Die Neue Zeit
16th January 2009, 01:59
[Given recent board upgrades and concerns over original vs. duplicate posting in the Articles feature, I have been advised to double-post this here (though really, what is here should've been double-posted in the Articles feature :lol: ).]
"Broad Economism"
“Occasionally someone has attempted to oppose the political struggle to the economic, and declared that the proletariat should give its exclusive attention either to the one or the other. The fact is that the two cannot be separated. The economic struggle demands political rights, and these will not fall from heaven. To secure and maintain them, the most vigorous political action is necessary.” (Karl Kautsky)
In the introduction, I mentioned that “the various circle-sects have, long ago, allowed the discredited economism to strike back with a vengeance.” For the Marxist reader, the first revolutionary identifier of political economism as an obstacle to class-strugglist politics was, historically speaking, not Lenin, but his theoretical mentor – specifically through the aforementioned words in his authoritative commentary on the Erfurt Program. For the reader who is unfamiliar with the word “economism,” Lenin gave a good summary of a narrow form of this in 1916:
The old Economism of 1894–1902 reasoned thus [...] capitalism has triumphed in Russia. Consequently, there can be no question of political revolution. The practical conclusion: either “economic struggle be left to the workers and political struggle to the liberals” – that is a curvet to the right – or, instead of political revolution, a general strike for socialist revolution. That curvet to the left was advocated in a pamphlet, now forgotten, of a Russian Economist of the late nineties.
[Note: It would appear that Lenin was less kind to the mass strike strategy, from Bakunin to Luxemburg to today’s Left-Communists and “Transitional Program” circle-ists – Trotskyists – than Mike Macnair was as quoted at the end of Chapter 3. As indicated in my earlier work, however, the full range of “direct action,” from mass strikes to publicized civil disobedience, does have its place in the revolutionary process.]
Looking further back, hints of this narrow economism (significant ones, but hints nevertheless) were identified within German social democracy during the era of the Anti-Socialist Laws that preceded the Erfurt Program. Consider the oratorical words of one Wilhelm Liebknecht, a revolutionary (and I stress “revolutionary”) social-democrat:
The question as to what position Social-Democracy should occupy in the political fight, can be answered easily and confidently if we clearly understand that socialism and democracy are inseparable. Socialism and democracy are not identical, but they are simply different expressions of the same principle; they belong together, supplement each other, and one can never be incompatible with the other. Socialism without democracy is pseudo-socialism, just as democracy without socialism is pseudo-democracy. The democratic state is the only feasible form for a society organized on a socialist basis.
All enemies of the bourgeoisie agree with the negative aspect of socialism. Wagener and Bishop Ketteller, the Catholic clergy in the Austrian Reichsrat, the Protestant squires of the Prussian model state – they all condemn the bourgeoisie just as loudly as the most radical Socialist, using the same slogans. This shows that in itself the fight against the bourgeoisie is not necessarily democratic, but can arise from the most reactionary motives. Here we are faced immediately with the necessity of emphasizing not only the negative side of socialism but also its positive side, which distinguishes us from those reactionaries; and, above all, of waging a political fight in addition to the social fight, and of marching in its front ranks at that. We call ourselves Social-Democrats, because we have understood that democracy and socialism are inseparable. Our programme is implied in this name. But a programme is not designed to be given merely lip-service and to be repudiated in action. It should be the standard which determines our conduct.
If we restrict ourselves to the social struggle, or pay insufficient attention to the political battles, we run the risk that our enemies will make use of the existing class antagonisms, and in accordance with the maxim [divide and conquer] flirt sometimes with the bourgeoisie against the workers, sometimes with the workers against the bourgeoisie.
Looking even further back, the Communist Manifesto identified one particular “socialism” that was similar. Notwithstanding the eventual succumbing to class-collaborationist “compromise” by the majority of the international social-democratic movement, the father of the revolutionary martyr Karl Liebknecht had, from today’s perspective, provided the historical link between the “socialist” economists and what the Manifesto identified as “True Socialists”:
The fight of the Germans, and especially of the Prussian bourgeoisie, against feudal aristocracy and absolute monarchy, in other words, the liberal movement, became more earnest.
By this, the long-wished for opportunity was offered to “True” Socialism of confronting the political movement with the Socialist demands, of hurling the traditional anathemas against liberalism, against representative government, against bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality, and of preaching to the masses that they had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by this bourgeois movement. German Socialism forgot, in the nick of time, that the French criticism, whose silly echo it was, presupposed the existence of modern bourgeois society, with its corresponding economic conditions of existence, and the political constitution adapted thereto, the very things those attainment was the object of the pending struggle in Germany.
