party, which later changed its name to the Group of Council Communists. This group maintained close contact with the remaining German and Dutch groups of left communists in Europe and the journal International Council Correspondence (ICC). In the course of the 1930s, this developed into the Anglo-American parallel to the Council Correspondence (Räte-Korrespondenz) of the Dutch Group of International Communists (Holland) (GIC/GIK). It translated articles and debates from Europe and published them together with economic analyses and critical political commentaries on current affairs in the USA and the rest of the world.

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

At the time of the popular fronts in France and Spain, “a defeat of the proletariat”, denounced Paul Mattick, as well as all council communists, the ideological incorporation of the proletariat in the coming world war, whose directors were the anarchists, Stalinists and Trotskyists:

“The anarchists became propagandists for the Moscow brand of fascism, the servants of those capitalist interests which oppose the present Franco plans in Spain. The revolution became a play ground of imperialist rivals... But whatever happens, unless the workers throw up new barricades against the Loyalists also, unless the workers really attack capitalism, than whatever may be the outcome of the struggle in Spain it will have no real meaning to the working class, which will still be exploited and suppressed. A change in the military situation in Spain might force Moscow-Fascism once more to don the revolutionary garb. But from the viewpoint of the interests of the Spanish workers, as well as of the workers of the world, there is no difference between Franco-Fascism and Moscow-Fascism, however much difference there may be between Franco and Moscow. The barricades, if erected again, should not be torn down. The revolutionary watchword for Spain is: Down with the Fascists and also down with the Loyalists. However futile, in view of the present world situation, might be the attempt to fight for communism, still this is the only course for workers to adopt...”

When European council communism officially disappeared in the second half of the 1930s and was forced to go underground, Mattick wrote in Council Correspondence: From 1938 it was called Living Marxism and from 1942 New Essays. The theoretical contribution of Karl Korsch* became essential there. Both journals denounced the new imperialist world war.

Alongside Karl Korsch and Henryk Grossmann, Mattick was also in contact with Max Horkheimer’s Institute for Social Research, the later “Frankfurt School”. In 1936, Mattick wrote an extensive sociological study on the American unemployment movement for this institute, in whose archives it was stored until it was published in 1969 by the SDS publishing house  “Neue Kritik”.

After the USA entered the Second World War and the subsequent campaign of persecution against the intellectual left, this last one was eliminated by  Joseph McCarthy, whereupon Mattick “officially” withdrew from political life in the early 1950s. He moved to the countryside, where he saved his head above water with odd jobs and his work as a writer. In the post-war period, Mattick - like others - only occasionally took part in minor political activities and wrote short articles for various magazines from time to time.

In a curious article (Politics, March 1947), Mattick denounced the double face of Bolshevism under the twin forms of Stalinism and Trotskyism, the result of which was “state capitalism”:

 “Trotsky thought that Stalin would destroy the state-capitalist nature of the economy in favor of the bourgeois economy. That is what Thermidor was supposed to mean. The decline of the bourgeois economic order prevented Stalin from accomplishing this. All he could do to impose the ugly features of his personal dictatorship on a society that had been built by Lenin and Trotsky. In this sense, Trotskyism has triumphed over Stalinism, even though Stalin is still dominating the Kremlin”.

However, Stalinism and Trotskyism had not triumphed. These last ones exposed a dead past:

 “Trotsky could not allow himself to in Bolshevism only one aspect of the worldwide trend towards a fascist world economy. Even (as) late as 1940, he maintained the view that Bolshevism had prevented the rise of fascism in Russia in 1917. However, it should have been clear for a long time that all that Lenin and Trotsky prevented in Russia the use of a non-Marxist ideology for the fascist reconstruction of Russia. Since the Marxist ideology of Bolshevism served only state capitalist goals, it also discredited itself. From any point of view that leaves the capitalist system of exploitation behind, Stalinism and Trotskyism are both relics of the past”.

Beginning in the 1940s and continuing into the 1950s, Mattick devoted himself to the works of Keynes and wrote a series of critical notes and articles on Keynesian theory and practice. As part of this work, he further developed Marx’s and Grossmann’s theory of capitalist development in order to critically confront new phenomena and manifestations of modern capitalism.

In the wake of the general changes in the political landscape and the re-emergence of more radical ideas in the 1960s, Paul Mattick gave 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 an impact on the post-sixties student movement. Another important work was Critique of Herbert Marcuse – The one-dimensional man in class society, in which Mattick decisively rejected the thesis that the proletariat as understood by Marx become a “mythological concept” in an advanced capitalist society. Although he agreed with Marcuse’s critical analysis of the prevailing ideology, Mattick argued that the theory of one-dimensionality itself existed only as an ideology. Marcuse subsequently confirmed that Mattick’s critique was the only serious one to which his book had been subjected.

By the end of the 1970s, numerous new and old articles by Mattick could be found in various languages in a wide range of publications. In the academic year 1974/75, Mattick was awarded a visiting professorship at the “red” University of Roskilde in Denmark. There he lectured on Marx’s Critique of Political Economy and on the history of the labor movement and participated critically in seminars by other guests such as Maximilien Rubel, Ernest Mandel, Joan Robinson and others. In 1977, he completed his last important lecture tour at the University of Mexico City. His appearances in what was then West Germany were in Berlin in 1948 and 1971 and in Hanover in 1975.

