Ask Lemmygrad

1005 readers

34 users here now

A place to ask questions of Lemmygrad's best and brightest

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

What is state capitalism? Is it needed to reach socialism? (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

19 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I have often heard the term "state capitalism" being used by Western academics to refer to AES states like China or Vietnam. Lenin also uses the term a lot in The Tax in Kind and distinguishes it from true socialism.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

https://chinareporting.blogspot.com/2009/11/class-nature-of-chinese-state-critique_26.html?m=1#_ednref18

This is from 2009 but provides a lot of good data on the subject.

An important note from it is that most private companies in China at the time had less than 10 employees so it's not big Bourgeoisie just because it is private. The majority of the GDP at the time came from SOEs

Edit: some more recent data says "The total capital of firms with some level of state ownership has risen to roughly 68% of total capital of all firms (40 million) in the economy in 2017. The share owned by the central government has declined while that of local governments has risen." https://sccei.fsi.stanford.edu/china-briefs/reassessing-role-state-ownership-chinas-economy#%3A%7E%3Atext=The+total+capital+of+firms%2Cin+the+economy+in+2017.

Note that SOEs doesn't include township village enterprises which are publicly owned at the local level