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Marxism has a well established category for such a patronising,
short-sighted and emaciated outlook - economism. A term originally
coined in pre-revolutionary Russia. Naturally the likes of Thornett,
who parade themselves as Marxists of the first rank, define economism
in a particularly selective, reduced, fashion. That way, in their
own minds at least, they can plead not guilty to the charge.
Here are four specially selected, but representative, definitions
of economism. We shall begin with Tony Cliff, founder of the Socialist
Workers Party: “Socialists should limit their agitation to
purely economic issues, first to the industrial plant, then to inter-plant
demands, and so on. Secondly, from the narrow economic agitation
the workers would learn, through experience of the struggle itself,
the need for politics, without the need for socialists to carry
out agitation on the general political and social issues facing
the Russian people as a whole” (T Cliff Lenin Vol 1, London
1975, p59).
Next an ‘official communist’ dictionary definition of
economism: “Its proponents wanted to limit the tasks of the
working class movement to economic struggle (improving labour conditions,
higher wages, etc). They held that political struggle should be
waged by the liberal bourgeoisie alone” (I Frolov [ed] Dictionary
of philosophy Moscow 1984, p118).
Thornett’s fellow ISGer, Bob Jenkins, can speak for orthodox
Trotskyism: economism is “orientating to daily trade union
struggles” and this “leads them to underestimate the important
new political issues and movements unless they are to be found in
the unions” (Socialist Outlook January 2001).
Finally we turn to the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s
Pete Radcliff, for a definition from the camp of unorthodox Trotskyism:
“Economism was the term Lenin used to describe the politics
and approach of revolutionaries who exclude themselves from the
political struggle ... and merely concentrated on trade union agitation”
(Weekly Worker January 11 2001).
All partial, all cut short. Even against the “old economism”
of the 1890s Lenin fielded the term in the “broad sense”
(VI Lenin CW Vol 5, Moscow 1977, p317). According to Lenin the principal
feature of economism is a general tendency to lag behind the spontaneous
movement and to downplay or belittle the centrality of democracy.
So there is what we might call narrow economism and broader economism.
Economism need not necessarily mean therefore an underestimation
of “important new political issues and movements” or “merely”
concentrating “on trade union agitation.” On the contrary
economists can and do follow, and even staff, all manner of existing
campaigns, causes and demands - eg, petty bourgeois greenism, feminism,
black separatism, CND pacifism, Scottish nationalism and left Labourism.
Hence economists do not, by any means, shun politics. Rather economism
veers away from the Marxist conception of politics. Crucially economism
eschews taking the lead on democratic questions and uniting all
democratic demands into a single, working class-led assault on the
existing state.
No wonder most left groups and factions nowadays do their best to
ignore the unabridged, complete definition. They might not exactly
fit the bill when it comes to narrow economism. Broader economism,
however, is another matter. What goes for Alan Thornett and his
ISG goes for the others - SWP, Socialist Appeal, AWL, the Morning
Star’s Communist Party of Britain, Workers Power, Independent
Working Class Association, Socialist Party in England and Wales,
etc. Despite a superficial loyalty to and knowledge of Marxism they
all downplay the necessity of democracy. So what passes itself as
Marxism to the public of this country is in actual fact economism
with all its anti-democratic philistinism and prejudices. No wonder
Marxism is commonly seen as discredited or irrelevant.
Let us examine economism in Russia. Its growth from 1894 onwards
was aided by four main factors. Firstly, in the early stages of
their movement the communists in Russia “restricted themselves
merely to work in propaganda circles”. When they took up the
work of agitation amongst the masses, they were “not always
able” to restrain themselves “from going to the other
extreme”. Their leaflets brilliantly exposed the terrible factory
conditions in Russia and roused the admiration of workers, but little
more. Secondly, they were struggling against the Narodnik socialists,
who understood politics as activity isolated from the masses and
often as terroristic conspiracies. In rejecting this sort of politics,
the communists “went to the extreme of pushing politics entirely
into the background”. Thirdly, in conditions of the small circles
of workers and revolutionaries, the communists “did not devote
sufficient attention to the necessity of organising a revolutionary
party which would combine all the activities of the local groups
and make it possible to organise the revolutionary work on correct
lines” (VI Lenin CW Vol 4, Moscow 1977, pp367). Fourthly, there
was the arrest and exile of Lenin, Martov and other theoretically
experienced comrades in December 1897, and the success the new,
younger, generation of leaders enjoyed in influencing mass strikes.
