Economism

From MarxWiki

Economism provides an understanding of historical, social, and cultural epiphenomena by reducing them to fundamentally economic factors. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx writes that he sees all of history as a history of class struggles, and contemporary class divisions as predicated on ownership or lack of capital: that is, Marx sees class, and therfore history, in terms of fundamentally economic distinctions.

Early critics of Marx and later Marxists have identified Marx's writing as economist, and therefore overly simplistic or a form of reductionism in its understanding of these phenomena. In response, Marxists complicate understandings of phenomena such as class by adding in factors of race, gender, and nationality.