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Economism is a direct reduction of any political or cultural phenomena or activities to economics.
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.
Robert M. Young used the term as a synonym to Vulgar Marxism, which he defined as "the most orthodox position provides one-to-one correlations between the socio-economic base and the intellectual superstructure".Policy Futures in Education, Volume 3, Number 1, 2005. Transmodernism, Marxism and Social Change: some implications for teacher education Mike Cole, Bishop Grosseteste College, Lincoln, United Kingdom
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 Commodification 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 Nicolas Lokhoff, Yekaterina Kuskova, Alexander Martynov, Sergei Prokopovich, and others.
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.
Old Right social critic Albert Jay Nock used the term more broadly, denoting a moral and social philosophy "which interprets the whole sum of human life in terms of the production, acquisition, and distribution of wealth", adding: "I have sometimes thought that here may be the rock on which Western civilization will finally shatter itself. Economism can build a society which is rich, prosperous, powerful, even one which has a reasonably wide diffusion of material well-being. It can not build one which is lovely, one which has savor and depth, and which exercises the irresistible power of attraction that loveliness wields. Perhaps by the time economism has run its course the society it has built may be tired of itself, bored of its own hideousness, and may despairingly consent to annihilation, aware that it is too ugly to be let live any longer."
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