On top of all that there was the publication of Eduard Bernstein’s
Evolutionary socialism in 1899. Anticipating the bourgeoisification
of the western labour movement, the basic thesis of Bernstein’s
book - much acclaimed in its day by left academics and liberals
alike - was that national capitalism, through the growing organisation
of the productive forces, was inexorably widening the democratic
space in society and gradually leading to its transformation into
a socialism from above. Wars, crises and violent revolutions were
discounted as phenomena of a past age. Bernstein also proposed that
the Social Democratic Party in Germany would greatly strengthen
itself by getting rid of all antiquated notions and phraseology:
eg, the dictatorship of the proletariat and class war. Instead it
should concentrate on the real business at hand: parliamentary elections
and the day-to-day improvement of the overall condition of the working
class.
Bernstein included the infamous phrase: “the final aim of socialism”
is “nothing”; it is the movement itself which “is
everything” (E Bernstein Evolutionary socialism New York 1961,
p202). By the “movement” he meant the existing institutions,
elected representatives and routine economic struggles of the working
class; not historically accumulated theory, fighting capacity and
revolutionary consciousness. As to the “final aim” being
“nothing”, that, he claimed, referred not so much to socialism
itself: rather “indifference” to “the form of the
final arrangement of things” (ibid pxxiv). Be that as it may,
Bernstein’s revisionism admirably suited the economists in
Russia.
Despite their popularity with strikers the problem with the economists,
loosely grouped around Rabochaya Mysl, Rabochoye Dyelo and various
other such papers and journals, was that they attempted to elevate
the one-sidedness of the movement into a “special theory”,
which they in turn linked to the “fashionable” Bernsteinism
and the “fashionable” refutations of Marxism - in reality
old bourgeois ideas dressed in new packaging. As a result of economism
the danger was that the connection between the working class and
the struggle for political liberty would be weakened. Lenin declared
that the “most urgent” task of Marxists in Russia is “to
strengthen that connection” in order to quickly bring to fruition
the overthrow of the “autocratic government” (VI Lenin
CW Vol 4, Moscow 1977, p368).
Economic demands were proclaimed as both key in mobilising the masses
and enlightening them. The “final aim” of replacing tsarism
with a democratic republic was increasingly downgraded in the list
of priorities to the point where it simply disappears into the mists
of a far distant future. Republican demands therefore had no practical
significance. Only the liberal bourgeoisie and intelligentsia were
interested in such remote and obtuse matters. Not the workers. Hence
there was no leverage in making anti-tsarist agitation. On the other
hand, spontaneously following the line of least resistance, workers
were actually striking - not taking to the streets demanding a republic
and a constituent assembly. Consequently the economists argued,
in true tailist fashion, that the job of the party was to assist
workers in their efforts to build trade unions and give their demands
a ‘socialist coloration’. Trade unionism was virtually
equated with socialism.
Lenin and his comrades launched a ferocious assault on the economists
and joined in the international campaign opposing Bernsteinism.
In the hands of the economists Marxism was being “narrowed
down” and the attempt was being made to turn the party of revolution
into a party of reform. Lenin warned that “the working class
movement is being sundered from socialism”. Yes, the workers
are being “helped to carry on the economic struggle”,
but “nothing, or next to nothing, is done to explain to them
the socialist aims and political tasks of the movement as a whole”.
Self-fulfillingly the economists were beginning to talk “more
and more” about the struggle against the tsarist government
having to be “carried on entirely by the intelligentsia because
the workers confine themselves to the economic struggle” (VI
Lenin CW Vol 4, Moscow 1977, pp366-67).
