Concept

Two-stage theory

Overview

The two-stage theory, or stagism, is a Marxist–Leninist political theory which argues that underdeveloped countries such as Tsarist Russia must first pass through a stage of capitalism via a bourgeois revolution before moving to a socialist stage.

Stagism was applied to countries worldwide that had not passed through the capitalist stage. In the Soviet Union, the two-stage theory was opposed by the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution.

While the discussion on stagism focuses on the Russian Revolution, Maoist theories such as New Democracy tend to apply a two-stage theory to struggles elsewhere.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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Proletarian revolutions, on the contrary, such as those of the nineteenth century, criticize themselves constantly; constantly interrupt themselves in their own course; come back to what seems to have been accomplished, in order to start over anew; scorn with cruel thoroughness the half measures, weaknesses and meannesses of their first attempts; seem to throw down their adversary only in order to enable him to draw…
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
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It is then that the inevitable conflict between employer and the employed becomes imminent, and cannot be adjourned any longer."[1] This quotation must be familiar to the reader, as it has lately been very much abused by scholastic Marxists. It has been used as an iron-clad argument against the idea of a labor government in Russia.
Leon Trotsky, Our Revolution
Close in meaning to Two-stage theory; the term itself is not named.
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The organization of the advanced Communist party in Germany was of this kind. In accordance with the principles of the "Manifesto"[11] (published in 1848), and with those explained in the series of articles on "Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany," published in the _New York Daily Tribune_, this party never imagined itself capable of producing, at any time and at its pleasure, that revolution which was to…
Friedrich Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution
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Philosophers who discussed Two-stage theory

Georgi Plekhanov

Related ideas

Opposing perspectives

Trotskyism

Place in the tradition

Part of Communism.

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