Paul Mattick

[John Simkin]

Has anyone read Paul Mattick's books, Anti-Bolshevik Communism and Marxism - Last Refuge of the Bourgeoisie? (published after his death in 1981)?

You can find out more about Mattick here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Mattick

http://www.home.no/mattick/

http://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/index.htm

Mattick was a follower of Rosa Luxemburg. Mattick argues in his articles and books that the revolutions which succeeded, first of all, in Russia and China, were not proletarian revolutions in the Marxist sense, leading to the association of free and equal producers, 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. Mattick argues that this type of capitalism had not been foreseen by Marx and the early Marxists.