I haven't read Cohen's work but I want to comment on Louis's quote from
Marx. By itself, I agree that the passage is abstract, but it sums up an
argument that Marx makes time and again and develops more fully
elsewhere. That is, Marx *does* have a stage theory, but it can't be
deduced from the famous passage. Nor should it be over-extended by
analogy.
As far as the transition from feudalism to capitalism or capitalism to
socialism goes, Marx's theory is highly speculative. But it is *within*
capitalism, namely between the factory system and modern industry, that
Marx most explicitly develops a stage theory. The distinction between the
two epochs rests, ultimately, in the difference between the formal and the
real subsumption of labour under capital.
Extending the stages by analogy runs the risk of economic determinism.
If we allow that there is a *logic of capital*, it can only be manifest in
a social system in which capital dominates. The transitions from feudalism
to capitalism and from capitalism to socialism could thus not express such
a logic and could consequently only be made by contingent human actions
that aren't constrained by a logic of capital. Also, not everything that
happens within a society dominated by capital obeys the logic of capital.
In summary, the question of stage theories can't be resolved by the answer
to the question of whether such is proper to Marx and Engels. My own view
is that Marx tentatively projected a finite 'end of capital', which is to
say, yes, Marx's analysis of Capital was apocalytic. To say that Marx's
analysis was apocalyptic, however, is like saying he wrote prose.
"In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations
that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of
production which correspond to a definite stage of their development of
their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of
production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real
foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to
which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of
production of their material life conditions the social, political and
intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men
that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that
determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development,
the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the
existing relations of production, or -- what is but a legal expression for
the same thing -- with the property relations within which they have been
at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these
relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social
revolution. With the change of the economic foundations the entire immense
superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed."
tom Walker
