1. The Rise of the State-Monopoly Tendency
The notion of state-monopoly capitalism was coined by Lenin in his pamphlet, The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It, of October 1917. Criticizing the Kerensky government for tolerating economic chaos instead of introducing state control of the war economy (which he judged necessary for consolidating the bourgeois republic), Lenin went on to attack the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries for their failure to see that such state control represented the 'complete material preparation for socialism, the threshold of socialism'.
In other belligerent countries, the imperialist war had turned monopoly capitalism into state-monopoly capitalism. Bukharin even estimated in Imperialism and World Economy that the nationalization of capital into 'state-capitalist trusts' constituted the essential feature of imperialist development. But Lenin only wanted to make the revolutionary-democratic introduction of state-monopoly capitalism in Russia a factor in accelerating the socialist revolution. A progressive state-monopoly capitalism according to Lenin should be brought about by the following measures:
1. Forced centralization of bank capital into a single bank under state auspices;
2. Nationalization of the major syndicates (sellers' cartels);
3. 'Abolition of commercial secrecy';
4. Compulsory syndication of industry and commerce;
5. 'Compulsory organization of the population into consumers' societies'. 2
The codification of Lenin's works in Soviet Marxism, which fossilized their articulation of Marxist method and revolutionary tactics into official doctrine, in due course also elevated the analysis of The Impending Catastrophe to the level of standard theory. At the 1960 Moscow conference of Communist parties, state-monopoly capitalism, hitherto used loosely and as a theoretical category developed mainly in the GDR, was officially adopted as the scientific designation of advanced capitalism as such. The experience of the 1930s, when the main capitalist states resorted to an interventionist and corporatist policy intended to save capitalism from the crisis of its liberal mode of accumulation (but when Comintern Marxists still rejected any comparisons with the programme of The Impending Catastrophe), in hindsight was declared to be the formative period of state-monopoly capitalism. 3
In fact, the state-monopoly phase, linking the World War One experience with the peace-time state intervention of the 1930s and culminating in World War Two, proved transitory itself. The state-monopoly tendency in the bourgeoisie accordingly saw its hegemony evaporate to the degree capitalism succeeded in achieving a synthesis between state intervention and renewed internationalization: a process consummated in the era of Atlantic integration.
As a result, the essentially Bukharinist assumptions of the theory of state-monopoly capitalism condemn it to irrelevance in analysing the postwar period. In present-day France, the fate of the Left government launched on the basis of an (emaciated) programme of nationalizations illustrates better than anything the fundamental dislocation of state monopolism by a new liberalism, and hence, represents a critical moment in the crisis of the theory of state-monopoly capitalism, its reformist assumptions, and the Communist parties clinging to its tenets.
-- Michael Pugliese