Lenin defined the party as the living combination of the working
class movement and the aim of socialism. The party should therefore
not “passively serve” the working class movement at its
various stages, but constantly strive to represent the interests
of the movement as a whole, in its ultimate aims and in its political
and ideological independence. Isolated from the party, the working
class movement becomes “petty and inevitably bourgeois”.
In waging only economic struggles the working class movement is
doomed to fragmentation and simply going round in the same endless
circles. In all countries there have been periods, longer or shorter,
where the working class movement and Marxism have gone their separate
ways, to the great detriment of both. The thing to do is to fuse
them together - not just in word, but deed.
Suffice to say, by 1903 economism lay discredited and defeated,
above all due to the hammer blows of Iskra - the celebrated polemical
paper edited by Lenin, Martov, Potresov, Plekhanov, Axelrod and
Zasulich. And, suffice to say, in the years that followed economism
constantly reappeared in new, virulent forms and guises. For example,
the Mensheviks found themselves pulled in that direction. Having
rejected the Bolshevik strategy of the working class taking the
lead in the fight for democracy, aligning with the peasantry and
striving to form a post-tsarist worker-peasant government, the Mensheviks
turned more and more to highlighting the economic struggles of the
working class and forlornly urging support for the liberal bourgeoisie
against the tsarist autocracy.
Not that the Bolsheviks were immune to economism. During World War
I a ‘left’ faction emerged around Bukharin and Piatakov.
Amongst other things it argued against the right of nations to self-determination.
Self-determination was branded as illusory and damaging. Capitalism
at its imperialist stage could never grant such a right and under
socialism it would anyway be unnecessary, because nations had long
ago become reactionary. Class unity, not national rights, should
come first. Lenin savaged this trend of ‘imperialist economism’
in a series of devastating polemics (eg, VI Lenin CW Vol 23, Moscow
1977, pp28-76). National self-determination was neither illusory
nor damaging. On the contrary, the working class had to take the
lead in offering a positive, democratic solution to national questions
where they exist ... if it were ever to become a ruling class.
So economism is not something which Marxists equate with industrial
militancy in and of itself.
Certainly no one should denigrate, let alone denounce, striking
workers and the attempt to better their lot under capitalism. To
do so would be repugnant, stupid and counterproductive. Economism
concerns the left. It is a theory, or practice, quietly carried
out, or noisily advocated, by those who typically describe themselves
as Marxists, but who either elevate and flatter economic struggles
or downplay the primacy of the political. As well as narrow, strikist
economism other, broader manifestations of economism can therefore
be cited - not only Menshevik and imperialist economism, but atheist
economism - the reliance on technological and scientific progress
to overcome religious superstition - or Trotskyite economism, which
equates the former USSR with some kind of a workers’ state
due to nationalised property forms.
Modern-day economists, just like their Russian ancestors, sincerely
talk of the global fight against capitalism and the final aim of
socialism. However, the practical effect of their approach is to
maintain the workers as an oppressed class. Wages, hours, conditions,
social services, etc are what is deemed to be really important for
the workers. This implicit or explicit emphasis on the ‘base’
of capitalist society, is, of course, nothing but an unconscious,
ideological, reproduction of capitalism itself and its unique bifurcation
of social life into two apparently separate spheres: the economic
and the political. That incidentally being why economism constantly
reappears.
Let me elaborate. In pre-capitalist society - Asiatic, slave, feudal,
autocratic, etc - the extraction of surplus product was pretty unproblematic.
Typically it was naked and undisguised. Exploiters took and were
not in reality obliged to give anything in return. Brute force,
or the threat of brute force - ie, extra-economic means - were used
to extract surplus product from the immediate producers (tithes,
taxes, labour services, etc). This historically established ability
to deploy commanding military force was reflected, legitimised and
glorified in the exploiters’ elevated legal position: high
priests, senators, mandarins, barons, bishops, kings, emperors,
etc. Ditto the lowly, despised position of the common people. As
a result - be they helots, slaves, coloni or villeins - no one was
in any doubt that they were both oppressed and exploited. Hence
the class struggle spontaneously runs straight to the political.
