I’m not a coun­cil­ist. Of the two ma­jor streams of left-wing com­mun­ism with­in the Third In­ter­na­tion­al, the Ger­man-Dutch cur­rent formed around spon­tan­eous work­ers’ coun­cils and the Itali­an cur­rent formed around or­gan­ic party cent­ral­ism, my pref­er­ence is def­in­itely for the lat­ter. Though most mod­ern left com­mun­ist groups syn­thes­ize ele­ments from each, I con­sider Bor­di­gism far more com­pat­ible with or­tho­dox Trot­sky­ism than coun­cil­ism after 1930. Even more so than Bor­di­gism and Trot­sky­ism, I find Bor­diga and Trot­sky to be closer to one an­oth­er than to any of the ma­jor rep­res­ent­at­ives of coun­cil com­mun­ism.

Nev­er­the­less, I di­gress: By the end of the 1920s, the coun­cil com­mun­ist move­ment led by Ant­on Pan­nekoek, Her­man Gort­er, and Otto Rühle had taken its cri­tique of Bolshev­ism so far that it re­jec­ted the party-form of or­gan­iz­a­tion. Paul Mat­tick only emerged as a prom­in­ent fig­ure with­in this move­ment after this point, dur­ing his ca­reer in the United States. Al­though I do not find his polit­ic­al po­s­i­tions all that com­pel­ling, par­tic­u­larly his anti-Len­in­ism, I find his the­or­et­ic­al work to be of ex­cep­tion­al qual­ity. His short 1959 art­icle on “Na­tion­al­ism and So­cial­ism” de­serves spe­cial men­tion for in­sights like the fol­low­ing:

The second World War and its af­ter­math brought in­de­pend­ence to In­dia and Pakistan, the Chinese Re­volu­tion, the lib­er­a­tion of South­east Asia, and self-de­term­in­a­tion for some na­tions in Africa and the Middle East. Prima facie, this “renais­sance” of na­tion­al­ism con­tra­dicts both Rosa Lux­em­burg’s and Len­in’s po­s­i­tions on the “na­tion­al ques­tion.” Ap­par­ently, the time for na­tion­al eman­cip­a­tion has not come to an end, and ob­vi­ously, the rising tide of anti-im­per­i­al­ism does not serve world-re­volu­tion­ary so­cial­ist ends. However, what this new na­tion­al­ism ac­tu­ally in­dic­ates are struc­tur­al changes in the cap­it­al­ist world eco­nomy and the end of nine­teenth-cen­tury co­lo­ni­al­ism. The “white man’s bur­den” has be­come an ac­tu­al bur­den in­stead of a bless­ing. The re­turns from co­lo­ni­al rule are dwind­ling while the costs of em­pire are rising. In­di­vidu­als, cor­por­a­tions, and even gov­ern­ments still cer­tainly en­rich them­selves by co­lo­ni­al ex­ploit­a­tion. But this is now primar­ily due to spe­cial con­di­tions — con­cen­trated con­trol of oil-re­sources, the dis­cov­ery of large urani­um de­pos­its, etc. — rather than the gen­er­al abil­ity to op­er­ate prof­it­ably in colon­ies and oth­er de­pend­ent coun­tries. What were once ex­cep­tion­al profit-rates now drop back to the “nor­mal” rate, and where they re­main ex­cep­tion­al, it is in most cases due to a hid­den form of gov­ern­ment sub­sidy. Gen­er­ally speak­ing, co­lo­ni­al­ism no longer pays, so that it is in part the prin­ciple of prof­it­ab­il­ity it­self which calls forth a new ap­proach to im­per­i­al­ist rule.

Mat­tick’s book-length es­say on Marx and Keynes: Lim­its of the Mixed Eco­nomy is also a clas­sic. Whatever their tend­ency, Marx­ists stand to learn a great deal from Mat­tick’s ideas and work. You can down­load some of his books, art­icles, and re­views be­low. Fe­lix Baum’s re­view of Gary Roth’s Marx­ism in a Lost Cen­tury ap­pears un­der­neath. Roth’s bio­graphy of Mat­tick can be down­loaded via Lib­Com.

