From: "Greg Schofield" <g_schofield-AT-dingoblue.net.au>
Subject: Re: AUT: Stagism
Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2002 22:07:21 +0800


Micahel I will try and speak as plainly and civilly as possible.

The question of stages or phases is lifted directly from Marx's critique of the Gotha Program. Stages and phases are of course completely abstract, merely ways of distinguishing the begining, middle and end of a single process. There is nothing particularily bourgeois in this.

Progressivism, especially bourgeois progressivism has one characteristic. Not that things always get better, rather that we live in the best of all worlds. Progress is towards us, in other words.

On the other hand when looking at any historical phenomenon we must take into account, movement and transformation, and must grasp some way of distinguishing the different features belonging to each particular form in this movement. The negation of capitalism, the very idea of negating capitalism itself proposes the stages of which we speak. At one end its total negation (Communism) at the other its postive existence (classical capitalism) in between a contradiction (socialism).

Now Michael, if you can pick something particularily bourgeois in this good luck as far as I underdstand this is bog-standard dialectics.

In so far as the Soviet Union was Socialist and has reverted to capitalism - are you so sure?

Are not the means of production in the former SU  still socialisied? Not much I believe has actually been turned into private property - rather state property has become corporate property (which probably accords better with its prior existence anyhow). Both forms of property are highly socialisied the socialisation of capital is not something that is easily turned back nor the bourgeoisie a class easily resurrected.

Are not the ruling bureacrats, criminals and all the garbage that accumulated in the pores of the old SU now spilled over to become the managers and directors of the same means of production which in a sense they had mastery in the previous period?

History is never neat, but it can never be run backwards. The state in the old Soviet Union has certainly changed, but is there really any less state-capitalism, does capital now move in Russia indepedant of the state? or is capital and the state still enmeshed but now in a new form?

If we look at capitalism today as a world system and compare this to classic capitalism where individual capitalists directly owned capital it is obvious they practically no-longer exist - the bourgeoisie is still there, in control, but it is a transformed bourgeoisie, amongst themselves they share capital socially as a class - bourgeois socialism perhaps?

--- Message Received ---
From: Michael Handelman <mhandelman1-AT-yahoo.com>
To: aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2002 05:20:30 -0800 (PST)
Subject: AUT: Stagism

Stagism has always seen to me as so damn bourgeois,
that's amazing that anyone calling themselves
"anti-capitalist" can adopt such bourgeois
attitude....

The type of positivism, that is so representive of
"stagism" can easily be found in Comte (or pretty much
any bourgeois thinker eg Walter Rostow.), among
others: That history proceeds in a progressive manner.

If in fact, the stages theory might have made some
sense in the 50s, it certainly doesn't make any sense
now. If the SU was in stage 1
("socialism"/state-capitalism), it has regressed, back
to capitalism, meaning there is no way of assuming
that capitalism proceeds in a progressive fashion "up
the ladder", as stagism seems to assume.


Greg Schofield
Perth Australia
g_schofield-AT-dingoblue.net.au
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