Economism’s premature judgment reduces political analysis to moralistic accusations

Evidence

But economism puts forward this hypothesis in advance, when no concrete fact (that is to say, none which appears as such to the evidence of common sense—rather than as a result of some esoteric “scientific” analysis) yet exists to support it. It thus appears as a moralistic accusation of duplicity and bad faith, or (in the case of the movement’s followers), of naivete and stupidity. Thus the political struggle is reduced to a series of personal affairs between on the one hand those with the genie in the lamp who know everything and on the other those who are fooled by their own leaders but are so incurably thick that they refuse to believe it. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 717

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘genie in the lamp’ critique of economism parallels later critical-theory debates about who gets to speak for a movement — a connection to the Islamophobia field’s critique of reductionist readings of Muslim political movements.
• DEFINE: Defines economism operationally: the analytic practice of assuming in advance that a movement serves hidden material ends, before any concrete evidence.