Capitalism, however, exploits indirectly through the generalisation
of wage labour and the market. A social form which apparently equalises
the relationship between exploited and exploiters - workers themselves
ask for a ‘fair day’s pay’ in return for a ‘fair
day’s work’. Exploitation is thereby hidden and mystified
within a sphere which bourgeois ideologists seal off from the rest
of society under the rubric of ‘the economy’. The economy
is treated ahistorically as a mere technical arrangement and drained
of all social content. In reality the economic is thoroughly political
and the political is thoroughly economic.
Capitalist exploitation certainly begins with a defining political
act, the bloody separation of the producers from the means of production
- as harrowingly detailed by Marx in the last section of Capital
volume one - and continues to rely upon a political relationship.
Exploitation, and the reproduction of the conditions of exploitation,
would be impossible without the state - supposedly a neutral arbiter,
but in reality completely partisan - holding a monopoly of the means
of force. Though wherever possible it remains in the background,
state power exists in the final analysis to guarantee the law, property
rights and hence the fundamentally unequal relationship between
capital and the propertyless class of workers (by ‘property’
we mean, of course, the means of production, not personal property
like clothes, a car or a house).
Capitalism not only apparently separates economics from politics:
it also separates economic militancy from political consciousness.
Class conflict under capitalism spontaneously finds its first expression
at the point of production, in the workplace, and the relationship
between employee and employer. Not the exploited against the state.
As also pointed by Ellen Meiksins Wood, the Canadian leftwing academic,
that means class conflict under capitalism is spontaneously downgraded
from the political to the economic and therefore to the “local
and particularistic” (E Meiksins Wood Democracy against capitalism
Cambridge 1999, p45). Medieval peasants, for example, owned some
means of production and would control their own work. Hence their
struggle against the feudal lords - over rents, tithes or labour
duties - had an overtly political content. The feudal lord was the
state. By contrast, the permanent wages struggle that rages within
capitalism, no matter how militant, leaves the wage relationship
itself untouched. This is true even if workplace militancy impinges
upon management’s right to manage.
That need not, however, present an intractable dilemma. Capitalist
progress does not necessarily go hand in hand with a systemic decline
in political consciousness. There is no reason to look back fondly
at pre-capitalist societies or for that matter less developed capitalist
societies. In modern times, goes the argument, it has been backward
countries, because of the greater role of extra-economic surplus
extraction and therefore spontaneous political consciousness, that
have produced most anti-capitalist revolutions. Leave aside the
hollow pretence, grinding poverty and complete inability of Mao’s
China, Castro’s Cuba, Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam, etc, to positively
transcend capitalism. The fact of the matter is that, if we take
Russia as our example, it is quite clear that here it was definitely
the working class which played the leading role. Not, however, because
of surviving pre-capitalist forms and relationships, as erroneously
suggested by Meiskins Wood, amongst others. There is a staggering
lacuna in her account. She completely overlooks the Bolshevik Party
- and its programme, sophisticated theory, recruitment of tens of
thousands of proletarians and unremitting struggle to overcome spontaneity,
including economism. Indeed only with the mediation of such a combat
organisation - its scientific name being ‘Communist Party’
- it is possible to practically join together the economic and the
political.
Economism works to reproduce, or even further reduce, the already
cramped horizons of the working class. High politics and the vistas
of extreme democracy are not for today and ought not to disturb
the bovine minds of ordinary folk. Eg, demand the resignation of
Tony Blair, but do not even think about bringing to the fore the
monarchical-prime ministerial constitution. Such a deeply condescending
approach leads inevitably to an attenuated view - and not only of
political tasks. Organisational forms loyally follow political content
and doubtlessly narrow, trade union-type politics begets narrow-type
organisations. Economism therefore excuses the continuation and
proliferation of primitive sects and at best aims for little more
than reviving or reinventing old Labourism - whether that be as
Respect, the Scottish Socialist Party, the Labour Representation
Committee, the Socialist Alliance or a reddish-greenish protest
party within which a snug revolutionary minority is kindly tolerated.
