Economism - Mass movements and the fight for socialist politics

Many of us yearn for more spontaneous militancy in the working class – more of the spirit we have glimpsed in the Visteon occupation, or maybe the Lindsey oil refinery strikes earlier this year. Without spontaneity there is little movement at all, and without movement, the development of revolutionary politics becomes a laborious process of abstract propaganda and ideological debate, writes Jack Treadwell.

But for well over 100 years now, revolutionary leaders – perhaps most notably Lenin, who made this issue a key element in his break from the mainstream of social democracy in 1903 – have argued that spontaneous militancy is not enough.

It can leave workers as militant reformists, effectively trapped within the ideological limits of the ruling class, unable to grasp the necessity to go beyond reforms, seize power in their hands and to smash the state machinery that keeps the classes in their place.

In these days of reduced levels of class struggle, in which working time lost through strikes each year in Britain has almost dwindled to the level of being timed with a stopwatch rather than a calendar, it may seem over-ambitious for those of us on the left even to talk about going beyond trade union consciousness: a little more trade union consciousness might at least bring workers into conflict with their employers, and public sector workers indirectly into conflict with the government.

But while there is room for very militant trade unionism, there is no escaping the fact that “trade union consciousness” – centred on securing economic concessions, or “reforms” from the employers within the framework of the capitalist system – falls a long way short of class consciousness, or revolutionary consciousness.

Workers who remain at the level of trade union action may even take part in occasional ‘political’ protests which their union leaders have opted to support (such as the recent G20 protests, or fighting privatisation of the Royal Mail): but this is a far cry from the much more developed and systematic political critique which workers need to develop as a basis to challenge the blinkered and ineffective trade union and political leaders.

In his seminal pamphlet ‘What is to be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement’ Lenin in 1902 emphasised again and again the gulf between trade union consciousness, itself a reflection of the ideology of the ruling capitalist class, and the revolutionary consciousness required as the basis of an alternative policy, programme, organisation and leadership.

Lenin’s battle for this concept of a revolutionary party, a vanguard based firmly on a systematic revolutionary theory (Marxism) established and developed in conflict with trade unionism and all those who would reduce class struggle to the “bread and butter” economic issues, was crucial in the development of the Bolshevik Party and of revolutionary Marxism.

It took place against a backdrop of a wholesale drive to “revisionism” – watering down Marx’s theories – and a drift by the mass social democratic parties towards a reformist approach, in which they sought comfortable parliamentary positions, ministerial jobs, and a coexistence with the capitalist system that their party programmes set out to abolish.

When Lenin took up the polemic, the man at the forefront of this attack on “obsolete” and “dogmatic” Marxism, under a banner of “freedom of criticism” and “new” thinking was the Tony Blair-like “moderniser,” German social democrat Eduard Bernstein: but these views later spread widely through the massive German Social Democratic Party, and through other social democratic parties, which were then still linked in the Second International.

Even the relatively small Russian party was infected with the same ideas, and this triggered Lenin’s fight, resulting in the split between the reformist “Menshevik” wing and the revolutionary Bolsheviks. It was no accident that the Mensheviks from the outset favoured a much looser “party” structure that would allow individual leaders more scope for opportunist policies, while the Bolsheviks, developing the notion of a combat party, forming as vanguard that had to lead and to resist pressure to accommodate, proposed a more tightly organised and disciplined party. Lenin also argued in ‘What is to be Done?’ for the principle of a national newspaper as an organiser of the party, and the means by which it can uphold a single coordinated line.

Despite resistance from Lenin and other internationalists (notably Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht) the revisionist approach became the majority political trend inthe Second International long before its consequences were vividly illustrated by the splintering of the International on the eve of World War 1.

So far had these so-called “Marxists” retreated from revolutionary politics that as war broke out, each of the leading social democratic parties voted to support its “own” bourgeoisie in the war – and in effect fight each other and connive at worker killing worker.

This type of nationalist “social patriotic” division can also be the damaging logic today of endorsing nationalistic campaigns and strikes which seek to defend the jobs of one group of “local” workers in one country by seeking to persuade employers or governments to exclude workers from other countries.

Economism, beginning and ending with trade union struggles within the system, fails to offer a political framework that can unite workers as a class on an international and internationalist basis, to fight their “own” employers and other employers too.

Lenin strongly rejected the criticism from opponents that in his insistence upon a Marxist theoretical basis for the party he was being “dogmatic” and “doctrinaire”. Instead he branded those who argued for a new “critical” approach, headed by Bernstein, as reformists and opportunists, and their politics as a capitulation to bourgeois ideology, one variant of which was “economism”.

There was no disagreement over the importance of the strike waves of the period, the awakening of the industrial working class. As Lenin argued, the fact that these spread from St Petersburg in 1896 to almost all of Russia showed how deep the new movement was, and how strong spontaneous action could be. But he was opposed to exaggerating the political development that had taken place among the workers. “Taken by themselves these strikes were simply trade union struggles, but not yet Social-Democratic [i.e. revolutionary] struggles.”

Lenin went further, and argued that many other aspects of the situation (many reminiscent of issues today) offered a basis for drawing sections of the masses into political struggle and could help to develop workers’ understanding of class society and the need for radical, revolutionary solutions:

“The flogging of peasants, the corruption of the officials, the police treatment of the “common people” in the cities, … the extortion of taxes, the persecution of religious sects, the humiliating treatment of the soldiers and the treatment of the students and liberal intelligentsia as if they were soldiers …”

None of these issues was directly linked with economic struggle: but a revolutionary programme needed to relate to the struggles of other classes as well as workers, and to democratic demands and issues as well as economic exploitation, and point out that none of these issues could be resolved within the capitalist system.

