Saturday, February 22, 2014

Two interviews with Paul Mattick Jr

For my own reference to study later. In the first from 1991, he discusses 'This comparison between the fascist and Nazi programs and social democratic programs is scandalous for many people' , his father Paul Mattick Sr. who disagreed with both Lenin an Keynes,  Marx
 (Your father saw Marx mainly as a negative thinker., as a critic of capitalism. 
Yes.
... and not a positive thinker. 
Well, Marx explicitly refused to make, as he said, recipes for the future...)
"Did your father ever develop this theme on the nature of a socialist society? 
No. He wanted very much to, and he intended to, and was beginning to work on such a project at the time when he died...... But these, sort of speculations, about the possible future were developed really in the 1930s, and since by 1980 a great deal had happened in the world, he felt that the whole issue had to be re-thought, that, for example, the use of modern means of telecommunication, television, computer networks, made possible a kind of democratic decision making which was simply not -- for practical reasons -- possible in an earlier period.
So your father took seriously this kind of technological advance. 
Yes, absolutely. He thought these were potentially extremely powerful tools."
"I would like to return to the question of ideology. Because the idea of "socialism" or "communism" has been so badly discredited in the minds of so many people by the Bolshevik experience, do you think that anything can be saved from this, starting with the terms themselves? 
Well, as I said, I think that this movement, the workers' movement, which started in the 19th century, is now completely over. So you could say that the words "socialism" or "communism," which were very much disgraced by the Bolshevik movement, may be irretrievable. In my opinion, that doesn't matter very much. The fact is that capitalism remains. It has the same nature that it had before, except that it is much more highly developed. We now have, to a much greater extent than ever before in history, a world capitalist system, a global working class, which is facing the problem that the working class has always faced, namely that it has a choice between taking control over the system of production and distribution in its own hands or suffering indefinitely the consequences of the capitalist mode of production. At the present time, for example, that means, I believe, deep economic depression. And it certainly also means severe ecological disruptions and even major disasters, and continuous warfare."
(Next from the second interview)

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