Rawthentic
4th May 2009, 22:07
Mike Ely: On Economic Struggle and Economism Among Revolutionaries (http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2009/05/04/mike-ely-on-economic-struggle-and-economism-among-revolutionaries/)
Posted by Mike E (http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1129785784) on May 4, 2009
http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/serve_the_people.jpg?w=350 (http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/serve_the_people.jpg)
by Mike Ely
I remember hearing about a campus meeting, where a student stood up very indignant and confronted the communists in the room:
“Serve the people! Serve the people! You say that all the time. But WHAT ABOUT ME? I’m a people.”
The issue around economism is what is the role of self-interest among the oppressed — how do we understand it? Can people make an emancipatory revolution based on their own self-interest? Based on revenge? Based on getting their “seat at the table”? Or do growing cores of people need to see the interests and suffering of other people and strata, including around the world, and take all that to heart, in a way that perceives a larger “historic interest” for the oppressed generally, and that loses narrower conceptions of “self” and “interest” in that new identification (which is sometimes called “class consciousness”).
There is a world of difference for “We”ve come for what’s ours” and “Serve the People” — and part of the question is how does broader consciousness grip a revolutionary core driving politics forward, and what specific forms of consciousness should communists be promoting, and how is such the broad transformation of consciousness influenced by communist work.
Here are some notes I made to open the door for a discussion….
1) There are economic struggles and economist politics. And they are not the same things.
Economic struggles are (as the words imply) struggles waged by people over their conditions of life — wages, work conditions, taxes, housing conditions, unionizaton, job grievances etc.
Economist politics is a long-standing and rather tenatious current among communists that says that economic struggles are the most fruitful focus (for communists!) in organizing people and specifically for raising their political consciousness (toward class consciousness and socialist politics).
2) In fact, Communists have always supported economic struggles — and correctly so. The basic point by Marx is (i believe) valid: i.e. that if workers don’t wage such struggles they will be forced down by capitalism to a mass of broken wretches. And so there is a semi-permanent conflict — as the workings of capitalism relentlessly drive people down, and as the resistance of people is sparked by that.
This correct support for economic struggles has been challenged by a very sterile political trend that (incorrectly) equates virtually any communist participation in economic struggles as “economist” and that (in a confusing way) even refers to economic struggles as themselves “economist.” And in an extreme form (for example, among the RCP) there has been a newly enforced stand that views virtually any participation in the struggles of the people as “economist,” and views any discussion of the felt needs and demands of the people as “economist.” (It is as if concept of economism mushroomed and took over the known political universe, and left these poor communists cowering in a isolated bubble of their own “non-economist” imaginings. Ah, the fetish of the word.)
3) Lenin makes a number of cogent points about economic struggles: that they are an important means of pulling the relatively passive, politically unaware sections of people into social conflict and struggle. He was writing during 1905, when there were many kinds of struggles going on — and the more backward workers were erupting in a frenzy of econmic struggle, while in the places of more conscious working class politics the strikes and struggles were taking a more explicitly anti-tsarist and revolutionary political character.
4) Lenin famously argued hard against economist understandings. He thought that, in fact, you can’t draw political “lessons” out of mainly economic struggles, and (by their nature) economic struggles have a powerful pull into the existing system (that the understandings the repeatedly guide economic struggle don’t break with the system, and are focused on getting “fairness” or “fair days pay for fair days work” within the framework of capitalism. Lenin argued that for oppressed people to get a broader and more revolutionary understanding of themselves and the struggles around them — they need to first be engaged in political struggles (aimed at the state and the ruling classes), and they need the agitation and propaganda of communists (which exposes in a clear and materialist way the interconnections of society around them, and the historic possibility of socialism.)
It would be valuable to list somewhere a number of Lenin’s key observations on economism and where he believed communist consciousness actually arises.
5) The Haymarket events (of Chicago in the 1800s that were the basis of the first May First) were political struggle not economic struggle. In other words, the eight hour day movement of the 1870s was organized as a classwide demand — not against individual employers in a trade unionist way, but as a revolt of a whole class against the rulers of a system.
Marx discusses this movement as an example of the difference between political struggle and economic struggle.
