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Paul Mattick PAUL MATTICK READER P RINCIPLES, PROPOSITIONS & D ISCUSSIONS FOR L AND & FREEDOM An introductory word to the anarchive Anarchy is Order! I must Create a System or be enslav d by another Man s. I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create (William Blake) During the 19th century, anarchism has develloped as a result of a social current which aims for freedom and happiness. A number of factors since World War I have made this movement, and its ideas, dissapear little by little under the dust of history. After the classical anarchism of which the Spanish Revolution was one of the last representatives a new kind of resistance was founded in the sixties which claimed to be based (at least partly) on this anarchism. However this resistance is often limited to a few (and even then partly misunderstood) slogans such as Anarchy is order , Property is theft ,... Information about anarchism is often hard to come by, monopolised and intellectual; and therefore visibly disapearing.The anarchive or anarchist archive Anarchy is Order ( in short A.O) is an attempt to make the principles, propositions and discussions of this tradition available again for anyone it concerns. We believe that these texts are part of our own heritage. They don t belong to publishers, institutes or specialists. These texts thus have to be available for all anarchists an other people interested. That is one of the conditions to give anarchism a new impulse, to let the new anarchism outgrow the slogans. This is what makes this project relevant for us: we must find our roots to be able to renew ourselves. We have to learn from the mistakes of our socialist past. History has shown that a large number of the anarchist ideas remain 2 standing, even during the most recent social-economic developments. Anarchy Is Order does not make profits, everything is spread at the price of printing- and papercosts. This of course creates some limitations for these archives. Everyone is invited to spread along the information we give . This can be done by copying our leaflets, printing from the CD that is available or copying it, e-mailing the texts ,...Become your own anarchive!!! (Be aware though of copyright restrictions. We also want to make sure that the anarchist or non-commercial printers, publishers and autors are not being harmed. Our priority on the other hand remains to spread the ideas, not the ownership of them.) The anarchive offers these texts hoping that values like freedom, solidarity and direct action get a new meaning and will be lived again; so that the struggle continues against the demons of flesh and blood, that sway scepters down here; and the dirty microbes that send us dark diseases and wish to squash us like horseflies; and the will- o-the-wisp of the saddest ignorance . (L-P. Boon) The rest depends as much on you as it depends on us. Don t mourn, Organise! Comments, questions, criticism,cooperation can be send to [email protected] A complete list and updates are available on this address, new texts are always welcome!! 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS PAUL MATTICK : A BIOGRAPHY ........................ 5 Council communism..................................................... 10 Otto Ruhle and the German Labour Movement ........... 30 Rosa Luxemburg in retrospect...................................... 71 The Barricades Must Be Torn Down --Moscow-Fascism in Spain ................................................................... 103 The Inevitability of Communism................................ 112 The Masses & The Vanguard ..................................... 193 4 PAUL MATTICK : A BIOGRAPHY 1904-1981 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 Sozialistiche Jugend. In 1918 he started to learn as a toolmaker at Siemens, 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 KPD(Spartacus) and the formation for the 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 Ruhle. 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 AAU in Germany. 5 In the USA Mattick carried through a more systematic theoretical study, above all of Karl Marx. In addition, the publication of Henryk Grossmann'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 with the workers movement. Towards the end of the 20 ies Mattick had moved to Chicago, where he first tried to unite the different German workers' orgainizations. 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, who were the only revolutionary union organization existing in America which, 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 programe for the IWW trying to give the Wooblies a more solid marxist foundation based on Grossman s theory, although it did not improve the organization's condition. 6 After some unsuccessful attempts to exercise an influence from the outside on the leninist United Workers 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 up though the 30 ies became a anglo-ameriacn parallel to the Rätekorrespondenz from 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 the european council communism went underground and formally dissapeared in the second halt of the 30 ies Mattick let the Correspondence change name - from 1938 to Living Marxism, and from 1942 to New Essays. Through Karl Korsch and Henryk Grossman Mattick also had some contact to Horkheimer's Institut fur Sozialforschung (the later Frankfurter School ). In 1936 he wrote a major sociological study on the American unemployed movement for the Institue, althought it 7 remained in the Institute's files, to be published only in 1969 by the SDS publishing house Neue Kritik. After the United States' entry into the Second World War and the consequent persecution campaign directed against the entire critical intelligentsia, the left in America was liquidated by Macarthyism. Mattick retired, at the beginning of the 50 ies, to the countryside, where he managed to survive through occasional jobs and his activity as a writer. In the postwar development Mattick - like others - made only small and occassional political activities, making small articles for various periodicals from time to time. From the 40 ies and up thorugh the 50 ies Mattick went through a study of Keynes, and compiled a series of critical notes and articles against keynesian theory and practice. In this work he developed Marx s and Grossmans theory of capitalist development further to meet the new phenomenons and appearences of the modern capitalism critically. With the generel changes of the political scenes and the re- emergence of more radical thoughts in the 60 ies Paul Mattick made som more elaborated and important 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-68-studentmovement. Another important work was Critique of Herbert Marcuse - The one-dimensional man in class society , in which Mattick forcefully rejected the thesis according to which the "proletariat", as Marx understood it had become a "mythological concept" in advanced capitalist society.
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