The Precious Legacy of Paul Mattick

Paul Mattick was a left-wing German worker (activist with the Communist Workers' Party of Germany, the KAPD), son of Spartakist workers, who emigrated to the United States in 1926, where he continued his activism (notably with the Industrial Workers of the World). Thirty years after his death, he is today a key Marxist author, notably for his analysis of capitalist crises, his critique of Keynesianism and, more broadly, of so-called Marxist currents that have lost sight of the objectives of political and economic emancipation of the working class.

This book is unfinished, his last. His son of the same name edited it in 1983, and a French translation of one chapter was published by Ab irato in 1998 under the title "De la pauvreté et de la nature fétichiste de l'économie”, the rest is unpublished except for the final chapter added by P. Mattick Jr as a conclusion. Leaving aside the book object, expensive for a semi-paperback and poorly corrected, the text deserves our full attention.

The title is deliberately provocative, and the answer is obviously “No”, at least for those who make the effort to (re)immerse themselves in authentic Marxism, from a proletarian perspective incompatible with bourgeois domestication, instead of following its modern developments, attempts to adapt it “by incorporating ideas from bourgeois economics”, its depoliticized borrowings as a substitute for the bourgeoisie's inability to understand its own economy, or usurped as a veneer for unassuming Keynesianism or as a flag for new oppressions.

The first part, “Marxism and bourgeois economics”, sets out the foundations of Marxian analysis. It is not always easy on first reading when it develops the law of value, which is not “a concrete phenomenon”, and insists in particular on the permanent instability of capitalist society:

“The accumulation of capital is a dynamic process which implies a continual disequilibrium. The appropriation of surplus-value and its expansion presuppose constant changes in the productivity of labor, and therefore in the relations of value and exchange in general, for both labor and capital. Only conceptually can we consider the system to be stationary, in an attempt to understand its movements. In fact, there's no such thing as a static situation: the system expands or contracts, it's never in equilibrium.”

The myth of market equilibrium based on the law of supply and demand hasn't held water for a long time, but we keep hearing it over and over again. Whereas bourgeois economics is primarily concerned with commodity exchange, prices and market competition, Marx prefers to look at production: the division between necessary labor time and surplus labor is in every commodity. The "science of our own misfortune” lies there, in understanding the mechanism of wage exploitation for the benefit of a ruling class, a mechanism ”masked" by the price form of value. Capitalists themselves have "forgotten the real relations of production and exchange to cling to their outward appearance on the market”. The experience of the speculative bubbles of the late 1990s will confirm this.

No longer, as in pre-capitalist times, a landed aristocracy living off a relatively stable agricultural surplus product limited by nature, but a bourgeoisie “accumulating surplus labor in the form of surplus value and capital”. If this accumulation “no longer has a limit, then the bourgeoisie is right: history has come to an end”.

The second part, “Revolution and Reform”, is an easy read. It situates the complex dynamics of capitalism within history, and above all within the history of struggles and emancipatory theory. Indeed, “the history of capitalism is also the history of Marxism”. Revisiting the history of the workers' movement is all the more necessary as “in the absence of revolutionary action, Marxism is no more than a theory for understanding capitalism”.

Three examples:

— the unions are pinned down for putting the working class “under control, in a two-faced effort to confine the class struggle within the confines of capitalist society”;

— we return to a conception, inherited from old social democracy (and not from the revisionists, but from Kautsky's “orthodoxy”), of socialism as collectivization without changing the wage-labor/capital relationship, the relations of production, without abolishing wage-labor: “such ‘socialism’ differs from organized capitalism only in that it would allow a more equitable distribution”. The chapter “Capitalism and Socialism” is thus particularly noteworthy;

— nationalism, an ideology replacing religion as a cohesive force, not revealing its interests and control in the hands of the bourgeoisie, is hardly combated by an internationalism “presented as a final, but distant goal”. All the more so since “capital operates on an international scale, but aggregates its profits at the national level. Its internationalization therefore takes on the guise of imperialist nationalism, aimed at monopolizing surplus value”.

Generally speaking, the working class is subject to the dominant ideological pressure in the face of which its emancipation project appeals to a future, to “conditions that do not yet exist”, and inevitably undergoes doubts, even retreats from a strong position for fear of taking power (as with the English general strike of 1926). Moreover, the bourgeoisie is not incapable of making concessions, compromises, as long as its power and profits are safeguarded:

“However reformable capitalism may show itself to be, one thing cannot be altered: the relations of wages and profit, without this system being eliminated at the same time”.

Generally speaking, the working class is subject to the dominant ideological pressure in the face of which its emancipation project appeals to a future, to “conditions that do not yet exist”, and inevitably undergoes doubts, even retreats from a strong position for fear of taking power (as with the English general strike of 1926). Moreover, the bourgeoisie is not incapable of making concessions, compromises, as long as its power and profits are safeguarded:

“However reformable capitalism may show itself to be, one thing cannot be altered: the relations of wages and profit, without this system being eliminated at the same time”.

The chapter on the Russian revolution closely resembles material already published by Autogestion & Socialisme in 19777. It explains that Lenin, as he himself acknowledged in the April Theses, was not aiming for the establishment of socialism with the abolition of wage labor, but for “control of social production”, which control was not to remain workers' for long:

"there was a kind of reversal of workers' control, which became control over workers and their production. It was essential to increase production and, because it could not rely on mere exhortation to induce workers to exploit themselves more than usual, the Bolshevik state extended its jurisdiction to the economic sphere (...)”.

Paul Mattick finally responds optimistically to the endless lamentations about insufficient class consciousness and poor subjective conditions: “revolutions must always be triggered by insufficient ideological preparation”.

As we've already said, this book is also about lack (the very title evokes what's only marginally there), which is what Mattick won't have had time to write. In his foreword, Mattick Jr. points out that a third, unwritten, part should have dealt with recent economists' attempts at partial borrowing from Marxism, talking about “post-Keynesians" and "neo-Ricardians”. The book should have concluded on revolutionary action today. This impossible conclusion is replaced by a reprise of a text published by Spartacus in 1983: “Le marxisme, hier, aujourd'hui et demain".

Note that in his biographical note at the end of the volume, Charles Reeve ventures an interesting evocation of the current crisis as the “exhaustion of the Keynesian project" (reminiscent of another posthumous book, Pierre Souyri's La Dynamique du capitalisme au XX° siècle).

An important, long-awaited and welcome book. It's a must-have in the library of every militant who hasn't given up on the project of social emancipation, of socialism. Because that's also the tragedy of our times: many comrades remain involved in honest militant work on the ground of class struggle, but in a mechanically defensive way. They no longer know what a genuine communist project can be. The current crisis is opening up new possibilities for challenging capitalism. The legacy of P. Mattick's thought is invaluable in helping us retool for this re-opened door.

S. J.1

• 1Stéphane Julien