Those works of Paul Mattick which have been published in France have given rise to only a few responses and to almost no, favorable commentary. One can hardly be astonished at this, for the work of this old German radical, quite unmindful of intellectual fashions, has been nothing but an unremitting denunciation of the myths and ideologies which have flowered in the course of the long consolidation of capitalism since the Second World War. Even in the years when capitalism went, in Germany, Italy, and Japan, "from miracle to miracle," Mattick did not believe that the Keynesian or neo-Keynesian policies were nullifying Marx's prognostics as to the contradictions and limits of the accumulation of capital.
But Mattick did not only persist in opposing Marx to Keynes; above all — and this is much more unusual — he also opposed Marx to almost all those who claimed to speak in his name. According to Mattick, the self-proclaimed continuators of Marx have been only his epigones, all guilty, since the end of the 19th century, of having falsified the meaning of Marxism by refusing to see it as a theory of the collapse of capitalism or by deducing that collapse from premises other than Marx's own. Beyond their divergences and the conflicting conclusions to which they led, the revisionists (Cunow, Schmidt, Tugan-Baranowsky), the Austro-Marxists (Bauer, Hilferding), the Bolsheviks, and the Luxemburgists had this in common: they believed it possible to construct the theory of crisis and.
