#Paul Mattick

[anarchistin]

instead of finding their orientation in the actual social conditions and their possibilities, the new leftists base their concerns mainly on a set of ideologies that have no relevance to the requirements of social change in capitalist nations.

they find their inspiration not in the developmental processes of their own society but in the heroes of popular revolution in faraway countries, thereby revealing that their enthusiasm is not as yet a real concern for decisive social change.

Paul Mattick, Introduction to Anti-Bolshevik Communism

[oceanicmarxist]

[argyrocratie]

"In Capital Marx pointed out that “a rise in the price of labour, as a consequence of accumulation of capital, only means, in fact, that the length and weight of the golden chain the wage-worker has already forged for himself, allow of a relaxation of the tension of it.”

(...)

The more the workers gained, the richer capital became. The gap between wages and profits became wider with each increase of the ‘workers’ share’. The apparently increasing strength of labour was in reality the continuous weakening of its position in relation to that of capital. The ‘successes’ of the workers, hailed by Eduard Bernstein as a new era of capitalism, could, in this sphere of social action, end only in the eventual defeat of the working class, as soon as capital changed from expansion to stagnation.

(...)

The masses were as little revolutionary as their leaders, and both were satisfied with their participation in capitalist progress. Not only were they organising for a greater share of the social product, but also for a greater voice in the political sphere. They learned to think in terms of bourgeois democracy; they began to speak of themselves as consumers; they wanted to take part in all that was good of culture and civilisation. Franz Mehring’s History of the German Social Democracy typically ends in a chapter on ‘Art and the Proletariat’. Science for the workers, literature for the workers, schools for the workers, participation in all the institutions of capitalist society — this and nothing more was the real desire of the movement. Instead of demanding the end of capitalistic science, it asked for labour scientists; instead of abolishing capitalistic law, it trained labour lawyers; in the increasing number of labour historians, poets, economists, journalists, doctors and dentists, as well as parliamentarians and trade-union bureaucrats, it saw the socialisation of society, which therewith became increasingly its own society.

That which one can increasingly share in one will soon find defendable. Consciously and unconsciously the old labour movement saw in the capitalist expansion process its own road to greater welfare and recognition. The more capital flourished, the better were the working conditions. Satisfied with action within the framework of capitalism, the workers’ organisations became concerned with capitalism’s profitability. The competitive national capitalistic rivalries were only verbally opposed. Although the movement was at first striving only for a ‘better fatherland’, and was later willing to defend what had already been gained, it soon reached the point where it was ready to defend the fatherland ‘as it is’.

The tolerance that Marx’s ‘followers’ displayed towards the bourgeois society was not one-sided. The bourgeoisie itself had in its very struggle against the working class learned to ‘understand the social question’. Its interpretation of social phenomena became increasingly more materialistic; and soon there was an overlapping of ideologies in both fields of thought, a condition increasing still further the ‘harmony’ based on the actual disharmony of class frictions within a rising capitalism. However, the ‘Marxists’ were more eager than the bourgeoisie to ‘learn from the enemy’.

(...)

Behind the aspect of the proletarian revolution the leaders of the socialist movement correctly saw a chaos in which their own position would become no less jeopardised than that of the bourgeoisie proper. Their hatred of ‘disorder’ was a defence of their own material, social and intellectual position. Socialism was to be developed not illegally, but legally, for under such conditions, existing organisations and leaders would continue to dominate the movement. And their successful interruption of the impending proletarian revolution demonstrated that not only did the ‘gains’ of the workers in the economic sphere turn against the workers themselves, but that their ‘success’ in the political field also turned out to be weapons against their emancipation. The strongest bulwark against a radical solution of the social question was the social democracy, in whose growth the workers had learned to measure their growing power.

