State Capitalism

Extracted Attributes

• Key Mechanisms

  Capital accumulation, centralized management, wage labor, and state-owned enterprises (SOEs).

• Core Definition

  An economic system where the state undertakes business activity and nationalizes means of production.

• Modern Practitioners

  China, Singapore, Russia, Norway, Brazil, and India.

• US Industrial Policy Focus

  Direct government support for Semiconductors and Pharmaceuticals to secure domestic supply chains.

• Economic Strategy (Trump Admin)

  Acting as an activist investor and deal broker to create national champions in strategic industries.

Timeline

• Friedrich Engels publishes 'Socialism: Utopian and Scientific', identifying state ownership as the final stage of capitalism. (Source: Wikipedia)

  1880-01-01

• Start of World War I, which Lenin argued transformed laissez-faire capitalism into monopolist state capitalism. (Source: Wikipedia)

  1914-07-28

• Lenin publishes 'Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism', detailing the rise of state-monopolist forms. (Source: Wikipedia)

  1916-01-01

• The Russian October Revolution leads to the establishment of the Soviet economic model, later labeled state capitalism by scholars. (Source: Wikipedia)

  1917-11-07

• Post-WWII era begins, characterized by French dirigisme and state-led credit allocation in Western Europe. (Source: Wikipedia)

  1945-05-08

• The Trump administration begins 'setting the table' for an industrial policy-driven economic strategy. (Source: Document 514d8ad8-2026-4107-9514-1e7e61217d6e)

  2025-01-01

• Projected year for the full realization of the Trump administration's state-capitalist economic boom for 'Main Street'. (Source: Document 514d8ad8-2026-4107-9514-1e7e61217d6e)

  2026-01-01

State capitalism

State capitalism is an economic system in which the state undertakes business and commercial economic activity and where the means of production are nationalized as state-owned enterprises (including the processes of capital accumulation, centralized management and wage labor). The definition can also include the state dominance of corporatized government agencies (agencies organized using business-management practices) or of public companies (such as publicly listed corporations) in which the state has controlling shares. The term has been used as a pejorative by Marxists, liberals and neoliberals. However, it has also served as a programmatic label for developmentalist and neomercantilist projects in reaction to imperialism. A state-capitalist country is one where the government controls the economy and essentially acts as a single huge corporation, extracting surplus value from the workforce in order to invest it in further production. This designation applies regardless of the political aims of the state, even if the state is nominally socialist. Some scholars argue that the economy of the Soviet Union and of the Eastern Bloc countries modeled after it, including Maoist China, were state capitalist systems, and Eastern and Western commentators alike assert that the current economies of China and Singapore also constitute a mixture of state-capitalism with private capitalism. The label "state capitalism" is used by various authors in reference to a private capitalist economy controlled by a state, i.e. a private economy that is subject to economic planning and interventionism. It has also been used to describe the controlled economies of the Great Powers during World War I (1914–1918). Alternatively, state capitalism may refer to an economic system where the means of production are privately owned, but the state has considerable control over the allocation of credit and investment. This was the case with Western European countries during the post-war consensus and with France during the period of dirigisme after World War II. Other examples include Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew and Turkey, as well as military dictatorships during the Cold War and fascist regimes such as Nazi Germany. The phrase "state capitalism" has also come to be used (sometimes interchangeably with "state monopoly capitalism") to describe a system where the state intervenes in the economy to protect and advance the interests of large-scale businesses. Noam Chomsky, a libertarian socialist, applies the term "state capitalism" to the economy of the United States, where large enterprises that are deemed by "the powers that be" as "too big to fail" receive publicly-funded government bailouts that mitigate the firms' assumption of risk and undermine market laws, and where private production is largely funded by the state at public expense, but private owners reap the profits. This practice is contrasted with the ideals of both socialism and laissez-faire capitalism. There are various theories and critiques of state capitalism, some of which existed before the Russian October Revolution of 1917. The common themes among them identify that the workers do not meaningfully control the means of production and that capitalist social relations and production for profit still occur within state capitalism, fundamentally retaining the capitalist mode of production. In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), Friedrich Engels argued that state ownership does not do away with capitalism by itself, but rather would be the final stage of capitalism, consisting of ownership and management of large-scale production and communication by the bourgeois state. He argued that the tools for ending capitalism are found in state capitalism. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), Lenin claimed that World War I had transformed laissez-faire capitalism into monopolist state capitalism.

