Original publication: Marxisme en staatscommunisme; Het afsterven van de staat. – Amsterdam: Groepen van Internationale Communisten, 1932. – 18 p. A 1932 pamphlet hard to find in English, in which the Group(s) of International Communists (GIC) criticise Lenin's 'The State and the Revolution.' Part of this text was integrated into 'Basic principles of communist production and distribution'.
Mattick analyses "the superficiality of the ideological differences between Stalinism and Trotskyism" and why "Trotsky's own past and theories", with his role in the construction of the Russian regime, "condemned 'Trotskyism' to remain a mere collecting agency for unsuccessful Bolsheviks".
In this essay first published in 1930 in France, the founder of the Workers Group denounces the bureaucracy that he claims seized power in a “coup d’état” in 1920 at the Ninth Congress of the CPSU(b) its “latest deception” being its fraudulent appeals for “freedom of criticism” and “self-criticism” after a series of revolts by workers and peasants in the early to mid-1920s and calls for a restoration of proletarian democracy (as exemplified by the Paris Commune) by democratizing the functions exercised by bureaucratic State institutions (production, distribution, oversight) and replacing them with Soviets (“Councils”), cooperatives and trade unions.