Home › Authors › Paul Mattick
Paul Mattick Quotes
1904–1981 United States
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.
United States Communists Marxists Also known as: Paul Mattick Sr.
Random Paul Mattick quote
15 quotes
Despite the Stalin-Hitler pact, there are no greater ‘anti-fascists’ than the Bolsheviks on behalf of their own native fascism.
The trends of development indicate that the democracies travel in the direction of fascism and the fascist nations in the direction of the Russian system.
Ideological conformity depends on conditions of prosperity; it has no staying-power of its own.
Today, great men are no longer necessary. Modern propaganda instruments can transform any fraud into a hero, any mediocre personality into an all-comprehending genius.
In the democracies, individual ownership predominates over governmental control; in the fascist states, governmental control over individual ownership.
In order that some may lead, others must be powerless. To be the vanguard of the workers, the elite has to usurp all social key positions.
Leadership remained after Lenin’s death; there was not yet the Leader.
Russian state capitalism has become the example for other nations as indicated in the rise of fascism and the growth of governmental control in all countries.
The laissez faire theory was opposed by theories favoring state interventions in the economy.
When in 1933 Hitler suppressed all socialist literature in Germany, Rühle related, Lenin’s pamphlet was allowed publication and distribution.
Frequently Lenin identified state capitalism and socialism... In Towards the Seizure of Power, he writes: “Socialism is nothing but state capitalist monopoly made to benefit the whole people; by this token it ceases to be capitalist monopoly.”
Coming to power with the help of a russified Marxian ideology, Trotsky, after he lost power, had no choice but to maintain the revolutionary ideology in its original form against the degeneration of Marxism indulged in by the Stalinists.
‘People love today to speak disdainfully about the liberalistic economy,’ [Kautsky] wrote in his last work; ‘however, the theories founded by Quesnay, Adam Smith and Ricardo are not at all obsolete. In their essentials Marxhad accepted their theories and developed them further, and he has never denied that the liberal freedom of commodity production constituted the best basis for its development.’
Karl Kautsky: From Marx to Hitler (1939)
The meaning of Bolshevism was completely revealed only with the emergence of fascism. To fight the latter, it was necessary, in Otto Rühle’s words, to recognise that ‘the struggle against fascism begins with the struggle against Bolshevism.’
There is, however, an apparent contradiction here; for if fascism must be regarded as the direct outcome of the previous capitalist development it should appear first in the oldest and most advanced nations. But this is not the case. Russia, in which we find the most complete totalitarian system, was one of the most backward nations, as was Italy which experienced the first ‘fascist revolution.’
Topics Paul Mattick is quoted on
Works