State capitalism

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State Capitalism describes a capitalist society wherein the productive forces are owned and run by a state. The most common definition of state capitalism within Marxist literature is that it is a social system combining capitalism, the wage system of producing and appropriating surplus value, with ownership by a state. A state capitalist country is therefore a country where the government controls the economy and essentially acts like a single giant capitalist.

The term itself was in use within the socialist movement from the late nineteenth century onwards. For example, Wilhelm Liebknecht in 1896 said: "Nobody has combatted State Socialism more than we German Socialists; nobody has shown more distinctively than I, that State Socialism is really State capitalism!" 1. There are various theories and critiques of state capitalism, some of which have been around since the October Revolution. The common themes among them are to identify that the workers do not meaningfully control the means of production and that commodity relations and production for profit still occur within state capitalism.

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Use By Capitalists

The term is used by capitalists in a different way than leftists or Marxists. Capitalist usage is meant to differentiate between libertarian capitalism and a standard state-run market economy. Murray Rothbard, a laissez-faire capitalist thinker, uses state capitalism to refer to the coercive role of the state in modifying market behaviour. This usage dates from the 1960s, when Harry Elmer Barnes described the post-New Deal economy in the United States as "state capitalism." More recently, Andrei Illarionov, former economic advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin, resigned in December 2005, protesting Russia's "embracement of state capitalism."

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Use By Trotskyists

The theory of State Capitalism does not play a prominent part with in the traditional Trotskist position. Trotsky rejected the idea that the USSR was not communist, claiming instead that it was a Degenerated workers' state. However, alternative currents within the Trotskyist tradition have developed the theory of State capitalism as an explanation of the essentially non-socialist nature of the USSR, and of Cuba and China.

A relatively recent text by Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff, Class Theory and History, explores state capitalism in the former Soviet Union, continuing a theme that has been debated within Trotskyist theory for most of the past century. The most influential formulation therein has been that of Tony Cliff, associated with the International Socialist Tendency and the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP), although the discussion goes back to internal debates in the Left Opposition in the late 1920s.

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Use By Maoists and "Anti-Revisionists"

From 1956 to the early 1980s, the Chinese Communist Party 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 than either the Trotskyists or the left-communists. Specifically, the Maoists and their descendants use the term state capitalism as part of their description of the style and politics of Khrushchev and his successors, as well as to similar leaders and policies in other self-styled "socialist" states. This stemmed largely from the ideological break of the Sino-Soviet Split.

After Mao's death, amidst the supporters of the Cultural Revolution and the exploits of the 'Gang of Four', most extended the state capitalist formulation to China itself, and ceased to support the Communist Party of China, which likewise distanced itself from these former fraternal groups.

Most current communist groups descended from the Maoist ideological tradition still hold to the description of both China and the Soviet Union as being "state capitalist" from a certain point in their history onwards — most commonly, the Soviet Union from 1956 to its collapse in 1991, and China from 1976 to the present day. Maoists and "anti-revisionists" also sometimes employ the term "Social-imperialism" to describe socialist states that they consider to actually be captialist in essence — their phrase, "socialist in words, imperialist in deeds" denotes this.

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Use by Left-communists and Council communists

The earliest critique of the USSR as state capitalist was formulated by various groups adhering to Left-communism. One major tendency of the 1918 communist left criticised the re-employment of authoritarian capitalist relations and methods within production.

As Ossinsky in particular argued, one man management and the other impositions of capitalist discipline would stifle the active participation of workers in the organisation of production; Taylorism turned workers into the appendages of machines, and piece-wages imposed individualist rather than collective rewards in production so installing petty bourgeois values into workers. In sum these measures were rightly seen as the re-transformation of proletarians within production from collective subject back into the atomised objects of capital. The working class, it was argued, had to consciously participate in economic as well as political administration. In this best tendency within the 1918 Left Communists, there was an emphasis on the problem with capitalist production being the way it turned workers into objects, and on its transcendence lying in their conscious creativity and participation, that is reminiscent of Marx's critique of alienation.

Modern left communists share with Trotskyists the fundamental definition of state capitalism as a social system combining capitalism with state ownership, but they disagree on some levels. The left communist group Aufheben for example have three primary disagreements with Cliff's theory:

  • 1) Cliff's attempt to make the point of counter-revolution and the introduction of state capitalism coincide with Stalin's first five year plan (and Trotsky's exile);
  • 2) his denial that the law of value operated within the USSR; and
  • 3) his orthodox Marxist insistence that state capitalism was the highest stage of capitalism which implied that the USSR was more advanced than Western capitalism.
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State Capitalism in Western countries

An alternate definition is that state capitalism is a close relationship between the government and private capitalism, such as one in which the private capitalists produce for a guaranteed market. An example of this would be the military-industrial complex where autonomous entrepreneurial firms produce for government contracts and are not subject to the discipline of competitive markets. Many, including Cliff, see this as part of a continuum characterizing the modern world economy with 'normal' capitalism at one extreme and complete state capitalism like that of the former USSR at the other. This continuum has narrowed somewhat since the 1980s with the collapse of the USSR and its satellites and with large-scale privatization in Eastern Europe and most of the third world.

Both the first definition (the one used by Trotskyists) and this fourth one flow from discussion among Marxists at the beginning of the twentieth century, most notably Nikolai Bukharin who, in his book Imperialism and the world economy thought that advanced, 'imperialist' countries exhibited the latter definition and considered (and rejected) the possibility that they could arrive at the former.

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See also

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External links

fr:Capitalisme d'État it:Capitalismo di stato nl:Staatskapitalisme pt:Capitalismo de Estado sv:Statskapitalism

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