Books

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Reviews

Fe­lix Baum

Brooklyn Rail

Dec. 25, 2015

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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 “move­ment of the squares” 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.

Born in 1904 in­to a work­ing-class Ber­lin fam­ily, Mat­tick found his way to this cur­rent dur­ing the up­heavals at the end of World War I, when he was still a teen­ager. While the in­fam­ous role of the Ger­man So­cial Demo­crat­ic Party (SPD) in that peri­od (in­clud­ing im­plic­a­tion in the murder of their former mem­bers Rosa Lux­em­burg and Karl Lieb­knecht by the right-wing Freikorps) is widely ac­cep­ted as fact today, even by lib­er­al his­tor­i­ans; the fas­cin­at­ing land­scape of work­ers’ rad­ic­al­ism in those years has largely re­mained a top­ic for spe­cial­ists. Even in Ger­many many on the left know next to noth­ing about the KAPD, the Com­mun­ist Work­ers’ Party, that broke off from the re­cently foun­ded Com­mun­ist Party (KPD) as the lat­ter aban­doned its ini­tial po­s­i­tion of ab­stin­ence from elect­or­al polit­ics and the es­tab­lished trade-uni­on move­ment. Rid­ing the wave of pro­let­ari­an un­rest, this party was ini­tially able to draw with it the ma­jor­ity of mem­bers of the KPD, leav­ing a rump or­gan­iz­a­tion that slowly but surely turned in­to a loc­al branch of the vic­tori­ous Bolshev­iks in Rus­sia. Though fas­cin­ated, in the be­gin­ning, not only by Red Oc­to­ber but by the role the Bolshev­iks played in it, the coun­cil com­mun­ists soon took a crit­ic­al dis­tance from the USSR, read­ing events there as the es­tab­lish­ment of a new form of state cap­it­al­ism un­der strict party con­trol. Op­pos­ing work­ers’ self-dir­ec­ted activ­ity to party dic­tat­or­ship, they un­der­stood the coun­cils that first sprang up in Rus­sia in 1905 not as only a form of struggle un­der cap­it­al­ism, but sim­ul­tan­eously as the germ of a new class­less so­ci­ety un­der dir­ect con­trol of the pro­du­cers, and made the “ab­ol­i­tion of the wage-sys­tem” their ral­ly­ing cry.

It was this ba­sic out­look, formed in the heat of struggles that some­times verged on civil war, that would in­form Mat­tick’s activ­it­ies and most soph­ist­ic­ated writ­ings un­til the end of his life. Fol­low­ing Mat­tick through fact­ory strikes and bars, his activ­it­ies as a mil­it­ant of the KAPD youth or­gan­iz­a­tion, and his per­son­al life, Roth provides a col­or­ful pic­ture of the unique mi­lieu en­com­passing the KAPD and the more syn­dic­al­ist Uni­on­en that coun­ted sev­er­al hun­dred thou­sand mem­bers in the early twen­ties, as well as av­ant-garde art circles and in­tel­lec­tu­als around journ­als like Die Ak­tion.

