Anti-bolshevik communism

by Paul Mattick

This title was first published in 1978:  Communism aims at putting working people in charge of their lives. A multiplicity of Councils, rather than a big state bureaucracy is needed to empower working people and to focus control over society. Mattick develops a theory of a council communism through his survey of the history of the left in Germany and Russia. He challenges Bolshevik politics: especially their perspectives on questions of Party and Class, and the role of Trade Unions. Mattick argues that a??The revolutions which succeeded, first of all, in Russia and China, were not proletarian revolutions in the Marxist sense, leading to the a??association of free and equal producersa??, but state-capitalist revolutions, which were objectively unable to issue into socialism. Marxism served here as a mere ideology to justify the rise of modified capitalist systems, which were no longer determined by market competition but controlled by way of the authoritarian state. Based on the peasantry, but designed with accelerated industrialisation to create an industrial proletariat, they were ready to abolish the traditional bourgeoisie but not capital as a social relationship. This type of capitalism had not been foreseen by Marx and the early Marxists, even though they advocated the capture of state-power to overthrow the bourgeoisie a?? but only in order to abolish the state itself.a??

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, History

248 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 1978

About the author

Paul Mattick, Sr. (March 13, 1904 – February 7, 1981) was a Marxist political writer and social revolutionary, whose thought can be placed within the council communist and left communist traditions.

Father of author Paul Mattick Jr..

Reviews

[Marty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mattick does us all a great service by documenting the unpopular/ minority thinkers within the history of Marxism. His focus is on those thinkers who broke with the Lenin and Leninists on certain core ideas.

His primary focus is on the Spartacus Group (Luxumberg) and on the various council communists. This book is crucial reading for communists and anarchists as it addresses the history and debates around issues like the State, the party, the roles of revolutionaries and revolutionary identity, and more.

Its nice to see this back in print and i hope that more people get a chance to read it.

[Skramzisnice · Rating 1 out of 5]

Paul Mattick isn’t a left communist, he’s an anarchist who co-opts Marxist terminology. Throughout this work, he repeatedly repeats anti-Marxist phrases such as communism being worker control, when any look into Marx’s Holy Family defies this ideal. This book is nothing but an incoherent jab at Lenin through use of anarchistic phrases.

[loitering outside 711 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paul Mattick is my little meow meow, I love him

[Brackets_28 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Epic based communism innit!

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mattick comes down pretty hard on Lenin on the latter's Jacobinian conception of organizing proletarian resistance and the actual [socialist] content of the Bolshevik's claim to control the means of production on behalf of the working class. His is a portrait of Lenin as a bourgeosie practical theoretician who earnestly attempted to adapt Marx's revolutionary theory to the backward conditions of Russia (too backwards in comparison to the productive forces in operation in Western European countries, for example, and too advanced for bourgeosie liberal democracy) only to end up betraying the proletariat and their independent organisations (e.g. Soviet worker's councils) and having to take over the capital accumulation process into their own hands. This is not strictly a failure of Bolshevik leadership but for the most part had to do with the objective material and historical constraints (in contrast to the subjective unwillingness of Social Democratic revisionists and centrists in Germany). In any case, despite the sincere hopes of Lenin, Luxemborg and other internationalist radicals the Russian Revolution never spread to Germany, and thus the revolution, unable to expand and actualize the ruthless abolition of the present state of affairs, was doomed to ruthlessly reproduce the status quo.

[Brian]

Had a quick look at the introduction online (http://www.marxists.org/archive/matti...), seems very interesting.

[Jordan Ecker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lucid ultra-left Marxism. I expected essays like "Kautsky: From Stalin to Hitler" and "The Myth of Lenin" to be (articulate and persuasive) arguments that social democrats are just state capitalists are just fascists. I did not expect articles like "Socialism and the New Physics" to be the same. A bit of a one trick pony, it's a reasonably good trick but probably a bit histrionic and cynical. Its potted intellectual history of humanism was flagrantly wrong.

[Zoe M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Las secciones de economia (Monopoly Capital) hacen que valga la pena

[Tynan Brooks]

Like many leftcom works, it presents a number of negative critiques, but does little to build a positive "programme." The critiques it offers are pretty good, though.