‘State Capitalism’ in the Soviet Union

The aim of this paper is to explore the reactions to the Bolshevik Revolution of one group of critics from the left: those who saw it as ushering in a new form of capitalism. The controversy over state capitalism had both theoretical and practical significance. At the analytical level it presented an important test of Marx’s conception of historical materialism, which had been formulated in a largely successful attempt to explain the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Western Europe but had encountered difficulties when applied to other epochs and other continents. In political terms, the class character of the Soviet Union was a crucial question for those who wished to understand its internal dynamics, the nature of its contradictions and the potential that it offered for revolutionary change. It remained central, even after 1991, to any serious Marxian analysis of post-Mao China, though this is not a topic that we develop at any length here. Our treatment is broadly chronological. We begin by outlining the origins of the state capitalism hypothesis before the October Revolution, and then describe the use of the term by socialist critics of the Bolsheviks between 1917 and 1929. Next we discuss the revival of interest in the idea during the 1930s experience of Stalinism, show how Frankfurt School theorists extended it to denote contemporary developments in Western capitalism, and consider the further evolution of the notion of state capitalism that occurred after 1945. Finally we summarise the arguments, for and against the hypothesis, that emerged from these debates, and conclude by briefly considering the principal deficiencies of the state capitalist hypothesis.