Nothing shows the revolutionary character of Marx’s theories more clearly than the difficulty to maintain them during non-revolutionary times. There was a grain of truth in Kautsky’s statement that the socialist movement cannot function during times of war, as times of war temporarily create non-revolutionary situations. The revolutionist becomes isolated, and registers temporary defeat. He must wait till the situation changes, till the subjective readiness to participate in war is broken by the objective impossibility to serve this subjective readiness. A revolutionist cannot help standing ‘outside the world’ from time to time. To believe that a revolutionary practice, expressed in independent actions of the workers, is always possible means to fall victim to democratic illusions. But it is more difficult to stand ‘outside this world’, for no one can know when situations change, and no one wishes to be left out when changes do occur."

-Paul Mattick , "Karl Kautsky: From Marx to Hitler" (1939)

[dustedandsocial]

This essay examines the antinomy of class struggle, as formulated by Paul Mattick and elaborated by Théorie Communiste. The antinomy can be formulated as follows: while capital accumulates by exploiting wage labor, the reproduction of wage labor reproduces the conditions of exploitation that propel the accumulation of capital. Thus, in reproducing itself, wage labor reproduces the conditions of its own exploitation, which is to say, capital. This means that labor’s gains against capital—better wages and working conditions—are won at labor’s own expense: increasing wages imply an increasing rate of exploitation. Only the abolition of the capitalist class relation can abolish this vicious cycle. The question is whether this abolition requires labor’s seizure of the means of production, or whether these means have become so bound up with capital accumulation that abolishing capital entails relinquishing these means and abolishing production as we know it. Théorie Communiste insists on the latter. Since social production has become inextricable from capital accumulation and the affirmation of labor inseparable from the affirmation of capital, communism as the abolition of capital requires the self-abolition of the proletariat. Class struggle unfolds in the rift between two impossibilities: the impossibility of affirming the proletariat without affirming capital and the impossibility of negating capital without negating the proletariat. Is the possibility of communism inextricable from this rift between impossible affirmation and impossible negation? Or does it require a politics of the rift capable of pinpointing the faultline between these impossibilities?

[xjmlm]

Paul Mattick: "We're entering into a continuation of the downturn of 2020, which everybody describes as a COVID recession. It's true that the decision was made to stop the production and circulation of commodities, but the economy was already slowing down radically before that. If they hadn't done it on purpose, it would have happened anyway. And we are now returning to this slowdown, which you could say was interrupted by the enormous throwing of money by governments into the system. The problem is that the profitability of capital is still very low and the system is not expanding. For example, China, which started this process very late, was able ten years ago to manufacture a pseudo-prosperity by creating a real estate bubble, just like they did in Japan in 1980 and in the United States in 2007. It looked like everybody was getting rich and the economy was taking off and everything was great. But actually they were just providing credit so people could sell houses to each other.

And eventually the whole thing fell apart. It's not just something that's happening in China. The Chinese construction industry is collapsing, so Germany can't sell heavy machinery to China and Chinese businesspeople can't buy as many Mercedes as they used to buy. So you also have a contraction of the German economy happening at the same time. That has effects in the United States as well. There really is a global system which the economists forget when they're trying to analyze what's going on. There are problems in China, in the Eurozone, in the United States, or in Argentina, but, actually, it's one big system and it is not doing very well. Whoever can still make money by raising prices will do it, but others won’t be able to. They will not make a lot of money and the decline of the general economy will continue."

[metamatar]

no matter what criticisms you have of marxism-leninism and how much of the bolshevik route to power you view as mere opportunism it's very cringe to characterise the entire peasantry as reactionary. these were former serfs a few decades back. the SR's had the largest, most mobilised political base in the country. the path of chinese and indian communism is very illuminating in this.

[theoutcastrogue]

Trickster saves the world by fucking it all up

“The water begins to part, and you see vast and many realms of the Neverafter, many stories, many different versions of the stories of your companions. You see different versions of Pinocchio, different versions of Sleeping Beauty. All these things unveil themselves to you, and you see lots of great powers in this world. You see witches and fairies. You see monsters, like a terrible leviathan coming after Pinocchio. You see the Big Bad Wolf from Little Red Riding Hood’s legend.

