Mattick, Paul

MATTICK, PAUL (1904-1981). Paul Mattick’s continuing relevance for social movements lies in two areas: his advocacy of worker’s councils and his use of Marxian crisis theory as a means to explain capitalism’s destructive and self-limiting qualities.

Mattick’s ideas were an outgrowth of his experiences during the revolutionary upheavals in Germany that followed World War I. Born in Pomerania and raised in Berlin, he became radicalized just as he began an apprenticeship at age fourteen at the huge Siemens industrial complex in Berlin. At the time, demonstrations and food riots were widespread, and military desertions forced the monarchy’s abdication. An all-socialist government formed, and the war ended. Thousands of workers’ councils appeared in virtually every workplace, municipality, and barrack throughout the country. Over the next decade, Mattick participated in the demonstrations, strike actions, street fighting against the police and paramilitaries, factory occupations, open forums, reading groups, and newly-established radical publications that attempted to rekindle a revolutionary momentum, which was defeated at every turn.

During the early 1930s, after he emigrated to the United States, Mattick participated in the unemployed movement. In Chicago, he joined the huge demonstrations that overpowered and stunned the police and ad hoc storefront occupations. He worked to create new organizational forms outside leftwing political parties that relied directly on the decision-making capabilities of the unemployed.

These experiences turned Mattick into a sharp critic of socialist practices in both Germany and Russia. This dual-sided opposition to social democracy and bolshevism—to state socialism and state capitalism—was a defining trait of a radical left tradition that traced its beginnings to Rosa Luxemburg and continued in the writings of Anton Pannekoek, Karl Korsch, and others. Mattick would later serve as a conduit for their theories after these authors were rediscovered by the New Left of the 1960s.
Mattick favored council forms of organization rather than the political parties of the left. Councils were easy to form, did not presuppose prior exposure to socialist ideology and organizational strategies. He believed councils had the potential to set aside existing relations of domination and substitute egalitarian modes of decision-making and work-place functioning. Many Marxists viewed Mattick as an anarchist, and Mattick did consider himself part of a long tradition that attempted to bridge the differences between these two political positions.

In the decades immediately following World War II, Mattick was one of the few Marxist theorists to critique Keynesian economic measures, that is, the use of fiscal and monetary policy to stabilize and stimulate the economy. His book Marx and Keynes: The Limits of Mixed Economy (1969) was translated into several languages. That capitalism was prone to fatally-destructive economic crises was also part of the radical left tradition that Mattick brought forward. At a time when prominent Marxists like Paul Sweezy and Herbert Marcuse questioned the ongoing usefulness of Marxism in its original form, Mattick turned to Marx’s theory of capital accumulation as expounded in the three volumes of Capital to explain contemporary developments. Several years before his death, he collected his major essays into Anti-Bolshevik Communism (1978). His final, posthumously-published volume, Marxism—The Last Refuge of the Bourgeosie?, was completed by Paul Mattick, Jr.

Roth, Gary. Marxism in a Lost Century: A Biography of Paul Mattick. Leiden/Chicago: Brill/Haymarket Books, 2015.

Paul Mattick, 1904-1981. Collected Writings. Marxist Internet Archives. https://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/index.htm