On the Continuing Relevance of Mattick's Critique of Marcuse

Paul Mattick's work still awaits a working-class movement which will find in it a historical understanding of a phase in capitalist history ("the mixed economy" of the postwar era) that will allow the working class to make sense of the newness and distinctiveness of its revolutionary aspirations. Paul Mattick realized that this movement may never come, that his message in a bottle may remain forever lost at sea: "Marx says somewhere that the 'proletariat is revolutionary, or it is nothing.' Presently it is nothing, and it may well be that it will continue to be nothing. But there is no certainty."1 Mattick understood that the working class could no longer have faith in technocratic promises to stabilize society and would have to reclaim its own centrality in any real attempt to change society at its base something which no anti-imperialist movement on behalf of peasant revolutions, minority struggle, or student upsurge has even the latent power to do. It was not, however, on a sanguine estimate of the revolutionary spirit of the working class in affluent Western societies that Mattick focused his analysis. Rather, he pinpointed the weakest part of the foundation of the capitalist structure on which that affluence depended. The critical nature of Mattick's theoretical efforts remains clearest in his treatment of the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, whose grip on the New Left is difficult for someone of my later generation to comprehend. At this point, it is apposite to underline that Marxist theory has historically developed through critique of other socialist currents2 from Marx's anti-Proudhon