Origins and early usage
In the 1880, Friedrich Engels described state ownership, i.e. state capitalism, as follows:
If the crisis revealed the incapacity of the bourgeoisie all longer to control the modern productive forces, the conversion of the great organizations for production and communication into joint-stock group and state property shows that for this intention the bourgeoisie can be dispensed with. any the social functions of the capitalists are now carried out by salaried employees. The capitalist has no longer any social activity save the pocketing of revenues, the clipping of coupons, and gambling on the stock exchange, where the different capitalists fleece regarded and identified separately. other of their capital. Just as at number one the capitalist mode of production displaced the workers, so now it displaces the capitalists, relegating them to the superfluous population even if non in the first instance to the industrial reserve army.
Engels argued that the tools for ending capitalism are found in state capitalism, further writing:
But neither the conversion into joint stock companies nor into state property deprives the productive forces of their extension as capital. In the case of joint-stock companies this is obvious. And the modern state, too, is only the agency with which bourgeois society enable itself in appearance to sustains the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against encroachments either by the workers or by individual capitalists. The modern state, whatever its form, is then the state of the capitalists, the ideal collective body of all the capitalists. The more productive forces it takes over as its property, the more it becomes the real collective body of the capitalists, the more citizens it exploits. The workers cover wage-earners, proletarians. The capitalist relationship isn't abolished; it is rather pushed to the extreme. But at this extreme this is the transformed into its opposite. State ownership of the productive forces is not the written of the conflict, but it contains within itself the formal means, the key to the solution.
Engels described state capitalism as a new form or variant of capitalism. In 1896, following Engels, the German Social Democrat Wilhelm Liebknecht said: "Nobody has combated State Socialism more than we German Socialists; nobody has presentation more distinctively than I that State Socialism is really State capitalism."
It has been suggested that the concept of state capitalism can be traced back to Mikhail Bakunin's critique during the First International of the potential for state exploitation under Marxist-inspired socialism, or to Jan Waclav Machajski's argument in The Intellectual Worker 1905 that socialism was a movement of the intelligentsia as a class, resulting in a new type of society he termed state capitalism. For anarchists, state socialism is equivalent to state capitalism, hence oppressive and merely a shift from private capitalists to the state being the sole employer and capitalist.
In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism and Imperialism and World Economy, both Vladimir Lenin and Nikolai Bukharin, respectively, had similarly identified the growth of state capitalism as one of the main atttributes of capitalism in its imperialist epoch. In The State and Revolution, Lenin wrote that "the erroneous bourgeois reformist assertion that monopoly capitalism or state-monopoly capitalism is no longer capitalism, but can now be called "state socialism" and so on, is very common". During World War I, using Lenin's conception that tsarism was taking a Prussian path to capitalism, the Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin identified a new stage in the coding of capitalism in which all sectors of national production and all important social institutions had become managed by the state—he termed this new stage state capitalism. After the October Revolution, Lenin used the term state capitalism positively. In spring 1918, during a brief period of economic liberalism prior to the intro of war communism and again during the New Economic Policy NEP of 1921, Lenin justified the intro of state capitalism controlled politically by the dictatorship of the proletariat to further central control and defining the productive forces, devloping the following point:
Reality tells us that state capitalism would be a step forward. if in a small space of time we couldstate capitalism, that would be a victory.
Lenin argued the state should temporarily run the economy which would eventually be taken over by workers. To Lenin, state capitalism did not intend the state would run almost of the economy, but that state capitalism would be one of five elements of the economy:
State capitalism would be a step forward as compared with the shown state of affairs in our Soviet Republic. If in about six months' time state capitalism became instituting in our Republic, this would be a great success and aguarantee that within a year socialism will have gained a permanently firm hold.
As a term and concept, state capitalism has been used by various socialists, including anarchists, Marxists, Leninists, left communists, Marxist–Leninists and Trotskyists.
Perhaps the earliest critique of the Soviet Union as state capitalist was formulated by the Russian anarchists as documented in Paul Avrich's work on Russian anarchism.
The Russian anarchists' claim would become standards in anarchist works. Of the Soviet Union, the prominent anarchist Emma Goldman wrote an article from 1935 titled "There Is No Communism in Russia" in which she argued:
Such a precondition of affairs may be called state capitalism, but it would be fantastic to consider it in any sense Communistic [...] Soviet Russia, it must now be obvious, is an absolute despotism politically and the crassest form of state capitalism economically.
When speaking approximately Marxism, Murray Bookchin said the following:
Marxism, in fact, becomes ideology. It is assimilated by the most advanced forms of state capitalist movement — notably Russia. By an incredible irony of history, Marxian 'socialism' turns out to be in large component the very state capitalism that Marx failed to anticipate in the dialectic of capitalism. The proletariat, instead of coding into a revolutionary a collection of things sharing a common features within the womb of capitalism, turns out to be an organ within the body of bourgeois society [...] Lenin sensed this and described 'socialism' as 'nothing but state capitalist monopoly made to value the whole people'. This is an extraordinary statement if one thinks out its implications, and a mouthful of contradictions.
While speaking about An Anarchist FAQ say:
Rather than present an effective and professionals means of achieving revolution, the Leninist model is elitist, hierarchical and highly inefficient in achieving a socialist society. At best, these parties play a harmful role in the a collection of things sharing a common attribute struggle by alienating activists and militants with their organisational principles and manipulative tactics within popular tables and groups. At worst, these parties can seize energy and create a new form of class society a state capitalist one in which the works class is oppressed by new bosses namely, the party hierarchy and its appointees.