To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons, professors, country squires, and officials, it served as a welcome scarecrow against the threatening bourgeoisie.
Returning to the present, the class-collaborationist “social-democratic” left interprets “the political struggle” to refer to mere “social issues” – like “identity politics” based on race, gender, etc. and “Green politics” based on countering pollution – and “the economic struggle” to mean economic populism of the lowest common denominator (pertaining to taxation, subsidies, general spending, monetary policy, and international trade) and collective bargain-ism on the side. Meanwhile, most of the class-strugglist left interprets “the political struggle” to mean “the struggle for socialism” (note the shift from economic to political) and “the economic struggle” to mean immediate worker struggles, such as trade-union struggles. However, as noted by the Weekly Worker’s Jack Conrad in 2006 in much less generous terms:
As an aside, it is worthwhile here, once again, dealing with that term ‘economism’. Naturally economists, including those mentioned above, define economism in a particularly jejune fashion. That way, in their own minds at least, they have to be found completely innocent of the ugly charge. Hence the plaintive cry. ‘I can’t understand why you in the CPGB call us economists’. If I have heard it once, I have heard it a thousand times.
Below are four specially selected, but representative, examples of economism self-defined; it is a self-replicating Hydra.
1) Let us begin with Tony Cliff’s decoy of a definition: “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.”
2) Next an ‘official communist’ dictionary definition: “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.”
3) The International Socialist Group’s Bob Jenkins can speak as the head of 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”.
4) Finally we turn to the AWL’s Pete Radcliff for a definition from 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.”
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Even against the “old economism” of 1894-1902, Lenin fielded the term in the “broad sense”. The principal feature of economism is lagging behind the spontaneous movement and a general tendency to downplay the centrality of extreme democracy.
In light of the modern social fascism employing parliamentarism, it is not surprising in the least that the 750th issue of the aforementioned newspaper featured an article by the politically non-aligned Lars Lih himself (on, among other things, pre-renegade Kautsky as an “honorary Bolshevik”), in which this poignant statement against broad economism was made:
I think that the socialist attitude toward political freedom needs serious attention. In my book, I stress the primordial importance of political freedom as a goal for Lenin and the Bolsheviks. But this is only half the story. The main reason the Russian social democrats wanted political freedom was to be able to spread their own version of the truth. When they got into a position of ‘state monopoly campaignism’, their drive toward political freedom turned (dialectically?) into its opposite: lack of political freedom for their opponents now helped them spread their own version of the truth.
And this is not just some Asiatic deviation of the Russian Bolsheviks. On the contrary, European socialism as a whole was sceptical about the benefits of political freedom in bourgeois society and did not really see much need for political freedom in socialist society. And their scepticism was, of course, highly justified, then as it still is today. So the solution is not just to say, ‘Let’s recognise the importance of political freedom.’ The proper attitude to adopt is a complex and difficult issue. But from where I sit I cannot see any real grappling with the problem.
Finally, even a select few class-collaborationist “social-democrats” are grasping the picture, like Stefan Berger. Towards the conclusion of his Communism, Social Democracy and the Democracy Gap, he commented:
In what arguably amounts to the most spirited defence of the ambitions of the European left and, at the same time, the most trenchant critique of its failures, Geoff Eley has recently argued from a Marxist perspective that, 'by identifying "the Left" not with socialism but with a more capacious and exacting framework of democracy, in all its appropriate social, economic, cultural and personal dimensions, the disabling implications of the crises of socialism during the last third of the twentieth century might be brought under control.' In my view this is fundamentally correct and represents the most fruitful perspective from which to write the history of the left today [...] The history of the left as motor of democratic advances in the 19th and 20th centuries 'needs to be recovered and given its due.' It has to be recovered precisely because the left has always underplayed that aspect of its history as one part in the greater struggle to either tame or overcome capitalism [...] A thorough discussion of democracy though, in my view, needs to be disentangled from debates about socio-economic systems.