With the down­turn of struggles and the rap­id de­cline of the KAPD and the mi­lieu around it, Mat­tick de­cided to leave for the United States in 1926. It was there, in Chica­go, that the second ma­jor epis­ode of prac­tic­al activ­ity in his life un­fol­ded. While he kept writ­ing for what was left of the rad­ic­al press in Ger­many and began read­ing the­ory ser­i­ously, thereby ac­quir­ing in auto­di­dact­ic fash­ion the skills that would later make him an au­thor of out­stand­ing the­or­et­ic­al texts, Mat­tick made links with the In­dus­tri­al Work­ers of the World (IWW) as well as with the so­cial­ist Ger­man émigré com­munity. Again, Roth brings to life a mi­lieu from a by­gone era, a mi­lieu of politi­cized work­ers, their or­gan­iz­a­tions marked by con­stant quar­rels and splits. From 1932 on­wards, Mat­tick, hav­ing lost his fact­ory job at West­ern Elec­tric, par­ti­cip­ated in the un­em­ployed move­ment in Chica­go. He later de­scribed these years as the best of his life, since he was able to live with­in the move­ment full-time. Roth’s de­scrip­tion of this move­ment is in­ter­est­ing to read as a con­trast to the so­cial tran­quil­ity in the United States dur­ing the most re­cent crisis. Though quite lim­ited in com­par­is­on to the so­cial un­rest in Europe after World War I, the rad­ic­al un­em­ployed move­ment in which Mat­tick par­ti­cip­ated was char­ac­ter­ized by forms of dir­ect ac­tion that com­bined ma­ter­i­al self-help and polit­ic­al act­iv­ism:

The un­em­ployed began to use aban­doned store­fronts for their own pur­poses. Locks were broken, and the stores be­came meet­ing places, with chairs taken from deser­ted movie houses. Mat­tick es­tim­ated that there were some fifty or sixty such loc­ales in Chica­go [ … ]. Mi­meo­graph ma­chines were in­stalled for the pro­duc­tion of leaf­lets and move­ment lit­er­at­ure. Pa­per was con­trib­uted by those still em­ployed, who stole of­fice sup­plies from their work­places. [ … ] Gas lines were tapped without set­ting off the meters [ … ] Make­shift kit­chens were set up in the store­fronts and meals cooked around the clock.

Soon, however, these more rad­ic­al tend­en­cies were out­man­euvered by the un­em­ployed or­gan­iz­a­tions of the big­ger left-wing parties, while the ex­pan­sion of wel­fare and pub­lic em­ploy­ment un­der the Roosevelt ad­min­is­tra­tion led to the even­tu­al ec­lipse of the move­ment as a whole.

To­geth­er with a group of coun­cil com­mun­ists in Chica­go, Mat­tick star­ted pub­lish­ing the journ­al In­ter­na­tion­al Coun­cil Cor­res­pond­ence in 1934, it was later re­named Liv­ing Marx­ism and fi­nally New Es­says. Along with Karl Korsch (a former mem­ber of both the SPD and KPD who al­legedly taught Ber­to­lt Brecht his Marx­ism), Mat­tick con­trib­uted the bulk of the texts. Fo­cus­ing on cur­rent de­vel­op­ments like the Great De­pres­sion and the New Deal, the Span­ish Civil War and the rise of Fas­cism and Nazism in Europe as well as de­bat­ing more gen­er­al the­or­et­ic­al ques­tions, In­ter­na­tion­al Coun­cil Cor­res­pond­ence was a prime ex­ample of in­de­pend­ent so­cial cri­ti­cism with neither aca­dem­ic nor party af­fil­i­ations, pro­duced by a few pre­cari­ous in­tel­lec­tu­als and self-taught the­or­eti­cians like Mat­tick. With nu­mer­ous trans­la­tions of texts by European rad­ic­als, it also served as a bridge between Amer­ica and the old con­tin­ent in an era of heightened im­per­i­al­ist rivalry.2

Dur­ing the same years, Mat­tick had loose and rather dif­fi­cult re­la­tions with the ex­iled Frank­furt In­sti­tute of So­cial Re­search. The In­sti­tute, known primar­ily through its more fam­ous mem­bers Max Horkheimer, Theodor Ad­orno, and Her­bert Mar­cuse, com­mis­sioned him to write an ex­ten­ded ana­lys­is of un­em­ploy­ment and the un­em­ployed move­ment in the United States but then shied away from pub­lish­ing it, pre­sum­ably be­cause it ex­hib­ited more clearly the Marx­ist ori­ent­a­tion the In­sti­tute was now anxious to down­play in or­der not to en­danger its status in the U.S. This lu­cid ana­lys­is was first pub­lished in 1969 by a small Ger­man press and has nev­er been trans­lated in­to Eng­lish. Mat­tick’s re­la­tion­ship to the Frank­furt In­sti­tute dur­ing the war years is among the sub­jects of which a more in-depth dis­cus­sion than the frame­work of a bio­graphy al­lows would have been in­ter­est­ing. While some mem­bers of the In­sti­tute began work­ing for the Of­fice of Stra­tegic Ser­vices, provid­ing ana­lyses of Nazi fas­cism to the Amer­ic­an state ap­par­at­us and thus con­trib­ut­ing to its war ef­fort, Mat­tick be­longed to a tiny minor­ity of rad­ic­als for whom World War II es­sen­tially de­man­ded the same re­jec­tion of all sides as World War I.

