Marxism in a Lost Century: A Biography of Paul Mattick by Gary Roth (Brill Publishing 2015)

The Charlottenburg branch (Mattick’s) organised the production of the group’s monthly paper, Rote Jugend [Red Youth]. Mattick contributed short pieces and progressively turned his attention to writing. When he withdrew from view, friends assumed it was because he was composing something new. Radicalism meant that politics and creativity were pursued simultaneously, that protest and expression prefigured one another. The youth group publicised open forums through posters pasted on the sides of buildings. If a wall was wide enough, they displayed their entire newspaper. Small teams set out at night, careful not to get caught. Two people would watch for the police at the respective corners while someone else carried the glue pot and another the poster. Wheat paste (flour dissolved in water) was inexpensive, easy to mix, and nearly permanent as an adhesive. Mattick especially liked the easy-going camaraderie where everyone got along.

Financing their paper was a huge challenge. KAPD members like Max Hoelz and Karl Plättner, whose exploits received considerable attention from the bourgeois press during the Kapp Putsch, served as models. Hoelz mobilised a small army of 2500 to help with heists at banks, factory pay windows, and post offices, even commandeering a tank at one point. Plättner, a KAPD member from the beginning, attracted as many as 100 armed adherents, although the core group included fifteen-odd people who weaved in and out of participation. Members received regular wages in order to support their families and also to prevent personal gain and plundering as motivations. Inordinately scrupulous as to the use of force, they often threatened physical harm but never actually committed it. Couriers transferred expropriated funds between the field operations and KAPD colleagues in Berlin, with official receipts and proper paperwork to conduct the transactions. These radical leftists adhered to standard business practices whenever they handled money. Other KAPDists attempted to bomb Berlin’s Siegessäule, the tall victory column erected to celebrate Prussia’s crushing of the Paris Commune (and defeat of the French), albeit without success.

Class-conscious crimes aimed at the business world, the government, and the possessions of the upper and middle classes were considered proper and legitimate activities. The radicals determined from whom and how they would steal by means of a politicised ethics which guided the choice of targets and the possible uses for the proceeds. Mattick teamed up with friends to sneak into the common areas of apartment buildings where they absconded with things like the brass rods used to hold the staircase carpeting in place. Mattick’s expertise in metal recycling, learned during the war, was put to good use. They discovered, though, that much of the brass wasn’t real brass, only brass-plated. With the platinum lightning rods they took off rooftops, they uncovered something similar. Many of them were counterfeit, affording the buildings no protection whatsoever. For all the hoopla about expropriations, all they had done was to mimic everyday occurrences within the business arena. In the real world, theft and commerce were complimentary phenomena. At Siemens, Mattick carted lead, brass, and copper through the factory gates to sell to the salvage dealers, his contribution to the rampant employee theft during this period.

Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories by Katha Pollitt (Random House 2007)

I should say that it was only for me that Marxism seemed over. Surely, I would tell G. at least once a week, it had to count for something that every single self-described Marxist state had turned into an economically backward dictatorship. Irrelevant, he would reply. The real Marxists weren't the Leninists and Stalinist and Maoists - or the Trotskyists either, those bloodthirsty romantics - but libertarian anarchist-socialists, people like Anton Pannekoek, Herman Gorter, Karl Korsch, scholarly believers in true workers' control who had labored in obscurity for most of the twentieth century, enjoyed a late-afternoon moment in the sun after 1968 when they were discovered by the New Left, and had now once again fallen back into the shadows of history, existing mostly as tiny stars in the vast night of the Internet, archived on blogs with names like Diary of a Council Communist and Break Their Haughty Power. They were all men. The group itself was mostly men.

This was, as Marxists used to say, no accident. There was something about Marxist theory that just did not appeal to women. G. and I spent a lot of time discussing the possible means for this. Was it just that women don't allow themselves to engage in abstract speculation, as he thought? That Marxism is incompatible with feminism, as I sometimes suspected? Or perhaps the problem was not Marxism but Marxists: in its heyday men had kept a lock on it as they did on everything they considered important; now, in its decline, Marxism had become one of those obsessive lonely-guy hobbies, like collecting stamps or 78s. Maybe, like collecting, it was related , through subterranean psychological pathways, to sexual perversions, most of which seemed to be male as well. You never hear about a female foot fetishist, or a woman like the high-school history teacher of a friend of mine who kept dated bottles of his own urine on a closet shelf.

