State capitalism

I know that the USSR is usually described by many Marxists (and universally so post-1991) as "state capitalist". I am not sure I agree.

State capitalism would imply not just state control of industries or eventually of all productive property. It would imply production for profit.

However the Soviet Union didn't produce for profit; it produced for targets. The economic planners made a projection of a quantity required, and the industries had to meet that target precisely. This resulted in unnecessary inefficiencies - which eventually became long queues and waiting times and inferior products, despite a resource base that should have done better. The production for targets rather than profits itself was an ideological decision, a choice based on honoring the Marxian aversion to profit-seeking as the motive for production. But its fatal defect was its inability to correct (up or down) inputs and outputs in response to market signals.

A state capitalist system would still concentrate as much productive property in the hands of the state, but would allow the directors of each industry to decide based on the market - concentrated as it would be - rather than on a target order from above.

I know no real example of state capitalism by that definition: all the then-Communist countries followed some form of target models in their state-owned and collective-owned industries apart from reducing the size of their private sectors. Of course some target systems were more flexible or responsive than others, but overall not different. Remember that even the attempt at a Communist FTA (oxymoron as it is), the COMECON, was not based on actual free trade, but on specializing each economy so all would meet some targets in aggregate and one or two would provide some product for all of them, in exchange for being provided some product from only another one or two. By targets, not profits.

What to call that? It might not be "real" socialism, but it is not capitalism either. As a hybrid I cannot say it takes the best of both. Although well, it was a brave experiment, and for a time it seemed to be working...

In the end, the best example of state capitalism I find is from the one democratic petrocracy: Norway's Statoil is exactly state capitalism. But a whole economy?? Maybe the other petrocracies were so for a time, but every one of them today is busy diversifying for a future without oil - and privatizing its economy in the process.