Spontaneous worker struggle produces only trade-union consciousness, never socialist theory.
Evidence
Economism was defined in various ways by Lenin, especially in What is to be Done?, e.g. “the fundamental political tendency of Economism—let the workers carry on the economic struggle (it would be more correct to say the trade-unionist struggle, because the latter also embraces specifically working-class politics) and let the Marxist intelligentsia merge with the liberals for the political ‘struggle’.” Lenin opposed to economism the theory of a vanguard party which would unite intellectuals and workers, and bring socialist theory “from outside” to the proletariat—which in the course of its own, spontaneous activity can only develop “trade-union consciousness”. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2156
Categorization
- DEFINE: Defines economism and its Leninist antidote: the vanguard party importing theory ‘from outside’ the proletariat.
- XREF: This inside/outside theory-import dynamic is the ancestor of later debates over how subordinated groups receive liberatory concepts — relevant to Islamophobia critiques of who gets to author Muslim political consciousness. — connects to: Lenin held that the proletariat spontaneously develops only trade-union, not revolutionary, consciousness; Lenin held that the working class alone could only achieve trade-union consciousness