Lenin’s bolsheviks organized their agitation around three key political demands (the “three whales” as they were called): land to the peasants, an end to the Tsarist autocracy, and the eight hour day. Later in the conjunctures of World War 1, their revolutionary movement congealed around different political demands: all power to the Soviets, and a program of “bread, peace, and land.”
6) I believe that Lenin’s critique of economism is deeply true — i.e. that you can’t pull a radical political consciousness largely out of economic struggles, however militant.
I was lucky enough to be part of what-was-probably the most significant upsurge of struggle among industrial workers in modern U.S. history — the wildcat strike movement of the coal miners in the 1970s — where there was truly elemental, militant, sustained, relentless, often armed struggle over economic matters arising from the people themselves, year after year, in opposition to their employers, their trade union heads, the police, the state government, the feds, the judges, and anyone else who stood in their way. And we tried (as communists with a distinctly left economist politics) to “extract” from these experiences class conscious “lessons” that could become part of a rising political consciousness among the workers. In ways that I hope to write about more, it doesn’t work. The political consciousness of the most radical and active workers was realy not a particularly different spectrum from the mass of workers generally — and even the repeated collisions with the state, police, courts, etc. did not itself lead to ruptures with illusions about american democracy and capitalism (even in the presence of rather energetic agitation by the communists).
And the experience of miners emerging from this intense decade of upsurge and voting (in large numbers) for Nixon and then for Reagan is something to think about soberly.
In fact, as we communists came to understand (learning from Lenin’s polemics), the more politically radical workers were not the same as the more militant and active fighters of the economic struggles. And the road to revolutionary class consciousness (in the 1970s coal fields) did not lie mainly through the workers own economic struggles, but through the larger winds of those times (the war in Vietnam, the black liberation struggle, the rise of African liberation, the struggle over women’s place in the family and society). And when we engaged in political work around THOSE faultlines, the communist work we were doing (including within the economic struggles) started to engage more directly with the political life and understanding of the people.
Again there is much to say about this.
7) I think it is true that this deep economic crisis will condition and accelerate all kinds of contradictions in society, including political ones. But that does not mean that the economic struggles of people against the effects of this crisis are now (automatically or naturally) the focus of struggle for the people, or the focus of political work among communists. In fact, the economic crisis may accelerate many other faultlines in this society (the border region, the question of undocumented workers and their legality, the position of women in society, the future of farmers, the activity of students around war….)
Again, some distinctions: there is an economic crisis. There are economic struggles. and there are economist politics and assumptions among communists. I don’t think they are the same thing. Or should be linked in mechanical ways.
In the main, revolutionary politics arise from political confrontations over how society is governed, and from movements among the people that want radical changes in how society is organized…. (that want puerto rico independent, or that want equality for black people in the 1950s, or that demand an end to the military defense of empire, or nuclear threats against the world). And it is true (as in Lenin’s time or in the coalfields) that economic struggles are important, and (in particular) that they play a role of bringing relatively unawakened forces into struggle.
8) I do not doubt that we will see new waves of economic struggle. I have long expected that the undocumented workers in the U.S. will form an increasingly militant movement that merges a trade union demand for better conditions with a civil rights movement for amnesty and citizen rights. that has to do with their conditions, the consciousness they bring from Mexico and other countries, the history of tradeunionism in their home countries, the political program of forces working now to congeal the immigrants into a movement…and so on.
9) I think there is an important conjunctural aspect to the development of mass consciousness — that is not particularly elaborated in Lenin’s work. Specifically: There are deep, historic and structural reasons why the oppressed in the U.S. have not given rise to a mass socialist movement. This is not simply reducible to “privilege” or “bribery” — the way some have portrayed have it. It has to do with the mobility in the U.S., the lack of a historic countrywide anti-feudal movement giving rise to social democracy, the division of people into nationalities (and hierarchies of nationalities) that obstructed common struggles of the oppressed in some periods of history, and also the self-selecting of who came to the U.S. as immigrants (as opposed to those who stayed).