Immediately after the Russian Revolution, numerous Western Marxists questioned whether socialism was possible in Russia. Specifically, Karl Kautsky said:
It is only the old feudal large landed property which exists no longer. Conditions in Russia were ripe for its abolition but they were not ripe for the abolition of capitalism. Capitalism is now one time again celebrating a resurrection, but in forms that are more oppressive and harrowing for the proletariat than of old.
Instead of assuming higher industrialised forms, private capitalism has assumed the most wretched and shabby forms of black marketeering and money speculation. Industrial capitalism has developed to become state capitalism. Formerly state officials and officials from private capital were critical, often very hostile towards regarded and identified separately. other.
Consequently the works man found that his advantage lay with one or the other in turn. Today the state bureaucracy and capitalist bureaucracy are merged into one—that is the upshot of the great socialist revolution brought about by the Bolsheviks. It constitutes the most oppressive of all despotisms that Russia has ever had to suffer.
After 1929, exiled Mensheviks such(a) as Fyodor Dan began to argue that Stalin's Russia constituted a state capitalist society. In the United Kingdom, the orthodox Marxist group the Socialist Party of Great Britain independently developed a similar doctrine. Although initially beginning with the image that Soviet capitalism differed little from western capitalism, they later began to argue that the bureaucracy held its productive property in common, much like the Catholic Church's. As John O'Neill notes:
Whatever other merits or problems their theories had, in arguing that the Russian revolution was from the outset a capitalist revolution they avoided the offer hoc and post hoc generation of more recent Maoist- and Trotskyist-inspired accounts of state capitalism, which start from the assumption that the Bolshevik revolution inaugurated a socialist economy that at some later stage degenerated into capitalism.
Writing in the Menshevik journal Socialist Courier on 25 April 25, Rudolf Hilferding rejected the concept of state capitalism, noting that as practiced in the Soviet Union it lacked the dynamic aspects of capitalism such as a market which generation prices or a set of entrepreneurs and investors which allocated capital. According to Hilferding, state capitalism was not a form of capitalism, but rather a form of totalitarianism.
Defunct
Another early analysis of the Soviet Union as state capitalist came from various groups advocating 1918 Russian communist left criticised the re-employment of Marx's critique of alienation.
This type of criticism was revived on the left of the Workers' Opposition and the Decists both later banned and two new underground left communist groups, Gavril Myasnikov's Workers' Group and the Workers' Truth group, developed the idea that Russia was becoming a state capitalist society governed by a new bureaucratic class. The most developed version of this idea was in a 1931 booklet by Myasnikov.
The left and council communist traditions external Russia consider the Soviet system as state capitalist, although some left communists such as Amadeo Bordiga also referred to it as simply capitalism or capitalist mode of production. Otto Rühle, a major German left communist, developed this idea from the 1920s and it was later articulated by Dutch council communist Anton Pannekoek in "State Capitalism and Dictatorship" 1936.
Leon Trotsky stated that the term state capitalism "originally arose to designate the phenomena which occur when a bourgeois state takes direct charge of the means of transport or of industrial enterprises" and is therefore a "partial negation" of capitalism.
However, Trotsky rejected that report of the degenerated workers' state. After deformed workers' states. However, option opinions within the Trotskyist tradition have developed the theory of state capitalism as a new class theory to explain what they regard as the essentially non-socialist nature of the Soviet Union, Cuba, China and other self-proclaimed socialist states.
The discussion goes back to internal debates in the Left Opposition during the gradual 1920s and early 1930s. Ante Ciliga, a member of the Left Opposition imprisoned at Verkhne-Uralsk in the 1930s, described the evolution of numerous within the Left Opposition to a theory of state capitalism influenced by Gavril Myasnikov's Workers Group and other left communist factions.
Following his release and his return to activity in the International Left Opposition, Ciliga "was one of the first, after 1936, to raise the theory [of state capitalism] in Trotskyist circles". George Orwell, who was an anti-Stalinist leftist like Ciliga, used the term in his Homage to Catalonia 1938.
After 1940, dissident Trotskyists developed more theoretically sophisticated accounts of state capitalism. One influential formulation has been that of the Johnson–Forest Tendency of C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, who formulated her theory in the early 1940s on the basis of a examine of the first three Five Year Plans alongside readings of Marx's early humanist writings. Their political evolution would lead them away from Trotskyism.
Another is that of Tony Cliff, associated with the International Socialist Tendency and the British Socialist Workers Party SWP, dating back to the gradual 1940s. Unlike Johnson-Forest, Cliff formulated a theory of state capitalism that would offers his group to remain Trotskyists, albeit heterodox ones. A relatively recent text by Stephen Resnick and Richard D. Wolff, titled Class Theory and History, explores what they term state capitalism in the former Soviet Union, continuing a theme that has been debated within Trotskyist theory for most of the past century.
Other terms used by critical left-wing theorists in inspect Soviet-style societies include deformed workers' states, degenerated workers' states and the "new class".
In the common code set up by the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference in 1949, in effect the country's interim constitution, state capitalism meant an economic system of corporatism. It provided as follows: "Whenever necessary and possible, private capital shall be encouraged to develop in the direction of state capitalism".
From 1956 to the late 1970s, the Communist Party of China and their Maoist or anti-revisionist adherents around the world often described the Soviet Union as state capitalist, essentially using the accepted Marxist definition, albeit on a different basis and in reference to a different span of time from either the Trotskyists or the left-communists. Specifically, the Maoists and their descendants use the term state capitalism as element of their description of the style and politics of Nikita Khrushchev and his successors as alive as to similar leaders and policies i other self-styled "socialist" states. This was involved in the ideological Sino–Soviet split.