From: "cwright" <cwright-AT-21stcentury.net>
Subject: Re: AUT: Stagism
Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2002 20:03:59 -0600


This is not a new discussion.  Greg, I think that you misunderstand Marx's
Critique of the Gotha Program and his notion of stages.

The first 'stage' assumes the end of the dictatorship of the proletariat
already and the end of capitalist forms of property.  That does not mean
that all of the old garbage has been swept away, hence Marx's discussion of
the continuation of bourgeois forms of right.  This notion of stages, btw,
is not simply bourgeois but a retrogression from Hegel even.  So it may be
standard 'dialectics' in the structuralist/Ortho bog, but it isn't
dialectical at all.  There is no necessary progression from one 'stage' to
another, nor does reality present itself as discrete stages.  For example,
retrogression, in the sense of the destruction of the conditions that would
have lead to, say the possibility of communism, is possible.  Hegel
recognized this in his Smaller Logic, Luxemburg recognized it in her
discussion of 'socialism or barbarism'.

This has also been discussed in the past at length on this list over the
last year (actually more recent than that.)

Cheers,
Chris

----- Original Message -----
From: "Greg Schofield" <g_schofield-AT-dingoblue.net.au>
To: <aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
Sent: Friday, March 08, 2002 8:07 AM
Subject: Re: AUT: Stagism


> 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?
>
>



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