So i think there is a conjunctural element in two ways:
a) There are in the U.S. openings for radical politics in period of unusual crisis (or specific forms of immigration) — including the early 1900s, the 1930s, and the 1960s.
b) And then, in such moments, there is the emergence of radical politics (of particular kinds) do with particular forms of common experience — the emergence of the Black Liberation struggle from a specific history of oppression, struggle and decisive events that “light the sky” in a way that impart a common set of political lessons (the mass experience of World War 1, the 1960s birmingham bombing and killing of Martin Luther King etc.)
There are specific times when people are more open to radical conclusions, and there are historically determined reasons why different groups may be open to one kind of radicalism but not another.
10) I think this current economic crisis will heat up many contradictions — cause governments to topple, accelerate the formation of political movements, cause millions to look around themselves, challenge deep rooted illusions etc. But that does not mean that economic struggles around the effects of the crisis will (inherently or automatically) come center stage. It may be other struggles around other questions that come forward (within a largely charged atmosphere).
In another post I described the fact that economic crisis doesn’t automatically give rise to economic struggle — that was the experience of the 30s and other times. (And there is no law that decrees that the radical shifts in politics brought by crisis are inherently progressive shifts…. the experiences of Nazism in Germany is one of many examples, or Father Coughlin in 1930s U.S.)
Often the collapse of economic conditions makes it harder to win short-term demands from individual employers — and that simple reality affects the decisions of workers to take up that kind of action. In many cases, it is the lifting of the crisis that opens the floodgates of economic struggle (that was certainly a big element in the U.S. experience).
And the emergence of such a movement would be an important development for the U.S. (and for communists). Just as early Maoists sent organizers into the coalfields, and the autoplants, and the garment shops and so one…. so we should consider becoming part of such a wave of resistance as it emerges.
But we should do that with a rather sharp and communist appreciation of the dangers of economism — which have played themselves out graphically in the 1930s and then again in the 1970s. Major sections of the new communist movement picked up the economist politics of the old 1930s CPUSA, and tried to implement them again in the 1970s. And the results were different, but disasterous both times. And the lessons affirm Lenin’s basic point.
And the chalenge before us has been before us for quite a while: HOW exactly should we do COMMUNIST political work among the people, among the people rising in various forms of struggle. How do the events of today potentially give rise to revolutionary political consciousness and what are the ways of accelerating and organizing that process of political change?
Posted by Mike E (http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1129785784) on May 4, 2009
http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/serve_the_people.jpg?w=350 (http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/serve_the_people.jpg)
by Mike Ely
I remember hearing about a campus meeting, where a student stood up very indignant and confronted the communists in the room:
“Serve the people! Serve the people! You say that all the time. But WHAT ABOUT ME? I’m a people.”
The issue around economism is what is the role of self-interest among the oppressed — how do we understand it? Can people make an emancipatory revolution based on their own self-interest? Based on revenge? Based on getting their “seat at the table”? Or do growing cores of people need to see the interests and suffering of other people and strata, including around the world, and take all that to heart, in a way that perceives a larger “historic interest” for the oppressed generally, and that loses narrower conceptions of “self” and “interest” in that new identification (which is sometimes called “class consciousness”).
There is a world of difference for “We”ve come for what’s ours” and “Serve the People” — and part of the question is how does broader consciousness grip a revolutionary core driving politics forward, and what specific forms of consciousness should communists be promoting, and how is such the broad transformation of consciousness influenced by communist work.
Here are some notes I made to open the door for a discussion….
1) There are economic struggles and economist politics. And they are not the same things.
Economic struggles are (as the words imply) struggles waged by people over their conditions of life — wages, work conditions, taxes, housing conditions, unionizaton, job grievances etc.
Economist politics is a long-standing and rather tenatious current among communists that says that economic struggles are the most fruitful focus (for communists!) in organizing people and specifically for raising their political consciousness (toward class consciousness and socialist politics).
2) In fact, Communists have always supported economic struggles — and correctly so. The basic point by Marx is (i believe) valid: i.e. that if workers don’t wage such struggles they will be forced down by capitalism to a mass of broken wretches. And so there is a semi-permanent conflict — as the workings of capitalism relentlessly drive people down, and as the resistance of people is sparked by that.
