So, in discussions about Gaddafi era Libya, people usually say it was state capitalism, from what I’ve seen anyway. Thats fair and I think I agree (although if you pointed a gun at me and forced me to define it, the best I could think of would be anti-colonial bonapartism, but idk). However, it does make many wonder what splits socialism from state capitalism. For instance, the soviet union under the NEP is fairly regularly called a period of “state capitalism.” Bukharin is also usually labeled a right oppurtunist who was open to the Bourgeois elements of the NEP men. Conversely, China and Vietnam today are said to be “market socialist.”
In terms of Gaddafi’s Libya, what does make it state capitalist versus socialist? Profit motive? Commodity production?
What about post Krushchev soviet union? Was it state capitalist and social imperialist like maoists say?
I know theres not one concrete answer to this. It’s not like there’s a communism button you can press to confirm communism (I wish), but I am curious
Materialist dialectics rejects that any definition we come up with to describe something will ever accurately capture it as it exists in the real world, because everything contains internal contradictions and only exists in its interrelations with everything else. In a sense, definitions are all abstractions which only approximate reality, and so we instead define things based on their dominant characteristics. There will never be a society that fits the definition of capitalism or socialism perfectly, so we instead focus on what are the dominant characteristics (principle aspects) of that society.
As Mao explained, whatever is the principle aspect will shape everything else, it will shape all contradictory aspects and those contradictory aspects will take on characteristics of the principle aspect. Take public property for example. Most capitalist states have public property on paper, but does that mean they are socialist? No, because in a state overwhelmingly dominated by private capital, capital owners will control the state, and thus the public sector will ultimately exist at the behest of private interests and will take on a private character.
On the other hand, consider a society that is dominated by public ownership but contains a single private enterprise. That private enterprise will have to acquire its land and all its resources to produce its product from the public sector, and then when it sells its product, it would be selling to workers of the public sector, ultimately selling to public enterprise. So, the public sector would control all of its inputs and outputs, its supply and demand, and thus the private enterprise would effectively be under the control of the public sector and would therefore take on a public character. Hence, such a contradictory aspect within a socialist society would not be sufficient reason to say it is not socialist.
Hence, what makes state capitalism state capitalism is when capital owners nationalize industries but the capitalist class still remains in control of the state, and thus they are operated within the framework of the interests of capital and profits and still retain their capitalistic character.
Liberal society likes to separate things into the “private sector” and “the government/state sector” when in reality private enterprise are forms of local governance that are recognized and defended by the state, and thus are ultimately part of the state and not separate from it. A more coherent analysis would be to separate society into the autocratic and the democratic sector, as this is more close to what is meant when Marxists talk about public vs private property.
To own something means to have a say in its use, and so for a sector to be genuinely public it must be democratic, the working masses have to have input. Nationalization thus does not necessarily mean the transfer from private to public property. The state can still operate property privately. Even if the state nationalizes everything, it is still capitalism if it is still operated at the behest of private interests and not for the masses. When I think state capitalism I think of something like Saudi Arabia where much of the economy is owned by the state but the royal family is recognized as the private owners and they don’t even pretend that the working masses have any say. Or I think of modern Russia where on paper they have significant public ownership over the economy but the country is clearly controlled by private oligarchs and so these aren’t being put in service of the people; social services are crumbling.
Also, Maoists are pure moralists, don’t pay them much attention.
Also, Maoists are pure moralists, don’t pay them much attention.
Sorry if I’m clueless here but what do you mean? I see this on hexbear too but I’m not well read enough to understand why this is. Mao himself was not a moralist, so is this a modern phenomenon or only for Western Maoists?
Marxism is supposed to be a scientific theory of development. The point of the proletariat seizing power and nationalizing industry is to resolve the contradiction between the socialization of labor/production, which results from the development of big industry which drags capitalists against their will from complete isolation to complete socialization, and private appropriation. Due to private ownership, a small number of people control the appropriation of resources, but as enterprises get larger and larger, more and more people work together collectively to produce those resources.
This contradiction increases as larger enterprises get until eventually it is no longer sustainable and starts becoming socially unstable and hindrance to further development. The proletariat seizing state power and nationalizing these big industries replaces private appropriation with socialized appropriation and thus resolves the contradiction as it is consistent with socialized production/labor.
