We often dub CS’s opponents on the left such as ENS ‘economists’ – but what does that mean?

Economism is an opportunist political trend that denies the central importance of democracy to Marxism. As such it is a broad organism, whose tentacles extend into the lofty heights of political theory and down into the grime of practical activism.

The most common, and well-known, variant, is a total focus on the ‘economic’ struggle of the workers – ie, wage demands, working conditions and so on – which are lent a political coloration.

There are other types (or rather, ‘effects’) of economism, however. Lenin, who is largely responsible for the term’s pejorative connotations, openly struggled against ‘imperialist economism’, whose central feature was the rejection of the right of nations to self-determination. Certain comrades, often very sincere revolutionaries (and including, at that time, Trotsky and Bukharin), believed that it was no job of revolutionaries to make such demands as the capitalist system fell about their ears.

These are very different political positions in many respects, but there is a common underlying error. Both the trade-unionist economist and the imperialist economist do not seriously approach the importance of the state to sustaining the system.

This is the cornerstone of Marx’s politics. The state hides in every nook and cranny of class society. It makes money work; it enforces contracts and debts; it ensures the reproduction of the labour force. It is necessary for the proletariat to understand this, and conduct at all times a struggle for state power against the political rule of the bourgeoisie.

Concretely, this means arguing for the most democratic forms of state power possible – the replacement of the standing army with a workers’ militia, election of all public officials with immediate recall, etc. These elementary demands effectively make capitalism unworkable, and socialism possible. Economism is thus a cancer that incapacitates revolutionary activity.

Economism in action

There is a simple proof of this. The most rigid trade-union economists in Britain are the Socialist Party in England and Wales (SPEW). Their full-blooded orientation to the unions has seen them gain control of the executive of the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS). You’d think that, if nothing else, they’d at least be able to fight for the sorts of demands thrown up by this.

Yet, when the government launched an assault on public sector pensions in 2005, SPEW cut a deal which divided the workforce between old and new employees, the latter seeing their retirement age nudge up to 65. They did not even ballot or fight among the members for a strike. My point is not that this was a disgraceful sell-out – it was – but that Marxists must peek behind the curtain. In reality, the failure by PCS SPEW members to understand how the state is implicated even in ‘internal’ trade-union affairs, and seeps into almost all economic activity at a molecular level, meant that they were unable to even fight back effectively on the one area of activity that consumes their entire existence.

Likewise, the Italian Socialist Party was, after World War I, faced with a huge wave of factory occupations. The dominating political force was the ‘maximalist’ tradition, which was derived in turn from the ideas of the likes of Bukharin, and shared his disdain for the petty affairs of international relations and other such matters. Yet they failed to convert this situation into revolution, despite their very real fervour; the result of the lost initiative was Mussolini.

Economism on campus

There are two types of student economism operative today. The first is deceptively close to the ‘narrow’ definition used by most of the left. Socialist Students, for example, really do focus almost exclusively on economic demands. This is in fact ‘economism once removed’ – simply a direct transference of the abiding (economist) political strategy of the adult organisation to the students. The Socialist Party is obsessed with union-type demands; therefore, so is SS. As Mike Macnair and James Turley have argued, this is a peculiarly misguided project. ‘Trade union’ politics on campus are inappropriate because students are not workers; there is no boss-worker relationship with their universities or lecturers (Mike Macnair, ‘Driven by ideas’ Weekly Worker February 14 2008; James Turley, ‘The campus and the state’ Weekly Worker April 24 2008).

The other variant is best exemplified by the Socialist Worker Student Society and Student Respect. These organisations spend a lot of time focused on anti-war and anti-racist work – probably more than on economic demands.

Economism does not mean focusing on economic issues, as opposed to ‘political’ issues like war – we do not characterise a movement as economistic simply because of what it is campaigning against. When we charge the left with economism, this relates not to the particular issues involved, but concerns the response that those who purport to be Marxists throw up to these questions. So there can be an economistic response to a political question.

Take for example the SWP. Calls for “books, not bombs” and “spend the military budget on hospitals” are economistic because they fail to seriously deal with the democratic question of the capitalist state and its role in war. This may be bourgeois pacifism, but it is certainly not Marxism. The same goes for their anti-racist work – it is bourgeois-multiculturalist, not Marxist. Their inability to raise the Marxist programme of political democracy in these questions (ie, their economism) gives the lead to alien political trends – and thus is just as harmful as (and sometimes, as in the support of the SWP’s Unite Against Fascism for state bans on fascist organisations, even more harmful than) the trade-union economist’s total philistinism.

The principled approach is to integrate trade-union-type work and democratic demands alike into a strategy for power that is distinctively Marxist throughout. In other words, the Marxist programme of political democracy that seriously takes up the issue of how we are ruled and how we should organise to rule ourselves.

Jim Grant