But you also see, over and over again, this continuation of animals in these stories getting up to mischief, and you look back at all the different lives you’ve lived, and you always see the clever fox, the cunning rabbit. You see these different versions of the cat in these stories, and in some places you’re helping, in some you’re hurting. But you feel this sudden tug or pull of understanding that there’s some reason or purpose to the animals that appear in these stories.

And when you think of your most recent life, of taking a poor miller’s son and through cleverness and trickery making him king, it seemed that there were a lot of forces trying to control the flow of these stories and determine what it is they should be, and that your role has often been to upset that. That you’ve lived many lives of saying, something’s actually going to be a different way now. Something unexpected or strange or hilarious is going to happen to subvert the order of how these things tend to go.”

— the DM (Brennan Lee Mulligan) to Puss in Boots (Zay Oyama) in Neverafter Episode 4: “Once Upon A Time”

Reynard the Fox

“In mythology, whenever a system becomes overregulated, a figure spontaneously appears to restore balance by introducing chaos. The trickster is “playful, mischievous, and sometimes outrageous.” He delights in paradox, confusion, and “auspicious bewilderment”. He keeps us from being too confident that we know what we are doing or that we are in control. [...] The trickster confounds a perspective that sees reality only through the lens of power. He proves that something exists that is neither power nor its opposite.”

— Susan Wyatt, “Awakening the Trickster”

“[Tricksters] stabilize society by annoying it.”

— Paul Mattick reviewing Lewis Hyde’s Trickster makes this world

“I feel like in the last one, my kind of life was a little simpler. I did some trickery, but overall, I was a little on the sweeter side. And I think it seems fun and it seems correct to just fuck it all up.”

— Puss in Boots (Zac Oyama) in Neverafter Episode 4: “Once Upon A Time”

@we-are-trickster​

[shituationist]

Do you have any good sources/links critiquing market socialism? I’m thinking C4SS in particular.

I think the best book critiquing market liberalism in general is John O'Neill's the Market: Ethics, Knowledge and Politics, which comprehensively addresses major arguments in favor of markets or against socialist planning. O'Neill examines the Weber/von Mises "calculation problem," the von Hayek "knowledge problem," as well as critiques of planning from public choice theory and neoclassical welfare theory. O'Neill does this by contrasting the philosophies and underlying philosophical assumptions of pro-market thinkers to those of Otto Neurath, who was a partisan of non-monetary socialist planning up until his death, and whose contributions to the debate are often underpublicized (usually in favor of making Oskar Lange, himself a market socialist, the primary interlocuter with the Austrians).

Otto Neurath himself is worth reading because he provides an epistemological defense of economic planning. You can find his collected economic writings on libgen pretty easily. It's worth perusing in tandem with O'Neill's book.

Honorable mention to Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell's essay "Anti-Hayek", which is a decent materialist counter to the esoteric epistemology von Hayek uses to suggest socialist planning is ineffective. Their essay on Leonid Kantoravich's linear programming and in-kind planning is also worth reading as a critique of the Weber/von Mises position on economic calculation. Cockshott has unfortunately sullied his legacy via his 70s Maoist sex politics, but his essays critiquing the Austrian positions in the socialist planning debates are still worthy of consideration.

William Kapp was a critic of market liberalism whose book the Social Costs of Private Enterprise prefigured a lot of critiques of laissez-faire markets that later ecological economists like Georgescu-Roegen and Herman Daly (who were not exactly "anti-market" but whose critiques do underline how the neoclassical idealization of markets is not... ideal) would make more famous. Kapp focuses on the non-monetary and unmonetizable effects of private enterprise, which by definition can not enter into the strictly monetary accounting that informs the decision-making of any commercial enterprise, and which empirically cut against the pretensions of theoretical/rationalistic market liberal utopias.

The Parecon guys, Robin Hahnel and Michel Albert, provide both an institutional framework for planning and several critiques of market liberalism which are applicable to market socialism and market anarchism. Robin Hahnel's Milton's Myths series on socialisteconomist is really good and intended for a popular audience. Pat Devine is a thinker of a similar type who is less of a marginalist, unfortunately I can't name any essays or books of his off the top of my head, but he seems of interest.