Fessin' Up Time

First time I ever came across the brilliant cartoons that make up Calvin and Hobbes was in an issue of the old council communist/autonomist zine 'Proletarian Gob'*. For three months after the event I was walking around thinking that the bloke behind 'Proletarian Gob' was a fucking genius, until one day I walked into a branch of Waterstones bookshop, and saw that there was this bloke called Bill Waterson who was the genius.

The image is nicked from here. Beg, borrow or recycle. I have no shame.

*The ultra-leftist trainspotters among you please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm sure that 'Proletarian Gob' was a zine produced out of Berkshire by a bloke who was also associated with the new defunct group Subversion. I think it may also be the same bloke who wrote this critique of the SPGB a couple of years back.

A Prisoner of the Past*

Couple of good posts from Alan J. over at his Mailstrom blog:

Anton Pancakes

O would some power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us

With the 'Anton Pancakes' post, it looks like Alan's taken on the task of scouring the Dead Socialist Watch list over at Virtual Stoa, as he follows up his post on Dietzgen with a piece on Anton Pannekoek, the Dutch astronomer and Council Communist. (Alan, I'm looking forward to your 5000 word essay on Beatrice Webb on Monday.)

I would disagree with Alan on one point: I think there is a case to be made that Pannekoek as a theorist has an greater influence today that he had during the latter part of his life, and an influence that far outstrips that of the SPGB.

AK Press republished his Workers' Councils a few years back, and there is no doubt that the celebrity endorsement from Chomsky - who in interviews I've read, always maintained that as a young man he was always more sympathetic to the council communism of Pannekoek and Mattick, rather than the various hues of Leninism - has gone some way in Pannekoek finding a new audience.

As Alan mentions, a lot of anarchists have a soft spot for Pannekoek. If I was being a cheeky bastard, it's a case of hyper-activists chasing after a theory, but I'm not a cheeky bastard.

It was always funny, though, that at various festivals, demos and bookfairs etc etc when you'd get the familiar sneer from the youthful badged-up anarcho-surbanite for admitting to being an SPGBer (using the line: "honest mate, they aren't my Socialist Standards. I'm carrying them for a bet." never used to work for me), they'd always have the Pannekoek pamphlet published by Collective Action Notes, with his articles reprinted from The Western Socialist, the old WSPUS journal, on their literature table.

Mention of the Western Socialist reminds me of this excerpt from an anniversary issue of the journal from 1966 which, when writing of socialist activity in Boston in the 30s and 40s, makes mention of Pannekoek:

"And the Sunday night forums at the old headquarters at 12 Hayward Place! One of the most memorable of these forums was the occasion of the visit to Boston by the late Dutch astronomer and Marxist, Anton Pannekoek (author of Marxism and Darwinism and Anthropogenesis). Pannekoek had come to accept an honorary degree from Harvard University for his work in astrophysics. Yet instead of hobnobbing with the intellectuals of Harvard, he chase to deliver a lecture at the W.S.P. headquarters to a working class audience seeking the truth about society from a scientist and philosopher. Pannekoek said that he was more at home with workers than he was with the professors." (From From The Western Socialist Issue 4, 1966)

I don't really have to write too much in connection with the second piece, 'O would some power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us', from Alan's blog . . .except perhaps to ask: what the hell did he have in his cocoa when coming up with the title of the post?

Alan's found some old posts on the google discussion list alt.politics.socialism.trotsky, where the well known science fiction writer, Ken MacLeod, does a bang up job defending the history and politics of the SPGB from the usual misunderstandings, misrepresentations and miscreants.

Regular readers of the blog will know that Ken MacLeod has a history of sorts with the SPGB. Not in a 'Literature Secretary of Enfield and Haringey Branch 1986-1988' kind of way, but more as someone who has in times past spoken at our Summer School, written a guest article in the Socialist Standard, and has also written warmly of the Party and its members in one of his novels, The Stone Canal, which is, erm, novel.

My only grumble is that it sticks in the craw when a non-member puts in a better performance of defending the politics of the Party than I ever could. I think I'll stick to blogging about music, footie and Sarah Silverman . . .but I do want that badge, though.

*Listening to Prefab Sprout.