Not surprisingly a democratic centralist party of the Bolshevik
type - which affords the right of minorities to establish temporary
or permanent factions and unites as one in agreed actions - is completely
beyond those who espouse such politics. Economic struggles against
employers and the government’s anti-trade union laws hardly
require a revolutionary programme. Nor does swelling the numbers
for the next anti-war protest. Nor does defending the NHS demand
a body of professional revolutionaries. Nor can contesting European
elections on the basis of vague platitudes give rise to a mass Communist
Party of the European Union, which would exist to elevate all protests,
all movements against injustice, all discontent with the EU and
its 25 governments eventually into one final assault. That much
is surely obvious.
Economists not only consign democratic questions towards the bottom
of their list of priorities, but sometimes they can be found actually
opposing them. Take the federal republic (which is the state form
required in Britain if the working class is to begin to liberate
itself). We have been told on countless occasions that raising such
a demand is unnecessary and diversionary because capitalism is on
its last legs and what we should be demanding instead is a socialist
republic. A clear case of programmatic illiteracy. Historically
speaking, we undoubtedly live in the epoch of moribund capitalism
and the transition to communism. That has been the case, though,
since monopoly capitalism and imperialism emerged at the end of
the 19th century. However, that economic truth should not lead anyone
to reject democratic demands nor the logical ordering of our political
programme.
First, the immediate, or minimum, section - it crystallises and
presents those demands that are technically achievable under the
socio-economic conditions of capitalism: through the mass, militant
and conscious fight for them, and of course in their practical fulfilment,
the working class is readied for revolution. And that is where the
maximum programme starts off. It describes the socialist transition
period to communism and universal human freedom and here, in the
maximum programme, not in the minimum programme, one finds the socialist
republic. Obviously both sections of the programme are internally
connected. They form an integral and related whole.
Certainly without the minimum programme and the struggle for democracy
the maximum programme and its socialist republic, abolition of the
wage system and money becomes nothing but a pious wish list. Putting
forward a disembodied socialism as the answer to every problem -
a socialist Britain, a socialist Europe, etc - is therefore more
than useless. It is a downright hindrance. The minimum programme
and the struggle for democracy cannot be skipped. Let us mention
a small detail. State power remains to be conquered. Revolution
and the overthrow of the old order is not yet an accomplished fact.
The parties and factions of the left are not busily setting up makeshift
offices in Buckingham Palace, nor are workers’ councils using
the chamber of the House of Commons as a convenient central meeting
place.
Counterpoising the immediate demand for a federal republic and the
maximum demand for a socialist republic is to mix the tasks of today
with those of tomorrow. It might sound terribly revolutionary to
reject a federal republic in Britain in favour of a socialist republic,
but the effect is to disarm ourselves before the existing state.
This helps explain why the left is so muddled and ineffective. A
telling example - Respect’s founding declaration boldly points
to the “crisis of representation, a democratic deficit”
in Britain. Yet, presented with the opportunity of providing a concrete
answer with the call for a republic, John Rees and the SWP successfully
urged the January 2004 ‘convention of the left’ to reject
the demand. Hence, while calling attention to a burning constitutional
question, Respect has no constitutional answers. Perhaps the ‘R’
in Respect does after all stand for ‘royalist’ - and a
commitment to pursuing equality, peace, community, socialism and
trade unionism under the existing monarchical constitution.
Chosen SWPers lined up to tell us that a republic was irrelevant,
that France and the US are republics, and that they are no better
nor worse than royalist Britain. A misdirected argument. No one
suggested that we should seek to copy the French or US presidential
republics. But only by politically challenging and fighting to replace
the existing constitution could we seriously and convincingly raise
the perspective of bringing into being the social republic.
Instructively that is the approach taken by Engels his Critique
of the Erfurt programme, written in 1891. Engels took to task his
Social Democratic Party comrades for their failure to raise the
demand for the republic in kaiser Germany. They excused themselves
from this task, not because it was deemed an irrelevance: rather
they pointed to the ominous possibility of another savage anti-socialist
clampdown by the Bismarck government. Engels suggests various semantic
ways of avoiding overtly illegal statements. Yet, whatever the precise
formulation in the programme, the party had to be clear: the hold
of Prussianism and its monarchy had to be broken. What is needed?
