Economism

Economism in Marxist usage means reducing the workers' movement to immediate economic demands—wages, hours, workplace conditions, trade-union bargaining—and treating broader political struggle for independent class power (e.g. a political party) as secondary, derivative, or unnecessary. 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.