From: "Greg Schofield" <g_schofield-AT-dingoblue.net.au>
Subject: Re: AUT: Stagism
Date: Sat, 9 Mar 2002 13:45:25 +0800



OK on this we might make some progress.

--- Message Received ---
From: cwright <cwright-AT-21stcentury.net>
To: aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2002 20:03:59 -0600
Subject: Re: AUT: Stagism

CWright:
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.  

Greg:
Obviously I believe that you have misunderstood Marx. Here is the first reference (note the way capitalist and communist societies are counterposed):

"Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary trnasformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat."

OK quote one. Between capitalism and its complete negation there is a middle bit - a revolutionary transformation. Simple and straight forward. Note also that corresponding to this at the political level is the dictatorship.

Now your proposition is after the dictatorship there are still odd bits of capitalism about and then phase one and two of communism begin. That does not really fit in the quote above so we will go to the next bit some 40 paragraphs latter.


"But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from the capitalist society..."

Birth pangs take place before birth, ie when "communism" was still the struggle of workers within capitalism. I believe this is rather explicit, and I cannot see how you squeeze another period in of revolutionary dictatorship, indeed Marx seems to be speaking of the same thing just using a different title.

"In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour.... has vanished."

I will point out the the division of labour predates capitalism, if trhe higher phase of communism means even this has gone, even the division between mental and manual labour, then phase one has done a great deal more then just mop up some remanant capitalist practices.

Now I ask you to go back to the first quote where Marx throws to opposites (capitalism and communism) which in the context could just as well be rendered class society as whole as opposed to communism, between which there is no small transition as Marx is at pains to point out. When he talks of first and higher phases, he talks of society once broken with the rule of the bourgeois it is a minor shift in emphasis underscored by a slightly different use of words, no more.

On the other hand I think it is a terribly forced reading of the text to come to the conclusions you have on this and I don't know of anything else of Marx that even gets this close. I have come across your reading of the Goath program before, but I have never seen anything but the bald assertion ever made, indeed theoretically the extra "period" seems to create more problems then it solves. Have you any evidence of this extra period in Marx?


CWright:
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.  

Greg:
Quite correct there is nothing dialectical about stages used as a rule (ie as a structuralist form) but I thought I went to some pains to distance myself from that and point out that stages are no more than convenient lables for distinct phases of the same movement (ie not lock stepped series of moves, but descriptive aspects of a single move). If I have not made myself clear in the previous post I will do so now. Stages are not dialectical when they are seen as disintict unrealted, discrete, series of structures, stages and phases however are useful in any dialectical understanding to classify distinct aspects of a transformation (actually this is how most people understand it regardless of dialectics). Stages and phases in themselves are not especially dialectical.


CWright:
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'.

Greg:
Ok same stuff again - external progression is silly, always has been. Structuralists use it because they do not know what is going on, they see that one set of distinct characteristics pressupposes another and that these can be placed in some order, but they don't know why so they import some indistict idea, like progress, to explain it - and it does no such thing.

Who's talking about descrete stages anyhow - Marx certainly was not which is clear from the quotes above and I am like hell trying not to (but with far less success).

I believe a serious issue is raised in your reading of the Gotha Program and unlike this distraction may be well worth pursueing.

Greg


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?

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