Why does communism require a highest stage of capitialism?

[BornDeist]

I've been looking for this answer and I can't seem to find it. And is socialism still considered a form a capitalism? Is this what achieving a highest form of capitalism means?

[Tim Cornelis]

I'm not exactly sure what you mean, but perhaps it's this. The historical development of capitalism is so that it condemns individual property. With proto-industrialisation and later the Industrial Revolution, small scale productive establishments, based on manufacturing workers whom generally owned their own tools, were outcompeted by more efficient industrial enterprises. This was a process of proletarianisation because the working classes now owned nothing, not even their own tools of production. Through development of the productive forces of society production becomes socialised, while appropriation of the social product remains as before: individual. As capital concentrates, it becomes more socialised as well as international and thus creates an antagonism between socialised production and individual or capitalist appropriation. The precondition for socialism.

[Marxaveli]

I'm pretty sure only Leninists make the claim that communism is presupposed by a so-called highest stage of capitalism. Capitalism stopped being an progressive and efficient system a long time ago anyway, so it doesn't really make sense.

Socialism = Communism (again, unless you are a Leninist who make a distinction between socialism and communism), therefore it cannot be a form of capitalism. Socialism is capitalism's antithesis.

[RedMaterialist]

I've been looking for this answer and I can't seem to find it. And is socialism still considered a form a capitalism? Is this what achieving a highest form of capitalism means?

Only after the highest stage of capitalism has developed can the consciousness of the working class within capitalism be developed to the point of revolution. It's sort of like, IMO, 100% of capitalism must be developed before, say, 70-80% of the working class can come to understand that it is a class and that socialism is possible.

[Remus Bleys]

Communism is the son of Capitalism. This is a result of the fact that capitalism has developed productive forces to the point that not only is communism (which is post-industrial) possible, but has created the class that will destroy capitalism and bring about communism.
Now, of course, we have gotten to the point where we can "skip" capitalist development and spread socialist revolution to underdeveloped nations.

[BornDeist]

I'm pretty sure only Leninists make the claim that communism is presupposed by a so-called highest stage of capitalism. Capitalism stopped being an progressive and efficient system a long time ago anyway, so it doesn't really make sense.

Socialism = Communism (again, unless you are a Leninist who make a distinction between socialism and communism), therefore it cannot be a form of capitalism. Socialism is capitalism's antithesis.

The first part, is what I see people bring up all the time. I'm yet to understand why capitalism requires a highest form before socialism can be established. I don't want to go out and call myself a trotskyist but I'm yet to see something opposing a permanent revolution.

The second part confuses me though. I thought socialism was simply the workers having control over the means of production and communism was a stateless, classless, currency-less society?

[La Guaneña]

Communism is the son of Capitalism. This is a result of the fact that capitalism has developed productive forces to the point that not only is communism (which is post-industrial) possible, but has created the class that will destroy capitalism and bring about communism.
Now, of course, we have gotten to the point where we can "skip" capitalist development and spread socialist revolution to underdeveloped nations.


Please expand your thoughts a bit more. You conceive of the revolutionary wave starting first in the USA and Western Europe and only then in the rest of the world?

[Remus Bleys]

Please expand your thoughts a bit more. You conceive of the revolutionary wave starting first in the USA and Western Europe and only then in the rest of the world?
No. Not at all. Don't you dare put words in my mouth.
But a successful revolution, if we are to call this a communist revolution, would have to involve the whole wide world to succeed. This can happen anywhere, but its all doomed if it doesn't happen in the "modernized nations" or "first world." Unless you think that if you call capitalism socialism and think that socialism in one country can exist. Certainly a revolutionary wave can start anywhere, however. I never said otherwise.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

A quick note to begin, there is an important distinction between "necessary" and "inevitable". Food is "necessary", but starvation happens. Communism is necessary, but we can't rule out nuclear armageddon, etc.

Personally, I think what we're dealing with is a bit of our dearly departed friend Karl's European Liberal and Hegelian idealist baggage: history as a march from "necessity" to "freedom", and so on. Crucially, I also feel, on the other hand, that to some degree the "necessity" of capitalism as a precondition for communism in Marx is greatly exaggerated by certain Marxists, and that there is a tendency to conflate this with communism as a necessary consequence of capitalism. This might seem like quibbling, but I actually think it's a relatively important distinction.
I do agree with Tim Cornelius, above, that there are contradictions within the very nature of capitalism that point to communism. I think Tim spelled it out rather well, so I'll avoid repeating him.
Of course, Marx himself recognized the existence of "primitive" communism - societies that didn't "develop" according to the drumbeat of "progress", which were stateless and classless, with free exchange unmediated by the commodity form. It seems to me that imagining communism only at the "beginning" and "end" of history, and flattening all contradictions that might point to communism in the interim is a bit perversely millenarian. Arguably, capitalism's development is tied to peasant struggles for communism, for example, in the German Peasant Wars, and the English Civil War, among others. The question, then, becomes one of specificities, rather than absolute pronouncements.

Of course, I expect to be pounced on for this.

[RedMaterialist]

The first part, is what I see people bring up all the time. I'm yet to understand why capitalism requires a highest form before socialism can be established. I don't want to go out and call myself a trotskyist but I'm yet to see something opposing a permanent revolution.

Capitalism is an economic form in which an individual, a capitalist, owns a factory (means of production.) The capitalist then brings together a group of people, workers, who produce things. The workers, then, work together as a social group for the individual capitalist, who buys the workers' labor for money. The production is social, although the ownership of what is produced is private. At first the workers do not understand that they are producing socially. They are glad to have the jobs for themselves and their families. Initially this type of production is sporadic. As it grows, the socialization of the workers grows. In fact, this socialization of the working class can grow only as capitalism expands.



The second part confuses me though. I thought socialism was simply the workers having control over the means of production and communism was a stateless, classless, currency-less society?

This confusion has caused a civil war among Marxists. On one had there are those who say that there must be some kind of transition from capitalism to communism and those who say that there is no transition, only a revolutionary break, from capitalism one day to fully developed communism the next day.