When the French Communist Party wanted to discredit a student leader, it called him the German Cohn-Bendit. When it wanted to explain its own politics, it talked about national interests and, in the phrase used against it, wallowed in the tricolour.
The Fourth Internationalists’ verdict on this, set out in lutte ouvrière ou la tendance prolétarienne, is that Stalinism functioned as the principal defender and principal vector of bourgeois ideology and the worst bourgeois prejudices in the working class. Not a movement that failed to fight chauvinism. A movement that transmitted it.
That is where economism ends up, and the route is short. Chauvinism, as the document puts it, is a mentality infinitely easier to spread than to combat. An organisation that has decided fighting it is not its business has not taken a neutral position. It has left the field to whoever is working it.
What economism actually is
Economism reduces the revolutionary task to propaganda within the working class and intervention solely in economic struggles. It concentrates on the direct relation between workers and employers, and it sets aside political critique of the regime and any engagement with non-proletarian sections of society. Politics, in the document’s phrase, is passed through the deforming prism of economism.
Underneath it sits one assumption, which the Fourth Internationalists call a radically false postulate: that revolutionary class consciousness will emerge spontaneously from economic struggle and the experience of exploitation at work.
Their counter-claim is the sharp one. Political consciousness has to be brought to workers from the outside, meaning from outside the economic struggle and outside the employer-worker relationship, and the knowledge it rests on comes from examining the relations of all classes and the state. You cannot derive a view of the state from a pay dispute, however militant the dispute.
What replaces revolutionary politics is practical politics, bread-and-butter issues, and a strategy the document calls atemporal and anti-dialectical: a method with no sense of timing, because it has no view of the whole.
Six things that follow
Adaptation to the average. The organisation adapts to the average level of consciousness of the average worker, when the revolutionary principle is to be one step ahead of the masses. Since the average worker is an abstraction the organisation has constructed, it ends up marching in step with an abstraction of its own making.
The workers wouldn’t understand. Political and theoretical differences between revolutionary groups go undiscussed on the grounds that workers would not follow them. This blocks the education of advanced workers and hides what the differences actually mean in practice, which is the only thing that makes them worth discussing.
No strategy at all. The narrow focus produces a total absence of political strategy. Activity contracts to patient work inside enterprises, and tactics stop responding to political shifts because political shifts are not being tracked.
Whole fields abandoned. Ecology, justice, health and the rest are simply not engaged, and are left to whoever else turns up.
Reformism by default. Economic demands pressed inside the existing system, with no link to the struggle for state power, fit comfortably inside an economistic and reformist vision of social change. Accepting the system’s logic caps what can be won. Economic struggles remain necessary defensive battles, but no lasting improvement is possible within capitalism, and the task is still the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the destruction of the capitalist state.
Reactionary ideas left standing. Nationalism and chauvinism inside the working class go uncombated, which brings us back to the German Cohn-Bendit.
There is a further point underneath all six. Capitalist society already fragments life, separating private existence from political engagement. Economism does not resist that fragmentation. It codifies it.
The alternative, stated as practice
Intervene in all sectors of the class struggle. Revolutionary politics is broad by nature: it takes up every question of life and connects it to the fight against capital, which means engaging with the social movements and issues thrown up by the contradictions of bourgeois society rather than waiting for them to become workplace questions.
Bring consciousness from outside, on the basis of an analysis of all classes and the state.
Educate and demarcate. Teach advanced workers, make the difference between revolutionary and reformist lines explicit, and build a visible revolutionary pole. That requires publications used for in-depth political explanation and demarcation, not only for agitation.
Raise transitional demands that tie immediate needs to socialist revolution. Control over hiring, over the organisation of work, over prices: demands that contest capitalist control directly, can open dual power situations, and make the conflict between workers’ interests and profit impossible to present as a misunderstanding.
Foster self-organisation. Work in the existing unions, and at the same time push workers to take their affairs into their own hands through strike committees and general assemblies. This is the practical answer to bureaucratic control.
Build the party as the collective intellectual, the body that develops strategy and provides leadership. Unity is not spontaneous; it is built through struggle against division.
Fight oppression and division as part of the same job. The point is not to rank oppressions or to separate struggles, but to grasp how they are bound together inside the contradictory whole of capitalism. The party should act as a tribune, relating to all political struggles against tyranny.
Why this is the argument of the moment
The economist case is being made again in Britain, usually without the word. It says that a socialist organisation should concentrate on wages, jobs and housing, and that anti-racist, feminist, trans and ecological questions are a distraction that costs it working-class support.
The Fourth Internationalists’ answer is not that those struggles are also important. It is that the choice is not available. The organisation that declines to fight chauvinism does not thereby become neutral on chauvinism, because chauvinism is easier to spread than to combat and someone is always spreading it. The PCF found that out, and then became a vector for it.
The tribune test is worth keeping in your pocket. Take any tyranny currently operating in this country and ask whether your organisation has anything to say about it. If the honest answer is that the workers wouldn’t understand, the problem is not with the workers.