Reflection on How to Understand the Developing Stage of Capitalism and Extinction of Capitalism

Based on the understanding that production relations are the base for dividing social formation and that the development of the capitalist social productive forces leads to the four phasic partial qualitative changes of capitalist production relations, the author tries to divide the historical development process of capitalism into five stages, i.e., individual capitalism, collective capitalism, group capitalism, national capitalism and social capitalism. By the last stage, seeds of socialist factors can be found. It is also recognized that there are two ways of transition of capitalism to socialism. One occurs when capitalism comes to death after completing its due course of development and the other occurs when capitalism comes to a premature end and develops into socialism.