Paul Mattick's "Limits of the Mixed Economy" I think would be relevant to Keynesian and post-Keynesian policy recommendations, since Keynesianism is of enduring interest to social democrats. I've never finished it though, so I don't really know. I do know it's talked about a lot in that way. Would be interesting to come back to that book some day myself.

As far as mutualism goes, I think Marx's critique of Proudhon's mutualism and similar schemes in the Poverty of Philosophy is definitive, even if Marx was not entirely honest w/r/t his object of critique. Engels's additions to this critique in his late prefaces to the Poverty of Philosophy and his debates with German Proudhonists over the housing question provide a sound enough basis for rejecting those kinds of schemes in favor of common ownership (i.e. communism).

<everything beyond this is based on personal reminiscence and not really a direct answer, take with a grain of salt>

With regards to C4SS, it's harder to say, b/c C4SS's moment seems to have passed, their moment was not that long in the first place, and they've always been defined politically more by their break from right-wing libertarianism than their antagonism to, say, Marxists, who are antagonistic intellectually but don't really have neo-mutualists on their radar, or anarchist-communists, who either just side with the Marxists, gesture vaguely in the direction of "the commons", or otherwise don't care enough about the topic to argue about it. As such I don't think C4SS itself has ever been singled out by anyone in an important way, but insofar as market anarchism is just market liberalism taken to its logical conclusions, critiques of the latter apply just as much to the former, and the sources above all provide compelling arguments against market liberalism and in favor of socialist planning.

Groups like C4SS thrived (relatively - C4SS has never had that large of a following) in a political atmosphere where the word "socialism" was still a very dirty one, where there was a lot of enthusiasm around p2p filesharing networks and p2p networks in general, where the overarching political consensus was that there was no alternative to markets and commerce, and where acephalous and amorphous political movements (that were seemingly structurally analogous to markets) had not yet exposed their limitations but seemed to be a genuine threat to state power (and not just a particular state power, but state power in general). Under those conditions, where leftists felt embarrassed to be proponents of what in the popular imagination had just been discredited with the fall of the Soviet bloc, C4SS style p2p utopianism was something you could gesture vaguely towards as an alternative, since those p2p schemes avoided the "centralized," "monolithic," and "sclerotic" epithets so often applied to central planning regimes, and fit well within the American political imaginary which has long treated decentralization as a virtue (the list of American endorsers of decentralism includes such diverse names as Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, John C. Calhoun, Lysander Spooner, George Wallace, Murray Bookchin and Bob Black). That atmosphere has given way to one where the left once again favors more traditionally structured organizations, especially after the fizzle-out of the 2020 uprisings and the abject failure that was decentralist-anarchist (non-/anti-)leadership in places like Seattle and Portland, which resulted in no lasting victories and which frankly embarrassed the anarchist movement in North America (reminiscent of the numerous embarrassments for anarchists recounted in Engels's the Bakuninists at Work). There are still true believers, but right-wing libertarianism no longer funnels people in their direction as much now that the Libertarian Party has more or less successfully been merged into the network of miscellaneous reactionary movements. Self-identifying "left-libertarians" seem to me to be an increasingly rare breed.

Genuine market liberalism is also increasingly unpopular on the left and right. Liberals under Biden have embraced "industrial policy" which is ill-defined but seems to involve the state playing an active role in economic development, especially fostering domestic industries to reduce dependence on what the state identifies as its foreign rivals. Given how the libertarian movement continues to shed a lot of its left-wing cultural sympathies (not that there aren't holdouts), an SEK3 type is hard to imagine emerging from today's libertarian milieu, especially the libertarians below the age of 25.

I guess shameless self-promotion here for my own article for a "Mutual Exchange" series where I critiqued anarchist decentralism and the "decentralization/centralization" dichotomy that C4SS-ites are so endeared to: https://c4ss.org/content/53124

I know I've gone off a bit here, so I'll stop pontificating, but I hope this is helpful to anyone who's interested in these debates or in a potentially unreliable narrative developed primarily through online interactions.

