13 Facts About Paul Mattick

1.

In 1921, at the age of 17, Paul Mattick moved to Cologne to find work with Klockner for a while, until strikes, insurrections and a new arrest destroyed every prospect of employment.

2.

Paul Mattick established contacts with intellectuals, writers and artists working in the AAUE founded by Otto Ruhle.

3.

From this time, Paul Mattick focused on Marx's theory of capitalist development and its inner logic of contradictions inevitably growing to crisis as the foundation of all political thoughts within the workers' movement.

4.

Towards the end of the 1920s, Paul Mattick had moved to Chicago, where he first tried to unite the different German workers' organisations.

5.

Paul Mattick participated in their meetings and contributed to their party publications for several years, during which he sometimes spoke in the nighttime lecture series at the bohemian Dil Pickle Club, an IWW hangout.

6.

Paul Mattick put out 10 monthly issues between February and December 1931, writing much of the paper's content himself, but the paper failed to achieve a large enough readership to be self-sustaining, and folded at the end of the year.

7.

In 1933, Paul Mattick drafted a programme for the IWW trying to give the Wobblies a more solid 'Marxist' foundation based on Grossman's theory, although it did not improve the organization's condition.

8.

Apart from his own factory work, Paul Mattick organized not only most of the review's technical work but was the author of the greater part of the contributions which appeared in it.

9.

In 1936, Paul Mattick wrote a major sociological study on the American unemployed movement for the Institute, although it remained in the Institute's files, to be published only in 1969 by the SDS publishing house Neue Kritik.

10.

Paul Mattick retired at the beginning of the 1950s to the countryside, as part of the rustic "back to the land" colony clustered around Scott Nearing near Winhall, Vermont, where he managed to survive through occasional jobs and his activity as a writer.

11.

Marcuse subsequently affirmed that Paul Mattick's was the best critique to which his book was subjected.

12.

Up through the seventies, many old and new articles by Paul Mattick were published in different languages for various publications.

13.

Paul Mattick spoke in West Germany only twice: in 1971 at Berlin and in 1975 at Hanover.