Economism

Economism, sometimes spelled economicism, is "the most orthodox [position in Marxism which] provides one-to-one correlations between the socio-economic base and the intellectual superstructure". Economism refers to the distraction of working-class political activism from a global political project to purely economic demands. The concept encompasses rewarding workers in socialism with money incentives, rather than incentivizing workers through revolutionary politics. The term is originally associated with Vladimir Lenin's critique of trade unionism. The term economism was used by Lenin in his critique of the trade union movement, in reference to how working class demands for a more global political project can become supplanted by purely economic demands. Economistic demands include higher wages, shorter working hours, secure employment, health care, and other benefits. In his criticism of economism, Lenin's view was that the political figure of the worker could not necessarily be inferred from the worker's social position. Under capitalism, the worker's labor power is commodified and sold in exchange for wages. While negotiating the sale of labor power is necessary for survival under capitalism, Lenin argued that participating in that negotiation did not guarantee a worker's political existence and in fact obscured the underlying political stakes. Lenin used the term in his attacks on a trend in the early Russian Social Democratic Labour Party around the newspaper Rabochaya Mysl. Among the representatives of Russian economicism were Nikolai Lochoff, Yekektarina Kuskova, Alexander Martynov, Sergei Prokopovich, K. M. Takhtarev and others. The charge of economism is frequently brought against revisionists by anti-revisionists when economics, instead of politics, is placed in command of society; and when primacy of the development of the productive forces is held over concerns for the nature and relations surrounding those productive forces. Economism became a familiar term in Chinese political discourse only during the Cultural Revolution.