It's highly questionable whether the pre-historical materialist Marx of the 1844 Paris Manuscripts held to a stagist theory of history marching through necessary and inevitable phases in a lockstep manner. That view may be attributable to some of the later Marx, although not, I think, his better ideas. But the young Marx didn't have the apparatus to state the view: the development of productive forces driving changes in the relations of production on which rested the political and ideological superstructure, I paraphrase closely from the 1859 Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. The Marx of 1844 could not even be a Hegelian stagist who held that history marches through a series of necessary phrases driven by the need to solve problems in the form that Spirit takes at a time, because he's working towards materialism.
At any rate, the attack on crude communism, of which the Marx of 1844 has a clearly highly negative view, is certainly an attack in the sense that Marx thinks poorly of it and takes care to distinguish it from the communism he advocates as a good thing and sees as the key to the riddle of history.
And the later, historical materialist Marx, would not think of crude communism as a phase that was necessary to communism as a historical materialist saw it. His views are clearly laid out in the 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program, where he says that the lower phase of communism will be the fulfillment of bourgeois right, where each is remunerated according to his work, prior to the higher phase, with the unfettering of the productive forces and remuneration according to need. Because the mature Marx thought that communism was only possible on the basis of a high level of economic development in a rich society, he would not have thought that crude communism was a necessary phase or, perhaps, even a possible one. In the stagist version of historical materialism, the thing that corresponds most closely to crude communism is the primitive accumulation stage of capitalist development.
Incidentally Marx would be contemptuous about the views expressed sometimes on this list that human progress or survival or socialism/communism require a halt to economic development or innovation. He thought, possibly without good justification, not only that communism was possibly only with a high level of economic development an innovation, but that once the "fetters" of capitalism on the productive forces were broken, the level and rate of development and innovation would rapidly increase. As G.A. Cohen suggested when he was still a Marxist, this is questionable if what drives innovation is market competition, which Marx supposes will be eliminated under communism. Be thata s it may, Woody Guthrie's paean to the glories of the Grand Coulee Dam are much more true to the spirit of Marx than grim ascetic warnings about the end of innovation. Marx would certainly think that the direction and nature of innovation and development would change drastically with the elimination of the profit motive, but not that they would or should end. End of digression.
-- Now, Marx's (few and unpublished) remarks about crude communism may be regarded as prescient with respect to the kind of "communism" that emerged in poor countries in the 20th century. I put "communism" in scare quotes because Marx would have regarded Stalinism, Maoism, the Khmer Rouge not as communist at all. However the failure of crude communist regimes and their collapse, or collapse into capitalism, may be argued to offer support for Marx's idea -- treated as stagist or not, it doesn't have to be -- that capitalism is sociologically prior to communism; hic Rhodus, hic salta (here is Rhodes, jump here) (Capital I.v) [should be saltus, no?], but not that far, or you have to ask where the hic is.
--- Charles Brown <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> wrote:
>
>
>
> andie nachgeborenen
>
> Marx has an attack on "crude communism in the Paris
> Manuscripts, "the consummation of this envy [shades
> of
> Nietzsche] and of this leveling down proceeding from
> the preconceived minimum." EPR, ME Reader at 83
> (Tucker, 2d ed.). This leads to the Cultural
> Revolution and at its worse to the Khmer Rouge.
> Surely
> you don't advocate this!
>
> ^^^^^
>
> CB: I always read this as , not an "attack", but a
> statement of a sort of
> objective stage that will be gone through, like the
> revolutionary
> dictatorship of the proletariat, or "to each
> according to work" not yet to
> each according to need. Not pretty ,but
> unavoidable. Marx doesn't see the
> revolutionary process, especially the first phases
> of socialism, as all
> sweetness and light.
>
>
>
> ___________________________________
>
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