REFERENCES:
The Nascent Trend of Imperialist Economism by Vladimir Lenin [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/sep/00.htm]
On the Political Position of Social-Democracy by Wilhelm Liebknecht [http://www.marxists.org/archive/liebknecht-w/1889/political-position.htm]
Left Economism: sounds familiar? [http://www.revleft.com/vb/left-economism-sounds-t93971/index.html]
Programming the Russian revolution by Jack Conrad [http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/651/programme.htm]
Rediscovering Lenin by Lars Lih [http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/750/rediscovering.html]
Communism, Social Democracy and the Democracy Gap by Stefan Berger [http://www.arbark.se/pdf_wrd/berger_int.pdf]
"Broad Economism"
“Occasionally someone has attempted to oppose the political struggle to the economic, and declared that the proletariat should give its exclusive attention either to the one or the other. The fact is that the two cannot be separated. The economic struggle demands political rights, and these will not fall from heaven. To secure and maintain them, the most vigorous political action is necessary.” (Karl Kautsky)
In the introduction, I mentioned that “the various circle-sects have, long ago, allowed the discredited economism to strike back with a vengeance.” For the Marxist reader, the first revolutionary identifier of political economism as an obstacle to class-strugglist politics was, historically speaking, not Lenin, but his theoretical mentor – specifically through the aforementioned words in his authoritative commentary on the Erfurt Program. For the reader who is unfamiliar with the word “economism,” Lenin gave a good summary of a narrow form of this in 1916:
The old Economism of 1894–1902 reasoned thus [...] capitalism has triumphed in Russia. Consequently, there can be no question of political revolution. The practical conclusion: either “economic struggle be left to the workers and political struggle to the liberals” – that is a curvet to the right – or, instead of political revolution, a general strike for socialist revolution. That curvet to the left was advocated in a pamphlet, now forgotten, of a Russian Economist of the late nineties.
[Note: It would appear that Lenin was less kind to the mass strike strategy, from Bakunin to Luxemburg to today’s Left-Communists and “Transitional Program” circle-ists – Trotskyists – than Mike Macnair was as quoted at the end of Chapter 3. As indicated in my earlier work, however, the full range of “direct action,” from mass strikes to publicized civil disobedience, does have its place in the revolutionary process.]
Looking further back, hints of this narrow economism (significant ones, but hints nevertheless) were identified within German social democracy during the era of the Anti-Socialist Laws that preceded the Erfurt Program. Consider the oratorical words of one Wilhelm Liebknecht, a revolutionary (and I stress “revolutionary”) social-democrat:
The question as to what position Social-Democracy should occupy in the political fight, can be answered easily and confidently if we clearly understand that socialism and democracy are inseparable. Socialism and democracy are not identical, but they are simply different expressions of the same principle; they belong together, supplement each other, and one can never be incompatible with the other. Socialism without democracy is pseudo-socialism, just as democracy without socialism is pseudo-democracy. The democratic state is the only feasible form for a society organized on a socialist basis.
All enemies of the bourgeoisie agree with the negative aspect of socialism. Wagener and Bishop Ketteller, the Catholic clergy in the Austrian Reichsrat, the Protestant squires of the Prussian model state – they all condemn the bourgeoisie just as loudly as the most radical Socialist, using the same slogans. This shows that in itself the fight against the bourgeoisie is not necessarily democratic, but can arise from the most reactionary motives. Here we are faced immediately with the necessity of emphasizing not only the negative side of socialism but also its positive side, which distinguishes us from those reactionaries; and, above all, of waging a political fight in addition to the social fight, and of marching in its front ranks at that. We call ourselves Social-Democrats, because we have understood that democracy and socialism are inseparable. Our programme is implied in this name. But a programme is not designed to be given merely lip-service and to be repudiated in action. It should be the standard which determines our conduct.
If we restrict ourselves to the social struggle, or pay insufficient attention to the political battles, we run the risk that our enemies will make use of the existing class antagonisms, and in accordance with the maxim [divide and conquer] flirt sometimes with the bourgeoisie against the workers, sometimes with the workers against the bourgeoisie.
Looking even further back, the Communist Manifesto identified one particular “socialism” that was similar. Notwithstanding the eventual succumbing to class-collaborationist “compromise” by the majority of the international social-democratic movement, the father of the revolutionary martyr Karl Liebknecht had, from today’s perspective, provided the historical link between the “socialist” economists and what the Manifesto identified as “True Socialists”:
The fight of the Germans, and especially of the Prussian bourgeoisie, against feudal aristocracy and absolute monarchy, in other words, the liberal movement, became more earnest.
By this, the long-wished for opportunity was offered to “True” Socialism of confronting the political movement with the Socialist demands, of hurling the traditional anathemas against liberalism, against representative government, against bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality, and of preaching to the masses that they had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by this bourgeois movement. German Socialism forgot, in the nick of time, that the French criticism, whose silly echo it was, presupposed the existence of modern bourgeois society, with its corresponding economic conditions of existence, and the political constitution adapted thereto, the very things those attainment was the object of the pending struggle in Germany.
