The Economist Controversy¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter traces the emergence of "Economism" within Russian Social Democracy as a political tendency that first manifested through seemingly minor organisational disputes. The narrative centres on a critical meeting in February 1897, when Lenin and other leaders, granted three days in Petersburg before Siberian exile, confronted the new leadership of the League of Struggle over proposals to establish separate groups for workers and intellectuals. The immediate flashpoint was a "workers' fund" organised on non-political lines. Lenin, supported by Martov, insisted on building the League as a revolutionary organisation rather than diluting its programme to attract workers. His position was not abstract but tactical: worker-cadres should be educated and promoted to key positions without reducing the organisation to the level of the most backward workers.
The chapter identifies Economism not as a coherent theory but as an ill-defined mood among student youth who entered Social Democracy in the 1890s lacking the theoretical grounding of the earlier generation. These "youngsters" displayed an opportunist desire for a "short cut" to the masses and a barely concealed contempt for theory. Where the first generation of Russian Marxists had linked economic agitation with propaganda that drew out broader political issues, the Economists sought to limit agitation to immediate economic demands. The League had won members from the Narodnik movement by arguing a political case; what was needed now was a Marxist paper that would generalise working-class experience and unite the strike movement with the revolutionary struggle against the autocracy—precisely the project Lenin and Martov were pursuing before their arrest.
The chapter situates this Russian phenomenon within the broader international context of Eduard Bernstein's revisionist campaign in Germany, noting the shared slogan of "freedom of criticism" used to smuggle alien ideas into the party. The conflict played out acutely in the Union of Russian Social Democrats, an organisation of émigré students that controlled contacts with Russia. The Emancipation of Labour Group, led by Plekhanov, found itself increasingly beleaguered, dependent on these "youngsters" for practical work while resenting their resentment of ideological control. The students attacked the Group's organisational inefficiency and demanded to see accounts, scoring points on the veterans' weak side. The chapter draws on S.H. Baron's biography to detail the students' critique: that Plekhanov's dedication to abstract theory demonstrated alienation from Russian reality, that the veterans were ill-informed and inefficient, that their hypercritical attitude impeded new literary talent. The campaign was a "guerrilla war" aimed at reducing or displacing the veterans' power.
The chapter acknowledges Plekhanov's difficult personality—his aristocratic aloofness, his systematic ruffling of younger colleagues, his characterisation by the young Trotsky as "past master of all shadings of coldness"—but insists that the deeper issue was the intelligentsia's egotism and contempt for theory, masked by demagogic appeals to "practical politics." The appearance of the journal Rabochaya Mysl' (Workers' Thought) in late 1897 transformed organisational friction into open political conflict, marking a decisive turn in the controversy.