This correct support for economic struggles has been challenged by a very sterile political trend that (incorrectly) equates virtually any communist participation in economic struggles as “economist” and that (in a confusing way) even refers to economic struggles as themselves “economist.” And in an extreme form (for example, among the RCP) there has been a newly enforced stand that views virtually any participation in the struggles of the people as “economist,” and views any discussion of the felt needs and demands of the people as “economist.” (It is as if concept of economism mushroomed and took over the known political universe, and left these poor communists cowering in a isolated bubble of their own “non-economist” imaginings. Ah, the fetish of the word.)
3) Lenin makes a number of cogent points about economic struggles: that they are an important means of pulling the relatively passive, politically unaware sections of people into social conflict and struggle. He was writing during 1905, when there were many kinds of struggles going on — and the more backward workers were erupting in a frenzy of econmic struggle, while in the places of more conscious working class politics the strikes and struggles were taking a more explicitly anti-tsarist and revolutionary political character.
4) Lenin famously argued hard against economist understandings. He thought that, in fact, you can’t draw political “lessons” out of mainly economic struggles, and (by their nature) economic struggles have a powerful pull into the existing system (that the understandings the repeatedly guide economic struggle don’t break with the system, and are focused on getting “fairness” or “fair days pay for fair days work” within the framework of capitalism. Lenin argued that for oppressed people to get a broader and more revolutionary understanding of themselves and the struggles around them — they need to first be engaged in political struggles (aimed at the state and the ruling classes), and they need the agitation and propaganda of communists (which exposes in a clear and materialist way the interconnections of society around them, and the historic possibility of socialism.)
It would be valuable to list somewhere a number of Lenin’s key observations on economism and where he believed communist consciousness actually arises.
5) The Haymarket events (of Chicago in the 1800s that were the basis of the first May First) were political struggle not economic struggle. In other words, the eight hour day movement of the 1870s was organized as a classwide demand — not against individual employers in a trade unionist way, but as a revolt of a whole class against the rulers of a system.
Marx discusses this movement as an example of the difference between political struggle and economic struggle.
Lenin’s bolsheviks organized their agitation around three key political demands (the “three whales” as they were called): land to the peasants, an end to the Tsarist autocracy, and the eight hour day. Later in the conjunctures of World War 1, their revolutionary movement congealed around different political demands: all power to the Soviets, and a program of “bread, peace, and land.”
6) I believe that Lenin’s critique of economism is deeply true — i.e. that you can’t pull a radical political consciousness largely out of economic struggles, however militant.
I was lucky enough to be part of what-was-probably the most significant upsurge of struggle among industrial workers in modern U.S. history — the wildcat strike movement of the coal miners in the 1970s — where there was truly elemental, militant, sustained, relentless, often armed struggle over economic matters arising from the people themselves, year after year, in opposition to their employers, their trade union heads, the police, the state government, the feds, the judges, and anyone else who stood in their way. And we tried (as communists with a distinctly left economist politics) to “extract” from these experiences class conscious “lessons” that could become part of a rising political consciousness among the workers. In ways that I hope to write about more, it doesn’t work. The political consciousness of the most radical and active workers was realy not a particularly different spectrum from the mass of workers generally — and even the repeated collisions with the state, police, courts, etc. did not itself lead to ruptures with illusions about american democracy and capitalism (even in the presence of rather energetic agitation by the communists).
And the experience of miners emerging from this intense decade of upsurge and voting (in large numbers) for Nixon and then for Reagan is something to think about soberly.
In fact, as we communists came to understand (learning from Lenin’s polemics), the more politically radical workers were not the same as the more militant and active fighters of the economic struggles. And the road to revolutionary class consciousness (in the 1970s coal fields) did not lie mainly through the workers own economic struggles, but through the larger winds of those times (the war in Vietnam, the black liberation struggle, the rise of African liberation, the struggle over women’s place in the family and society). And when we engaged in political work around THOSE faultlines, the communist work we were doing (including within the economic struggles) started to engage more directly with the political life and understanding of the people.
Again there is much to say about this.
7) I think it is true that this deep economic crisis will condition and accelerate all kinds of contradictions in society, including political ones. But that does not mean that the economic struggles of people against the effects of this crisis are now (automatically or naturally) the focus of struggle for the people, or the focus of political work among communists. In fact, the economic crisis may accelerate many other faultlines in this society (the border region, the question of undocumented workers and their legality, the position of women in society, the future of farmers, the activity of students around war….)