In these last years of his work, Mattick was able to win over a few followers from younger generations to his world view.

For these new generations, the only perspective was the social revolution at the world level. In a famous article (“Capitalism and Ecology. From the fall of capital to the fall of the world”, 1976), Mattick emphasized the real historical stakes:

“So what can be done in this seemingly hopeless situation? Nothing at all, if the problem is approached from the point of view of ecology. If only because it is not the closest thing that threatens the continued existence of humanity. The ‘ecological crisis’ is itself to a large extent a product of the social crisis situation, and the approaching catastrophe resulting from the latter precedes the ecological catastrophe. As things today, the high probability of nuclear war makes the ecological crisis superfluous. All attention must be focused on the social processes in order to forestall the nuclear criminals in East and West. If the workers of the world do not succeed in this, they will not able to confront the ecological threat and create the conditions for the continued existence of humanity with a communist society.”

In 1978, a comprehensive collection of his more than forty years of work was published under the title Anti-Bolshevik Communism.

Paul Mattick died in February 1981, leaving behind an almost completed manuscript for another book, which was later revised by his son and published under the title: Marxism – Last Refuge of the Bourgeoisie?

Paul Mattick was married to Ilse Mattick (1919-2009) from 1945. Their son, the philosopher and economist Paul Mattick Junior, was born in 1944.

Sources: Kommunismus im Allgemeinen, insbes. KPD und Nebenorganisationen, vol. 2, 6 June - 21 October 1921 (BArch, R 1507/2053): Paul (no surname); Paul Klein, „Silvio Gesell und die prol. Revolution. Manchestertum oder Gemeinwirtschaft“, Proletarier, issue 10, October 1926, pp. 179-184; „Die Bodenfrage in Südafrika“, Proletarier, issue 3, March 1927, pp. 73-74; «Sanierung und Rationalisierung in Frankreich «, Proletarier, issue 6, June 1927, pp. 115-117 «Marx-Epigonen gegen Rosa Luxemburg. Randglossen über die Akkumulation des Kapitals «, Proletarier, Heft 9, Sept. 1927, pp. 202-209; „Jack London: die Eiserne Ferse“, KAZ, No. 86, Nov. 7, 1927; Wikipedia; „Die Industrial Workers of the World und die Allgemeine Arbeiter-Union Eine notwendige Klarstellung“, Kampfruf, Organ der AAU (Revolutionäre Betriebsorganisation), February 1929, No. 7, p. 3, & No. 8, pp. 2-3: https://www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/mattick/1929/02/iwwaau.htm; „What is Communism“, ICC, Chicago, No. 1, Oct. 1934, pp. 1-9; „The end of the Trotsky Movement“, pp. 26-28; „The Lenin Legend“, ICC, Dec. 1935; „The defeat in France“, ICC No. 8 (July), 1936, pp.1-9; „The barricades must be torn down. Moscow Fascism in Spain”, ICC No. 7/8, Chicago, August 1937; “The war is permanent”, Living Marxism No. 1 (Spring), 1940, pp. 1-27; Luenika, “From Liberalism to Fascism”, Living Marxism No. 4, Spring 1941; Paul Mattick, Unemployment and the Unemployed Movement in the USA - 1929-35, New Critique, 1969; Critique of Herbert Marcuse. Der eindimensionale Mensch in der Klassengesellschaft, Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1969; Marx und Keynes. Die Grenzen des gemischten Wirtschaftssystems, Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1971; review of „Leninism and the Revolutionary Process“, IWK, Berlin, August 1972, issue 16, pp. 101-2; Paul Mattick, „Kapitalismus und Ökologie. Vom Untergang des Kapitals zum Untergang der Welt“, Jahrbuch Arbeiterbewegung 4, Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt/Main, 1976; Frank Dingel/Michael Buckmiller, „Paul Mattick“, IWK No. 2, Berlin, 1981: http://www.left-dis.nl/d/mattick_biblio_dingel.pdf; Paul Mattick, Kritik der Neomarxisten und andere Aufsätze, Fischer, 1982; Spontaneität und Organisation, Suhrkamp, 1982; Oliver Rast, „Ein Arbeiterintellektueller wie er im Buche“: http://iwwrostock.blogsport.eu/2014/02/23/ein-arbeiterintellektueller-wie-er-im-buche-steht; Paul Mattick, Die Revolution war für mich ein großes Abenteuer (Paul Mattick im Gespräch mit Michael Buckmiller), Unrast Verlag, Münster 2013; Gary Roth, Marxism in a Lost Century: A Biography of Paul Mattick, Brill, Leiden/Boston 2014; „Communists in situ“: https://cominsitu.wordpress.com/2017/03/26/international-council-correspondence-living-marxism-new-essays-1934-1943; International Communist Correspondence (1934-1937): https://bataillesocialiste.wordpress.com/international-council-correspondence-1934-1937; https://www.marxists.org/subject/left-wing/icc.