[howieabel]

“So understood, anarchism is the inheritor of the classical liberal ideas that emerged from the Enlightenment. It is part of a broader range of libertarian socialist thought and action that ranges from the left anti-Bolshevik Marxism of Anton Pannekoek, Karl Korsch, Paul Mattick, and others, to the anarcho-syndicalism that crucially includes the practical achievements of revolutionary Spain in 1936, reaching further to worker-owned enterprises spreading today in the Rust Belt of the United States, in northern Mexico, in Egypt, and in many other countries, most extensively in the Basque country in Spain, also encompassing the many cooperative movements around the world and a good part of feminist and civil and human rights initiatives.” ― Noam Chomsky, What Kind of Creatures Are We?

[argyrocratie]

Paul Mattick, “The Barricades Must Be Torn Down.” (1937):

"On May 7, 1937, the CNT-FAI of Barcelona broadcast the following order: “The barricades must be torn down! The hours of crisis have passed. Calm must be established. But rumors are circulating throughout the city, contradicting the reports of a return to normality such as we are now issuing. The barricades are a contributing factor to this confusion. We don’t need the barricades now that fighting has stopped, The barricades serve no purpose now, and their continued existence might give the impression that we wish to return to the previous state of affairs – and that is not true, Comrades, let us cooperate for the reestablishment of a completely normal civil life. Everything that hinders such a return must disappear.”

And then began the normal life, that is, the terror of the Moscow-Fascists. Murder and imprisonment of revolutionary workers. The disarming of the revolutionary forces, the silencing of their papers, their radio stations, the elimination of all positions they had previously attained. Counter-Revolution triumphed in Catalonia, where, as we were so often assured by the anarchist leaders and those of the POUM they were already on the March towards socialism.

(...)

The dead workers are removed together with their barricades; they were silenced so that their leaders might continue to talk.

What excitement on the part of the neo-Bolsheviks: “Moscow has murdered revolutionary workers,” they shout. For the first time in its history, the Third International is shooting from the other side of the barricades. Before this time it had only betrayed the cause, but now openly fighting against communism.” And what did these angry shouters expect from state capitalist Russia and its Foreign Legion? Help for the Spanish workers? Capitalism in all forms has only one answer for workers opposed to exploitation: murder. A united front with the socialists or with the party-“communists,” is a united front with capitalism, which can only be a united front for capitalism. Where is no use in scolding Moscow, there is no sense in criticizing the socialists: both must be fought to the end.

(...)

Once more, and so often before, the disappointed revolutionary workers denounce their cowardly leadership, and then they look around for new and better leaders, for improved organization. The “Friends of Durrutti” split away from the corrupted leaders of the CNT and FAI in order to restore original anarchism, to safeguard the ideal, to maintain the revolutionary tradition. They have learned a few things, but they have not learned enough. The workers of the POUM are deeply disappointed in Gorkin, Nin and Company. These Leninists were not leninistic enough, and the party members look around for better Lenins. They have learned, but so little. The tradition of the past hangs like a stone around their neck. A change of men and a revival of the organization is not enough.

A communist revolution is not made by leaders and organizations; it is made by the workers, by the class. Once more the workers are hoping for changes in the “People’s Front”, which might after all bring about a revolutionary turn. Caballero, discarded by Moscow, might come back on the shoulders of the UGT-members, who have learned and seen the light. Moscow, disappointed in not finding the proper help from the democratic nations, might become radical again. All this is non-sense! The forces of the “People’s Front,” Caballero and Moscow, are unable, even if they wanted, to defeat capitalism in Spain. Capitalistic forces can not have socialistic policies. The People’s Front is not a lesser evil for the workers. It is only another form of capitalist dictatorship in addition to Fascism. The struggle must be against capitalism.

(...)

But the CNT, we are told, felt so much responsibility for the lives of the workers. It wanted to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. What cynicism! More than a million people, have already died in the Civil War. If one has to die anyway, he might as well die for a worthy cause.