Partly, this stance seems lo­gic­al. As Roth re­counts:

Un­der the ban­ner of anti-fas­cism, the Com­mun­ist Party em­braced Roosevelt and the New Deal, egged for­ward the coun­try’s eco­nom­ic and mil­it­ary policies, and found a new audi­ence among in­tel­lec­tu­als and pro­fes­sion­als for whom Rus­sia offered a means to ap­pre­ci­ate the ac­com­plish­ments of state plan­ning. The more pat­ri­ot­ic the party be­came, the more mem­bers it at­trac­ted.

Partly, however, it seems to have been based on prob­lem­at­ic no­tions like that of a gen­er­al tend­ency to­wards the au­thor­it­ari­an state, a gen­er­al in­com­pat­ib­il­ity of cap­it­al­ism and demo­cracy, lead­ing to the idea that the out­come of the war made no dif­fer­ence. “If Hitler wins, it is true,” Mat­tick wrote in the Winter 1941 is­sue of Liv­ing Marx­ism, “there will be no peace, no so­cial­ism, no civil­iz­a­tion, but only the pre­par­a­tion for great­er battles to come, for fu­ture de­struc­tion. But if the ‘demo­cra­cies’ win, the situ­ation will not be dif­fer­ent.” This lev­el­ing later ex­ten­ded to an equa­tion of the Nazi sys­tem of con­cen­tra­tion camps with the Al­lies’ policy in oc­cu­pied Ger­many. Un­der the im­pres­sion of re­ports from friends and fam­ily in Ger­many about a dra­mat­ic lack of food (and re­fer­ring to the con­cen­tra­tion camp Ber­gen-Belsen), Mat­tick wrote in a let­ter in 1947: “If the Ger­mans re­duced a minor­ity to a Belsen-diet; the Al­lies have suc­ceeded in put­ting al­most the whole pop­u­la­tion on a diet be­low Belsen.”

At the same time, it must be said, the dis­cus­sion of war and fas­cism in Liv­ing Marx­ism and New Es­says was highly soph­ist­ic­ated; the journ­al provided one of the few places where in­de­pend­ent minds could try to come to terms with a deeply troub­ling and un­known situ­ation. Korsch, for ex­ample, noted that the World War I-era slo­gan “Down with the im­per­i­al­ist war!” had “lost all of its former re­volu­tion­ary force at the present time, when it fits in so per­fectly with the tend­en­cies of the bour­geois ap­peas­ers and isol­a­tion­ists,” while the slo­gan “De­feat of one’s own coun­try!” had be­come “a prac­tic­al policy of that sub­stan­tial part of the rul­ing class in vari­ous European coun­tries that pre­ferred the vic­tory of fas­cism to the loss of its eco­nom­ic and polit­ic­al su­prem­acy.” At the same time, the some­what tri­umphal­ist note on which Korsch’s piece ended — “Not Great Bri­tain, not ‘demo­cracy,’ but the pro­let­ari­an class is the world cham­pi­on in the re­volu­tion­ary fight of hu­man­ity against the scourge of fas­cism” — turned out to be wish­ful think­ing. It is far bey­ond the scope of this re­view to delve deep­er in­to these mat­ters. But in the sec­tions de­voted to them, Roth, who seems to share Mat­tick’s per­spect­ives without ex­cep­tion, in my view fails to un­fold the prob­lem at hand.

