Paul Mattick - World War II and After

World War II and After

After the United States' entry into World War II and the post-war Mccarthyism, the left in America experienced repression. Mattick retired at the beginning of the 1950s to the countryside, where he managed to survive through occasional jobs and his activity as a writer. In the postwar development Mattick took part in only small and occasional political activities, writing small articles for various periodicals from time to time. From the forties and up through the fifties, Mattick went through a study of John Maynard Keynes and compiled a series of critical notes and articles against Keynesian theory and practice. In this work, he developed Marx’s and Grossman's theory of capitalist development further to meet the new phenomena and appearances of the modern capitalism critically.

With the general changes of the political scene and the re-emergence of more radical thoughts in the sixties, Paul Mattick made some more elaborated and important political contributions. One main work was Marx and Keynes: The Limits of Mixed Economy from 1969, which was translated into several languages and had quite an influence in the post-1968 student movement. Another important work was Critique of Herbert Marcuse: The one-dimensional man in class society, in which Mattick forcefully rejected Marcuse's thesis that the proletariat, as Marx understood it, had become a mythological concept in advanced capitalist society. Although he agreed with Marcuse's critical analysis of the ruling ideology, Mattick demonstrated that the theory of one dimensionality itself existed only as ideology. Marcuse subsequentially affirmed that Mattick's critique was the only serious one to which his book was subjected.