I found this interview to be so thought provoking that I wished I had been there to participate with Mattick and Jourdan in the discussion. Unfortunately, because I overslept this morning, this is the only article that I had time to post, and my remarks will likewise be brief.
Early in the interview he sounds very pessimistic about revolutionary change as indicated here:
...this [neoliberalism as the current form of capitalism] remains the dominant structure in politics and in economics, and I think it is extremely unlikely that any political forces able to fight that are going to arise. Because in order to do that, you would have to mobilize—actually mobilize people to take direct action. And I think there is today no political structure, no political organizations, which are interested in mobilizing the kind of energy which has appeared in the global uprisings of the last five years. It would be extremely dangerous to do so. No one is going to do that.But then later in the interview in response to Jourdan's questions, he is more hopeful after reviewing the self-organizing potential that has been manifested by people in various crises over the centuries.
...it’s clear that the existing social life is one which is stunting, which does not fulfill some aspect of human personality, which wants to live socially and do things together with other people—and that people will respond to emergency situations in which normal life simply can’t go on, whether because there was an earthquake or a fire or a war which is just hammering them to death—and that in these situations they are able to very quickly start behaving in new ways. And something which is noted by people over and over in every kind of revolutionary or uprising situation, as well as in sort of normal economic or natural disasters, [is] the capacity of people to begin to reconstruct. .... Human history is not a very cheerful affair—but one of the reasons that I think it would be wrong to just give up or be completely depressed is what does seem to be the capacity of people to engage in a very active and spontaneous way in constructing new modes of social activity.Notice that Mattick ends the interview by arguing that there is no good alternative--we must pursue revolutionary action:
Now it seems like a weirdly old-fashioned thing to say, but that might just be because of my age, maybe now for ...for many younger people it isn’t old-fashioned anymore to say, “You really have to get rid of capitalism. Capitalism cannot deal with these problems.” Even if capitalism manages to grow again, I do not think that the economy will be able to grow at a rate which will make possible high enough employment levels to sort of afford lives to people that workers got used to in the developed countries in the 1950s and 60s and even 70s. So I think from the economic point of view, the medium- and long-term perspectives are very bleak, and I think from the ecological point of view, the medium- and long-term perspectives are catastrophic, and there simply is no possibility to get out of this without actually changing the social system.Basically he says that there are two choices for especially young people today:
And that means that you must end the ownership and control of the productive system on which human life depends by that minority of humans who control it, and for whom everybody else has to work if they are lucky enough to be able to do so.
...you can try to do as best as you can for yourself as an individual, or you have to somehow, together with other people, fundamentally alter the existing social system. And by alter, I mean really destroy it and create a new system: a system of a radically different type, which would be based on the collective democratic control of the interaction of human beings with nature—that the economists call “production”, but which you could also call the “daily life.”For me this recalls the first part of the famous quotation from Shakespeare which I believe applies now to humanity as a whole.
To be, or not to be, that is the question—After which Hamlet goes on to weigh the consequences of action or inaction.
Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?