The reason I tell you all this is because people often misunderstand Marxism as just “private property = bad,” and if you believe “private property = bad,” then from that standpoint you would want to abolish it immediately under any conditions. But that’s not Marxism, in Marxism, the nationalization of industry is for very specific economic reasons, and so by necessity those conditions must first exist to justify nationalizing industry. And what are those conditions? Heavily socialized production/labor which is a result of the development of big industry.
Hence, you need big industry first in order to justify nationalizing, or else you’ve abandoned historical materialism for moralism. This is why the Manifesto does not call for the immediate abolition of all private property, but in the program Marx suggests he only calls for an immediate extension of industry owned by the state, and then says the rest can come gradually, “by degrees,” alongside developing the forces of production as rapidly as possible.
Why is developing the forces of production important? Because by doing so you encourage more sectors of the economy to develop into big enterprises. If you read The Principles of Communism Engels says clearly that big enterprises can only develop in a competitive market economy, and therefore you cannot abolish private property in one stroke because you have to let the forces of production develop which can take a long time.
This is also why Marx believed you needed the dictatorship of the proletariat. It makes no sense to speak of a state without classes as he viewed the state as a tool of class oppression. He says clearly in Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy that class distinctions will still exist because the economic conditions that give rise to non-proletarian classes (the decentralization of production due to underdevelopment) would not immediately go away and would likely not go away for a long time.
Lenin understood this too, he warned against the nationalization of small producers multiple times. In The Tax in Kind he says that it would be economic suicide to nationalize the small producers, and in Left-wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder he says that the proletarian state just needs to “learn to live with them” (the small producers). There is just no reading of Marx that gets around the fact that if we take Marxian political economy seriously then the nationalize of enterprises is only applicable to big industry. It is just not applicable at all to small industry.
Mao did start off rather materialist and some of his earlier works are pretty good, but over time as he got old he seemed to move more towards moralism and tried to rapidly nationalize everything even though it made little economic sense. When it was leading to economic difficulties, he thought the problem was bad influences of bourgeois morality and a cultural revolution would help purge those bourgeois moral elements from the superstructure. However, this just led to a practical civil war and was a complete disaster.
When Mao died, the Gang of Four made it clear they had completely abandoned any pretense of being materialist and had just become pure moralists, outright saying that they would prefer China to be poor than to ever allow an inch of private enterprise to operate in the country. The situation was so dire that Hua Guofeng, Mao’s own chosen successor, had the Gang of Four arrested. Mao had so many great achievements I don’t really like talking much about his failures but this was all a disaster but luckily his successor managed to fix it.
However, “Maoists” think the older Mao’s policies were all actually a good thing, that the problem really was moral bourgeois corruption in the superstructure and the only reason his policies failed because he didn’t implement them early enough. Maoists insist that any socialist country that actually follows the Marxian path of development has betrayed “true socialism” as “true socialism” according to them would nationalize everything and if there is one iota from private enterprise in your country then you are an evil immoral revisionist capitalist roader.
Thanks for the thorough explanation! Love y’all here at lemmygrad! 🫡
Its a question without an answer. State capitalism isnt really a thing. Or i should say all capitalism is state capitalism? Capitalism is literally backed by capitalist states and neoliberalism as an ideology is based around using the state to increase profits for companies lol. If anything is state capitalism its neoliberalism.
I’m no expert on Libya but I’d say he was probably a social democrat anti-colonialist. As far as i know he pursued your typical social democrat reforms and programs while nationalizing natural resources that had previously been held by colonial powers? Altho pls correct me if my memory is wrong on that. I wouldnt say he was nationalizing out of some desire for collective ownership just out of a desire to get it away from imperialists.
State Capitalism as a term is just used as another bs way for western “leftists” to criticize every AES state they can. If Socialism succeeds suddenly its state capitalism.
Or i should say all capitalism is state capitalism?
I think so yeah. I’ve heard stuff like the US called a “dictatorship of capital” as opposed to a socialist state being a “dictatorship of the proletariat”. In that sense, I think “state capitalism” makes way more sense as a label for a dictatorship of capital than otherwise.
I think a lot of the confusion on this comes from the conflation of commerce and capitalism. Capitalism is taught to westerners as just being commerce basically. supply and demand etc. Thats not what capitalism is. Capitalism is the ownership of capital by capitalists. When private entities corps, individuals, etc, can “own” lands, means of productions, natural resources, etc. Commerce is the exchange of goods and services between 2 people or groups of people. Usually by some sort of monetary medium of exchange. Theyre very different things.