The struggle against the whole of capitalism – that struggle which the CNT wanted to avoid – cannot be avoided. The workers’ revolution must be radical from the very outset, or it will be lost. There was required the complete expropriation of the possessing classes, the elimination of all power other than that of the armed workers, and the struggle against all elements opposing such a course. Not doing this, the May days of Barcelona, and the elimination of the revolutionary elements in Spain were inevitable."

88 years ago today 4 fascist generals attempted a coup d'etat on the Second Spanish Republic. The right wing had lost the February elections to the United Front, made up of almost all of the left parties in the republic. This failed coup d'etat turned into the Spanish Civil War, during which the western democracies abandoned the republic in tacit approval of the reactionaries, and after which the 40 year long fascist dictatorship was protected by the US and NATO for the sake of anti-communist repression.

Fascists do not care about election results, bourgeois legality is only useful to them for as long as they can exploit it. Liberal democracies and popular fronts are not inherently anti-fascist either, they have consistently shown a preference for fascists and other reactionaries. The only viable opposition to fascism has always been the revolutionary organization of the proletariat with the communist party, advocating for anything less is naive at best and active collaborationism at worst.

[hiyathea]

hey! Hope you're having a good day. I've recently started learning about left-communism and was wondering if you have any recommendations for relevant blogs to follow on tumblr please?

I don't, but I do have many reading recommendations! If you want to get into the basics, I'd recomend Marx's "critique of the Gotha programme, or Paul Mattick's "Karl Kautsky: From Marx To Hitler". In terms of works on specific movements, Bordiga's "dialogue with Stalin" and "The Importance Of Horsepower" are must-reads. If you want to know the Leftcom position on a specific issue, there's likely a work by Marx, Engels, or Lenin that discusses it or something similar. If not, the archives of the International Communist Party Surely has something related to it. I hope this helps!

[hobodiffusion]

★ 5 avril 2024 > bit.ly/hobo-5avril2024

★ Les nouveautés de nos éditrices et éditeurs sorties le 5 avril 2024 > bit.ly/hobo-5avril2024

LISERON, Défaites vos jeux !, 369 éditions

LOEZ, Nous sommes le cri d'un peuple, Ici-Bas

Robert JENSEN, La Fin de la masculinité, Éditions Libre

Paul MATTICK, Le Retour de l'inflation, Smolny

Karl MARX, Théories sur la plus-value, Éditions sociales

Eric CHEVILLARD, Chiens écrasés, Mexico

Etaïnn ZWER, Bleu nuit, blouson rose, Éditions du commun

Jim DONAGHEY, Bakounine Vodka, BPM

LASZLO, Dix chansons qui troublent le genre, La Variation

"Traquant les Jeux d’édition en édition, les activistes du réseau anti-JO international constituent un contre-récit olympique qui exhume des faits soigneusement laissés dans l’ombre à chaque édition." Liseron, Défaites vos Jeux !, 369 éditions.

[argyrocratie]

i gues that the paul mattick quote i put under that post about the spanish civil war got me bloked

not surprising but for some reason i dindn't really expect it, i was like i wonder if they aknowledge it one way or an other and then discover i couldn't see their blog i was like "ah yes make sense, i forgot it was likely"

anyways i'm glad cause i like when i specifically can tell why i'm bloked by people

[yungcommunard]

Saw ur post about council communist website, if u want I can send u the link to the discord server!!

Lot of discussion, lot of theory if that's ur jam!

I also contributed to one of the articles! I translated part of a Paul Mattick interview (it's on the website too)

oh rad, fs fs would love that <3 not a council communist perse but definitely am glad a non-centralized marxism exists! would love to join the discord

<3

[edpor68]

Happy Monday! A clip from the Longstreet episode “The Shape of Nightmares”.(10/28/71)-Laura Singer- a young widow (Pattye Mattick) asks Longstreet to look into the “suicide” of her husband-that took place while he was in prison-#patriciamattick #Longstreet #goneburneverforgotten #adorable #1971tv #pattyemattick