Was Marx's Fifth Stage of History reached during the Soviet Days?

[Weezer]

Marx, in his theory of history, described that society has gone through 4 stages, or epochs, and will go through at least 2 more.

First Stage - Primitive communism
Second Stage - Slave Societies
Third Stage- Feudalism
Fourth Stage - Capitalism
Fifth Stage - First Stage of communism(State Socialism for Leninists)
Sixth Stage- Second Stage of communism

How would the rise and collapse of the good majority of state socialist regimes in the 20th century fit into Marx's theory of history?

I would say that during this time we were still living in the Fourth Stage, because capitalism still existed during those times.

Thoughts?

[Amphictyonis]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_in_One_Country

^ Not going to happen :)

I think we're still in the capitalist stage of development and are just now beginning to see real potential for a global socialist revolution. Perhaps in our lifetime.

[Lyev]

It's never so rigid. It's not you like suddenly wake up one day and the mode of production *poof* has suddenly transformed into another one. I mean in 1930s Russia some might argue that we saw a bit of socialist, feudal and capitalist social relations. Lenin, Bukharin, Trotsky etc. all argued from a similar perspective, I think. The fall of "communism" though, what with the coup and Gorby, Reagan, Yeltsin and everything, is largely explained from a Marxist POV in terms technological advancements, new forces of production. New innovations such as the microchip, computers, mobile phones and what have you simply were incompatible with the heavily bureaucratic top-down command economy, which was centralised and very hush-hush about what information was made public, with limitations also on freedom of speech and the press. In order to compete on the world stage the Soviet Union simply had to modernise, become computer-literate. I suppose you might say this is "the material productive forces of society" coming into conflict with "existing relations of production" and from "forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution" (the German Ideology). But I might have interpreted this quote wrong. Anyway if Marx's view of history postulates that the economic basis is the ultimate determinant, then purely on technological and economic grounds alone Russia had to move forward in the early 90s. But I guess this is perhaps over-mechanistic, or the kinda "vulgar economism" that Engels rallied against in his later life. We need to be dynamic with Marx's theories - it's not 1848 anymore! I guess we can also get a bit class analysis and whatnot in there too then. You can go right back to the 20s in Russia (what with the failure of the revolution to spread, a rising bureaucracy, which started to act upon its own class interests, separate from that of the proletariat, the civil war, famine etc. etc.). Perhaps this differs depending on whether you're an "anti-revisionist" and suchlike. But yeah, I guess I was specifically talking about the fall here, which of course can be interpreted and explained reasonably cogently from a Marxist ("historical materialist") viewpoint.

EDIT: I should hasten to add that socialism (the "fifth stage", DOTP, the "lower stage" of communism), is not a separate mode of production, when the proletariat have conquered state power and are "organised as the ruling class".