This helps underline the need for revolutionary socialists in today’s situation to do more than build around the handful of trade union disputes and focus on “bread and butter” issues. Active engagement with the fight against the war in Afghanistan, the campaign to scrap Trident and for nuclear disarmament, support for the rights of refugees migrant workers and opposition to brutal and racist immigration controls, opposition to Islamophobia, and all forms of discrimination on grounds of race, sex or sexuality, the fight to stem climate change, and the battle for sweeping, radical changes in the Parliamentary system itself to combat corruption and move towards democracy, are among the issues which can help to expose the limitations of the system and build broader support for an explicitly socialist alternative.

To consolidate a real break from the limitations of bourgeois politics and ideology, Lenin argued a systematic alternative was needed. He opposed the Economists and others who argued that the workers could somehow work out an independent ideology for themselves, and “wrest their fate from the hands of the leaders”.

Bourgeois ideology had been dominant for a long time, and was backed up by massive resources of the capitalist class, with its monopoly control on news media and controlling grip on education and most sources of information. For workers – an oppressed and exploited class, most with little education – to develop a coherent response and alternative world view from their own devices was a near impossible task.

To develop a critique of bourgeois ideology and capitalist society requires a knowledge of history, and a critique of existing ideology and theory, and the development of an alternative world view, in which the complex processes of the class struggle could be analysed and understood.

And without this theory – rejected out of hand by the Economists and reformists of all types – workers would remain locked in to the ideology of their rulers, argued Lenin.

Far from arising spontaneously from workers in struggle, Marx’s theory of scientific socialism had been developed in a very different process through intellectual efforts of highly educated thinkers:

“According to their social status, the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia.”

Lenin insisted that the task of revolutionary socialists was not just to be the most militant participants in spontaneous struggles, but to work to lift the consciousness of those workers taking part, and to win them away from trade union consciousness, towards Marxism. He insisted that:

“The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e. the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc.”

In other words even “political” action in this context is also seen by Lenin as limited, and a reflection of reformist and trade union consciousness.

Even the landmark political development of the British trade union movement reflected this weakness. Union leaders, battered by anti-union legislation, belatedly recognised in the early 1900s that neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives could be relied upon to implement legislation in their interests.

But while they accepted the need to build a new political party to represent their views in Parliament, this became a parliamentary party reflecting the limited reformist politics of the trade union leaders.

Unlike the social democratic parties in Germany and France which had grown up as part of an explicitly Marxist international, with at least verbal adherence to a Marxist programme, the Labour Party was formed from the outset as an explicitly reformist party.

Most British workers’ political consciousness remained limited to seeking reforms within the confines of the capitalist system. This was why Lenin was later so firm in insisting that the Labour Party, for all its working class electoral support, was a “bourgeois workers party”, and could not be reshaped to serve the interests of the working class.

This can be seen especially clearly today, with the large trade unions, bureaucratically controlled by loyal supporters of the Labour Party, seeking every way possible to divert their members from any challenge to Gordon Brown, and any action that might jeopardise New Labour’s election chances. Unite the union funnels millions of its members’ subscriptions to prop up Brown’s flagging party while ministers ignore the unions: UNISON, the biggest public sector union, pumps in millions more as ministers drive through a massive and unpopular round of privatisation in the NHS and turn the screw on public sector budgets. In each case union leaders make synthetic speeches at their annual conference proclaiming their concerns to change government policy, but the union leaders and the party their bankroll are locked in to supporting British capitalism.

Despite this desperate plight of British social democracy, whose limitations have been brutally exposed by twelve years in government, the British left remains divided, fractious, and heavily infected by Economism. Strikes get left activists excited, while more complex campaigns against privatisation leave them cold.

Even now, after 30 years of continual decline in the size of the manufacturing workforce and relative growth of the public sector, much of the left is visibly more eager to relate to dwindling unions representing (historically largely white, male) manufacturing workers than to devote serious resources to working with the largely female and much more diverse workforce in the NHS, local government, education, etc.

And with many economistic leanings still intact, there are also strong currents in the British left which pull back from the necessary fight to develop workers as revolutionaries. Lenin argued very clearly that Marxists must “go among all classes of the population” “as theoreticians, as propagandists, as agitators and as organisers.” This means developing an educated cadre of activists, people who are aware of Marxist theory, who are aware of complex political developments and issues, and who are confident to debate and fight for their views. They have to do that if they are to achieve Lenin’s (slightly exaggerated) target of “combating” the spontaneous politics of the masse and fighting to win them to revolutionary socialism.

But some sections of the left pull back from presenting detail, debate and complexity, arguing that many workers don’t know of these things, that especially in these days many don’t relate directly to the trade unions, and that some may have a limited grasp of English. By “dumbing down” and avoiding anything that challenges workers to learn more, understand more, and discuss more, this approach reinforces “trade union consciousness” and retreats from the task of educating a vanguard of activists.

So while the term “economism” and the debates which forced it into prominence may seem lost in the mists of time, many of the same issues confront us in building a political alternative today. No change in mass consciousness means no possibility of social change.

It’s time for the revolutionaries to come out fighting – before 12 years of New Labour betrayals plunge us into the dark depths of another spell of Tory rule.

Jack Treadwell is the pen-name of a leader of the International Socialist Group.