To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons, professors, country squires, and officials, it served as a welcome scarecrow against the threatening bourgeoisie.
Returning to the present, the class-collaborationist “social-democratic” left interprets “the political struggle” to refer to mere “social issues” – like “identity politics” based on race, gender, etc. and “Green politics” based on countering pollution – and “the economic struggle” to mean economic populism of the lowest common denominator (pertaining to taxation, subsidies, general spending, monetary policy, and international trade) and collective bargain-ism on the side. Meanwhile, most of the class-strugglist left interprets “the political struggle” to mean “the struggle for socialism” (note the shift from economic to political) and “the economic struggle” to mean immediate worker struggles, such as trade-union struggles. However, as noted by the Weekly Worker’s Jack Conrad in 2006 in much less generous terms:
As an aside, it is worthwhile here, once again, dealing with that term ‘economism’. Naturally economists, including those mentioned above, define economism in a particularly jejune fashion. That way, in their own minds at least, they have to be found completely innocent of the ugly charge. Hence the plaintive cry. ‘I can’t understand why you in the CPGB call us economists’. If I have heard it once, I have heard it a thousand times.
Below are four specially selected, but representative, examples of economism self-defined; it is a self-replicating Hydra.
1) Let us begin with Tony Cliff’s decoy of a definition: “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.”
2) Next an ‘official communist’ dictionary definition: “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.”
3) The International Socialist Group’s Bob Jenkins can speak as the head of 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”.
4) Finally we turn to the AWL’s Pete Radcliff for a definition from 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.”
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Even against the “old economism” of 1894-1902, Lenin fielded the term in the “broad sense”. The principal feature of economism is lagging behind the spontaneous movement and a general tendency to downplay the centrality of extreme democracy.
In light of the modern social fascism employing parliamentarism, it is not surprising in the least that the 750th issue of the aforementioned newspaper featured an article by the politically non-aligned Lars Lih himself (on, among other things, pre-renegade Kautsky as an “honorary Bolshevik”), in which this poignant statement against broad economism was made:
I think that the socialist attitude toward political freedom needs serious attention. In my book, I stress the primordial importance of political freedom as a goal for Lenin and the Bolsheviks. But this is only half the story. The main reason the Russian social democrats wanted political freedom was to be able to spread their own version of the truth. When they got into a position of ‘state monopoly campaignism’, their drive toward political freedom turned (dialectically?) into its opposite: lack of political freedom for their opponents now helped them spread their own version of the truth.
And this is not just some Asiatic deviation of the Russian Bolsheviks. On the contrary, European socialism as a whole was sceptical about the benefits of political freedom in bourgeois society and did not really see much need for political freedom in socialist society. And their scepticism was, of course, highly justified, then as it still is today. So the solution is not just to say, ‘Let’s recognise the importance of political freedom.’ The proper attitude to adopt is a complex and difficult issue. But from where I sit I cannot see any real grappling with the problem.
Finally, even a select few class-collaborationist “social-democrats” are grasping the picture, like Stefan Berger. Towards the conclusion of his Communism, Social Democracy and the Democracy Gap, he commented:
In what arguably amounts to the most spirited defence of the ambitions of the European left and, at the same time, the most trenchant critique of its failures, Geoff Eley has recently argued from a Marxist perspective that, 'by identifying "the Left" not with socialism but with a more capacious and exacting framework of democracy, in all its appropriate social, economic, cultural and personal dimensions, the disabling implications of the crises of socialism during the last third of the twentieth century might be brought under control.' In my view this is fundamentally correct and represents the most fruitful perspective from which to write the history of the left today [...] The history of the left as motor of democratic advances in the 19th and 20th centuries 'needs to be recovered and given its due.' It has to be recovered precisely because the left has always underplayed that aspect of its history as one part in the greater struggle to either tame or overcome capitalism [...] A thorough discussion of democracy though, in my view, needs to be disentangled from debates about socio-economic systems.
REFERENCES:
The Nascent Trend of Imperialist Economism by Vladimir Lenin [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/sep/00.htm]
On the Political Position of Social-Democracy by Wilhelm Liebknecht [http://www.marxists.org/archive/liebknecht-w/1889/political-position.htm]
Left Economism: sounds familiar? [http://www.revleft.com/vb/left-economism-sounds-t93971/index.html]
Programming the Russian revolution by Jack Conrad [http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/651/programme.htm]
Rediscovering Lenin by Lars Lih [http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/750/rediscovering.html]
Communism, Social Democracy and the Democracy Gap by Stefan Berger [http://www.arbark.se/pdf_wrd/berger_int.pdf]