Misreading organic-conjunctural relations yields either economism or ideologism errors
Evidence
A common error in historico-political analysis consists in an inability to find the correct relation between what is organic and what is conjunctural. This leads to presenting causes as immediately operative which in fact only operate indirectly, or to asserting that the immediate causes are the only effective ones. In the first case there is an excess of “economism”, or doctrinaire pedantry; in the second, an excess of “ideologism”. In the first case there is an overestimation of mechanical causes, in the second an exaggeration of the voluntarist and individual element. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 749
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: Defines the twin methodological error categories, economism and ideologism, central to Gramsci’s toolkit.
- XREF: The economism-versus-ideologism error pair will recur in analyzing how Islamophobia is (mis)explained as purely economic or purely ideological.
Related
- Gramsci distinguished long-lasting organic crises from occasional movements (similarity 0.86)
- Conflicts are first consciously grasped only at the level of ideology. (similarity 0.82)
- Reducing all ideology to immediate structural causes is primitive infantilism (similarity 0.79)
- Not every ideological shift directly mirrors the economic base. (similarity 0.79)
- Ideologies do not spread spontaneously but require organized struggle and politics. (similarity 0.79)
- Ideology’s shift from science of ideas to system of ideas demands historical explanation (similarity 0.78)
- Organic ideologies organize masses while arbitrary ones only produce individual movements (similarity 0.78)