Its also used to go after transitionairy governments. China for example, if westerners would actually read what the CPC puts out, makes no claims of being fully socialist yet. They actively talk about their transition, and long term plans. They allow capital accumulation in certain areas, while restricting it in others. I forget the exact term they use but they have tiers of goods and services. Food for example would be an essential service and kept under strict control to avoid profiteering and keep prices manageable. While a luxury item is less regulated in this way as its not considered an essential service. Some industries are fully state controlled and run and others are allowed to be private. some are a mix. Even private companies have party members inside them to make sure everything is above board tho.
So then western anarchists or liberals will come in and say China is state capitalist because, Huawei, BYD, etc exist, or because the government engages in commerce, or whatever. Its nonsense.
In a nutshell socialism (at least the early stages) is state capitalism at the service of the proleteriat (Lenin), for more reading:
https://x.com/RodericDay/status/1247950065165111296
Hope that helps.
(If Giddaffi’s Lybia was going to engage in scientific socialism in governance it would sooner or later would have to become marxist-leninist. Marxist-Leninism is the science of economic development; in the same way “Einsteinian physics” is just physics, we only have to put a qualifier because mainstream Western economics (which currently hold the most powerful cultural hegemony, though that is slowly ebbing away) is pseudo-scientific. If a Gaddafi’s Libya did not make that hypothetical turn then it would have remained under the spell of capital and the bourgoisie: https://redsails.org/why-marxism/)
Using “state capitalism” as a pejorative comes from idealists who uphold a romanticised view of socialism without contending with the problems of transitioning from a capitalist economy to a socialist one in an international climate where even “state capitalists” like Gaddafi are carpet bombed and assassinated for daring to be sovereign.
The way i see it, “state capitalism” is a misnomer. What ultras call “state capitalism” is actually an early stage of socialism. Lenin elaborates on this in “A Tax In Kind”.
The reason why ultras think that because you have “state capitalism” that means you don’t have socialism is because they don’t look any deeper at how things actually work and how much “state capitalism” differs from actual capitalism. They just see “oh, it has capitalism in the name therefore it must be capitalism”.
It’s a very liberal kind of mentality whereby it is assumed that simply by naming something a certain thing you have determined its essence. They are incapable of conceiving of socialism as progressing in stages. Instead they think that socialism is just this one specific thing and if it doesn’t match exactly their conception of socialism then it must not be socialism.
There is also no coherent definition of the term “social imperialist”. In fact it makes no sense at all according to the Leninist conception of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism for a socialist state, even a revisionist one, to be imperialist.
As for Gaddafi’s Libya, that’s a more complicated discussion, because i think we can agree that it was certainly not Marxist socialism, but it was something quite revolutionary. It had strong elements of socialism in practice but its ideological basis was quite different from that of scientific socialism, and the power of the state was not as firmly rooted in the working class as it typically is in socialist countries.
The key element of socialism imo is not a specific type of organization of the economy, though that is also important, but the dictatorship of the proletariat. And Libya, for all its other great achievements, never fully implemented that. Though given time perhaps it could have, as other anti-imperialist countries with very progressive (in the economic sense) governments like Nicaragua and Venezuela are now trying to do.
There is also no coherent definition of the term “social imperialist”. In fact it makes no sense at all according to the Leninist conception of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism for a socialist state, even a revisionist one, to be imperialist.
I suppose, then, it must be an insult term against imperialism, with a Socdem face.
The leaders of the present-day, so-called, “Social-Democratic” Party of Germany are justly called “social-imperialists,” that is, socialists in words and imperialists in deeds;
Indeed. The only form of “social imperialism” that can be called such is social democracy, and even then the “social” part is just a temporary, tactical concession.
If I’m remembering correctly, “state capitalism” was coined to describe what the west developed during the world wars. In order to mobilize their countries to fight, their federal governments took control of their industries to reorganize production for the war effort. Those governments also took greater responsibility for their people to ensure that they were healthy and fit to work/kill.
This kind of societal restructuring is a big step towards developing communism because it’s essentially socializing the means of production. If proles could take control of a country like this, it’s easy to imagine how they’d use these state controls to direct production toward other projects.
