Economism

For Marx and Engels, this is an error because class struggle is not merely workplace bargaining or economic reforms: "every class struggle is a political struggle," and the proletariat's organization as a class becomes organization "into a political party."

In particular, "economism" was a movement in early Russian Social Democratic Labour Party whose position was that the workers' struggle must be only economical and not political.

Before World War I, the dominant ideological current within the socialist movement represented by the Second International was Orthodox Marxism, which shares many similarities with Economism, and is most closely associated with Karl Kautsky. The collapse of socialist international unity in 1914 diminished Kautsky's authority and created the conditions in which Lenin's interpretation of Marxism gained prominence.

In Marxist analysis

Lenin

The term economism was described by Lenin as the tendency to tail spontaneous trade-union consciousness instead of raising workers to revolutionary socialist politics. In What Is To Be Done?, he says workers left to spontaneity develop "trade union consciousness"—combining in unions, fighting employers, and seeking labor legislation—while Communists must combat the reduction of the movement to that level.

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, Yekaterina Kuskova, Alexander Martynov, Sergei Prokopovich, Konstantin Takhtarev and others.

Cultural Revolution

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. Mao Zedong criticized the material incentives of economism, arguing that production must be led by revolutionary politics and to reward productivity with money promoted the wrong values and was inconsistent with making factories a bastion of proletarian politics.

In particular, economism became the most important issue during the Shanghai People's commune. Although many historical narratives of the Cultural Revolution have described economism as an effort on the part of the Chinese Communist Party leadership to bribe workers into political passivity, more recent scholarship argues that those narratives are only "partially correct, at best." Academic Yiching Wu argues, for example, that although local bureaucrats were in fact willing to make economistic concessions to workers, they had no control over the eruption of worker grievances and demands. Instead, economistic demands during this period were rooted in worker's actual conditions and driven by factors including the deterioration of work conditions during the state-driven economic accumulation of the late 1950s, the weakness of Chinese trade unions, and the collapse of the economy during the Great Leap Forward.

Others

Robert M. Young used the term as a synonym to vulgar Marxism, which he defined as "the most orthodox [position in Marxism which] provides one-to-one correlations between the socio-economic base and the intellectual superstructure".