In any case, World War II, un­like the pre­vi­ous one, did not end with ma­jor so­cial up­heavals. In the post-war peri­od, Mat­tick mostly ab­stained from polit­ic­al activ­ity, tem­por­ar­ily re­treat­ing with his wife Ilse and his son Paul to a quiet coun­try life in Ver­mont. However, it was dur­ing this second half of his life when he fi­nally emerged as one of the ma­jor thinkers of so­cial eman­cip­a­tion in­spired by Marx, pre­cisely by re­ject­ing pretty much all of the vari­et­ies of aca­dem­ic or party-af­fil­i­ated Marx­ism of the time. Most im­port­antly, Mat­tick took up crisis the­ory, a strand in Marx’s thought highly un­fash­ion­able dur­ing the so-called Golden Years after WWII, when even most Marx­ists be­lieved that state man­age­ment of the eco­nomy had even­tu­ally ac­com­plished the cre­ation of an ever­last­ingly “af­flu­ent so­ci­ety” by neut­ral­iz­ing cap­it­al­ism’s tend­ency to­wards crisis. Mat­tick’s main work Marx and Keynes, pub­lished in 1969, dis­pelled such no­tions some years be­fore their un­ten­ab­il­ity be­came glar­ingly ob­vi­ous, and even­tu­ally se­cured him a broad­er read­er­ship. Hav­ing chron­icled (some­times in slightly tir­ing de­tail) Mat­ticks’s dif­fi­culties to get his texts pub­lished, Roth de­scribes his late suc­cess, most not­ably in West­ern Europe, where some parts of the New Left who had no in­clin­a­tion to go down neo-Bolshev­ik or Maoist dead-ends de­veloped a real Mat­tick-mania for a few years. Events like the May ’68 in Par­is and the pro­longed autonom­ous work­ers’ struggles in Italy provided a fer­tile ground for a re­dis­cov­ery of the coun­cil-com­mun­ist tra­di­tion of which Mat­tick was one of the few liv­ing ex­po­nents.

By fol­low­ing Mat­tick through this “lost cen­tury,” Roth provides a rich ac­count of a rad­ic­al tra­di­tion which, after a cer­tain renais­sance in the six­ties and sev­en­ties, has today again fallen in­to ob­li­vi­on. The form of bio­graphy nat­ur­ally pre­cludes a de­tailed, in-depth en­gage­ment with the polit­ic­al and the­or­et­ic­al is­sues at stake. Roth ex­pli­citly states that he does not want to em­phas­ize Mat­tick’s the­or­et­ic­al work be­cause he sees “little reas­on to sum­mar­ize work that is best read in the ori­gin­al” (and of which sig­ni­fic­ant parts can be found on the in­ter­net today.) Still, in some cases the con­tours and con­tem­por­ary sig­ni­fic­ance of this the­ory could have been made clear­er, while cer­tain bio­graph­ic­al de­tails seem rather dis­pens­able. For read­ers who will feel in­spired to dig deep­er in­to Mat­tick’s writ­ings and those of his fel­lows, the strengths of the book by far out­weigh this short­com­ing.

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Notes

1 Gary Roth, Marx­ism in a Lost Cen­tury. A Bio­graphy of Paul Mat­tick (Leiden and Bo­ston: Brill, 2015).

2 Green­wood Press re­pub­lished the three journ­als in their en­tirety in 1970 in a six-volume edi­tion which today is un­for­tu­nately out of print; the next Oc­cupy move­ment in the United States should seize the headquar­ters of Green­wood Press (130 Cre­mona Drive, Santa Bar­bara, CA 93117) and force the com­pany to re­pub­lish this edi­tion to be dis­trib­uted freely to act­iv­ists in dire need of crit­ic­al the­ory. Al­tern­at­ively, if no such move­ment ma­ter­i­al­izes, someone should make these ex­cel­lent texts avail­able on the web.