“In my view,” says Engels, “the proletariat can only
use the form of the one and indivisible republic” (K Marx,
F Engels CW Vol 27, London 1990, p228).
Incidentally in the same work Engels reiterates that in the British
Isles a “federal republic” - formed between Britain and
Ireland - “would be a step forward” (ibid). Marx and Engels
had on a number of different occasions raised that demand. For them
the workers in Britain must take the political lead in the struggle
for the fullest democracy. Lenin approvingly cites the call by the
Marx-Engels team for a federal republic in the British Isles in
State and revolution. That does not mean the slogan is necessarily
correct when addressing the Scottish and Welsh national questions
today. But to dismiss it out of hand reveals a big political problem
for those who claim to be Marxists.
Trotsky’s writings on Spain in 1930 are instructive too. Spain
was still a monarchy. He therefore calls for a democratic republic
and tells the communists to “struggle resolutely, audaciously,
and energetically for democratic slogans”. Not to do so “would
be to commit the greatest sectarian mistake”. The communists
should distinguish themselves from all the “leftists”
not by “rejecting democracy” (as the anarchists, syndicalists
and left economists did), but by “struggling resolutely and
openly for it” (L Trotsky The Spanish revolution New York 1973,
pp59-60). The proletariat “needs a clear revolutionary democratic
programme”, he insists (ibid p77). Only so armed can the proletariat
lead the coming revolution, says Trotsky. Was Trotsky right? On
this occasion, absolutely!
A final point. Rejecting the minimum-maximum programme nowadays
passes for common sense amongst a wide range of leftists. The AWL’s
executive committee even agreed a solemn resolution denouncing the
CPGB because of our commitment to a minimum-maximum programme; such
a configuration is a hangover from our “Stalinist past”,
it claims. Pitiful huff and puff, of course.
The minimum-maximum programme is not only characteristic of orthodox
Marxism, but it is proven to work. Following their minimum-maximum
programme, and, yes, whenever necessary renewing and modifying it
- not abandoning it, as the old fable alleges - the Bolsheviks steered
their way to the world-historic moment of October (November) 1917
and the Soviet Republic of workers, soldiers and peasants. Dogmatists
and the ignorant will protest. But history shows the truth.
Undaunted, every half-educated Trotskyite derides and dismisses
the minimum-maximum programme. In the venerated, almost mystical,
name of Trotsky’s - totally outdated, deeply flawed and frankly
economistic - Transitional programme, every group, sect and cult
advances, either formally or informally, what is billed as an infinitely
superior alternative. It ain’t so. Instead of a revolutionary
minimum programme they engage in abstract propaganda for socialism
on the one hand and on the other peddle the usual smorgasbord of
economistic demands which leave the existing state and its constitution
completely untouched.
Such is the muck, myth and nonsense that has been thrown at the
minimum-maximum programme that advocating this honourable and proven
concept in most leftwing circles is akin to uttering the sacred
name ‘Jehovah’ amongst ancient Jews. To even say the two
words is to invite invective, mocking curses, if not a deadly hail
of rocks and stones. In the minds of the devotees the point blank
refusal by their masters to even consider the minimum-maximum programme
represents defence of the highest achievements of Marxist theory.
In reality it is narrow-minded bankruptcy.
Of necessity the minimum-maximum programme must be rescued from
the geriatric clutches of social democracy and ‘official communism’
and restored to its proper place in the basic armoury of the international
working class movement. To hammer out and adopt a minimum-maximum
programme is not to repeat the sins of German social democracy -
which, true, in part stemmed from its minimal minimum programme.
As we have seen though, Engels lambasted the SDP not because it
arranged its programme in two related parts, but for what was a
fearful unwillingness to include abolition of the kaiser monarchy
and a centralised democratic republic in the minimum section of
its programme. So there are minimum programmes and minimum programmes.
Jack Conrad
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