Again, some distinctions: there is an economic crisis. There are economic struggles. and there are economist politics and assumptions among communists. I don’t think they are the same thing. Or should be linked in mechanical ways.
In the main, revolutionary politics arise from political confrontations over how society is governed, and from movements among the people that want radical changes in how society is organized…. (that want puerto rico independent, or that want equality for black people in the 1950s, or that demand an end to the military defense of empire, or nuclear threats against the world). And it is true (as in Lenin’s time or in the coalfields) that economic struggles are important, and (in particular) that they play a role of bringing relatively unawakened forces into struggle.
8) I do not doubt that we will see new waves of economic struggle. I have long expected that the undocumented workers in the U.S. will form an increasingly militant movement that merges a trade union demand for better conditions with a civil rights movement for amnesty and citizen rights. that has to do with their conditions, the consciousness they bring from Mexico and other countries, the history of tradeunionism in their home countries, the political program of forces working now to congeal the immigrants into a movement…and so on.
9) I think there is an important conjunctural aspect to the development of mass consciousness — that is not particularly elaborated in Lenin’s work. Specifically: There are deep, historic and structural reasons why the oppressed in the U.S. have not given rise to a mass socialist movement. This is not simply reducible to “privilege” or “bribery” — the way some have portrayed have it. It has to do with the mobility in the U.S., the lack of a historic countrywide anti-feudal movement giving rise to social democracy, the division of people into nationalities (and hierarchies of nationalities) that obstructed common struggles of the oppressed in some periods of history, and also the self-selecting of who came to the U.S. as immigrants (as opposed to those who stayed).
So i think there is a conjunctural element in two ways:
a) There are in the U.S. openings for radical politics in period of unusual crisis (or specific forms of immigration) — including the early 1900s, the 1930s, and the 1960s.
b) And then, in such moments, there is the emergence of radical politics (of particular kinds) do with particular forms of common experience — the emergence of the Black Liberation struggle from a specific history of oppression, struggle and decisive events that “light the sky” in a way that impart a common set of political lessons (the mass experience of World War 1, the 1960s birmingham bombing and killing of Martin Luther King etc.)
There are specific times when people are more open to radical conclusions, and there are historically determined reasons why different groups may be open to one kind of radicalism but not another.
10) I think this current economic crisis will heat up many contradictions — cause governments to topple, accelerate the formation of political movements, cause millions to look around themselves, challenge deep rooted illusions etc. But that does not mean that economic struggles around the effects of the crisis will (inherently or automatically) come center stage. It may be other struggles around other questions that come forward (within a largely charged atmosphere).
In another post I described the fact that economic crisis doesn’t automatically give rise to economic struggle — that was the experience of the 30s and other times. (And there is no law that decrees that the radical shifts in politics brought by crisis are inherently progressive shifts…. the experiences of Nazism in Germany is one of many examples, or Father Coughlin in 1930s U.S.)
Often the collapse of economic conditions makes it harder to win short-term demands from individual employers — and that simple reality affects the decisions of workers to take up that kind of action. In many cases, it is the lifting of the crisis that opens the floodgates of economic struggle (that was certainly a big element in the U.S. experience).
And the emergence of such a movement would be an important development for the U.S. (and for communists). Just as early Maoists sent organizers into the coalfields, and the autoplants, and the garment shops and so one…. so we should consider becoming part of such a wave of resistance as it emerges.
But we should do that with a rather sharp and communist appreciation of the dangers of economism — which have played themselves out graphically in the 1930s and then again in the 1970s. Major sections of the new communist movement picked up the economist politics of the old 1930s CPUSA, and tried to implement them again in the 1970s. And the results were different, but disasterous both times. And the lessons affirm Lenin’s basic point.
And the chalenge before us has been before us for quite a while: HOW exactly should we do COMMUNIST political work among the people, among the people rising in various forms of struggle. How do the events of today potentially give rise to revolutionary political consciousness and what are the ways of accelerating and organizing that process of political change?