Historical economism reduces history to individual greed and technical change

Evidence

A few characteristics of historical economism: 1. in the search for historical connections it makes no distinction between what is “relatively permanent” and what is a passing fluctuation, and by an economic fact it means the self-interest of an individual or small group, in an immediate and “dirty-Jewish” sense. In other words, it does not take economic class formations into account, with all their inherent relations, but is content to assume motives of mean and usurious self-interest, especially when it takes forms which the law defines as criminal; 2. the doctrine according to which economic development is reduced to the course of technical change in the instruments of work. Professor Loria has produced a splendid demonstration of this doctrine in application, in his article on the social influence of the aeroplane published in Rassegna Contemporanea in 1912; 3. the doctrine according to which economic and historical development are made to depend directly on the changes in some important element of production—the discovery of a new raw material or fuel, etc.—which necessitate the application of new methods in the construction and design of machines. In recent times there has been an entire literature on the subject of petroleum: Antonio Laviosa’s article in Nuova Antologia of 16 May 1929 can be read as a typical example. The discovery of new fuels and new forms of energy, just as of new raw materials to be transformed, is certainly of great importance, since it can alter the position of individual states; but it does not determine historical movement, etc. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 710

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gives three enumerated characteristics distinguishing historical economism from genuine historical materialism.
• QUESTION: Worth noting Gramsci invokes an anti-Semitic trope (‘dirty-Jewish’ sense) in passing — significant evidence about the field’s own biases toward the Islamophobia toolkit’s caution about inherited vocabulary.
• XREF: connects to: Historical materialism cannot explain woman’s oppression because it reduces man to the economic abstraction — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 145; Capitalist realism reduces historical time to technological upgrades — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1906