Web Search Results

• State capitalism - Wikipedia

  State capitalism is an economic system in which the state "State (polity)") undertakes business and commercial economic activity and where the means of production are nationalized as state-owned enterprises (including the processes of capital accumulation, centralized management and wage labor). The definition can also include the state dominance of corporatized government agencies (agencies organized using business-management practices) or of public companies (such as publicly listed [...] The label "state capitalism" is used by various authors in reference to a private capitalist economy controlled by a state, i.e. a private economy that is subject to economic planning and interventionism. It has also been used to describe the controlled economies of the Great Powers during World War I (1914–1918). Alternatively, state capitalism may refer to an economic system where the means of production are privately owned, but the state has considerable control over the allocation of credit [...] State capitalism is distinguished from capitalist mixed economies where the state intervenes in markets to correct market failures or to establish social regulation or social welfare provisions in the following way: the state operates businesses for the purpose of accumulating capital and directing investment in the framework of either a free market or a mixed-market economy. In such a system, governmental functions and public services are often organized as corporations, companies or business

• State capitalism | Definition, Examples, Countries, & Explained

  Encyclopedia Britannica Encyclopedia Britannica # state capitalism Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. ### What is state capitalism? State capitalism is an economic system in which the state actively participates in economic production, controlling the means of production and generating profits for further production. The state’s economic interventions are driven by political goals. ### How does state capitalism differ from socialism? [...] state capitalism, economic system in which the state takes an active role in economic production, controlling the means of production and generating profits (or surplus value, in Marxist economics), which it then uses for further production. The state functions in a manner akin to a business enterprise, with its economic interventions and decisions driven by its political goals. The political affiliation of the state is independent of its participation in the capitalist process, and state [...] ## Types of state capitalism State capitalism broadly takes on two forms, depending on the nature of influence the state exerts. In the first form, statism, the state does not participate in the capitalist process directly but influences private corporations through taxation, regulation, economic planning, and policy. In state capitalism’s second form, the state directly intervenes in multiple forms. Examples of these interventions can include:

• [PDF] Party-State Capitalism in China - Harvard Business School

  For decades, China has been cast as exemplifying “state capitalism,” a broad concept meant to explain mixed economies in which the state retains a domi-nant role amidst the presence of markets and private firms. State capitalist systems are found in a variety of regime types, ranging from authoritarian coun-tries like China and Russia to democratic states such asNorway,Brazil,andIndia.Thesesystemstypically feature state ownership and other tools of govern-ment intervention that aim to achieve [...] Fascism, identified by many mid-century social theorists as “state capitalism,” was promoted as providing a political solution to the problems of market capitalism by fusing the interests of state and society. As the political scientist Sheri Berman observed, fascist regimes in both Italy and Ger-many during that era proclaimed that they would allow and even protect private property, but in each country the state put its own interests above any other social or economic interest. [...] It was only in the late 1990s that the CCP began to significantly privatize and downsize the state-owned sector. By the mid-2000s, China’s state capitalism was primarily about managing the re-maining large SOEs to contribute to economic growth, create wealth for the party-state, and look out for its economic and strategic interests at home and internationally. This circumscribed role for the state left ample space for private businesses to grow, a phenomenon captured in the common Chinese

• State Capitalism in America: The Government as Investor, Broker ...

  Academic definitions of state capitalism are broad, but most describe it as “an economic system in which the state uses various tools for proactive intervention in economic production and the functioning of markets.” Those tools are not limited to nonmarket economies such as Cuba or Venezuela. Political economists Peter Hall and David Soskice’s _Varieties of Capitalism_ include the “liberal market economy” as a form of state capitalism, where countries such as the United States and the United [...] In this light, American state capitalism as observed during the Trump administration can formally be described as: “An economic system in which the government operates as an activist investor, deal broker, and rentier, leveraging its power to (i) direct firm-level capital allocation into chosen national champions in strategic industries; (ii) increase the value of its investments, and (iii) extract rent from access to its market.” [...] warrants treating it as a novel, distinctly American form of state capitalism—is the government’s readiness to directly dictate the decisions of, and invest in, individual firms in a bid to create national champions and to wield state power to extract rent.

• Trump's “State Capitalism … a Hybrid Between Socialism and ...

  In 1982, the gifted libertarian Roy A. Childs Jr. warned that the American New Right was working to build a “populist, authoritarian movement” hostile to free markets and committed to some form of managed economy. Forty-three years later, Donald Trump is president, and the Wall Street Journal’s chief economics commentator describes his policies as “state capitalism,” a “hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.” [...] In a related step, the Trump administration announced it is acquiring 10 percent of Intel stock in exchange for $9 billion in federal grants the tech company was slated to receive under the CHIPS Act. This makes the government the largest Intel shareholder. Walter Isaacson observed, “You’re seeing what is really state capitalism here, where the government is interfering in all sorts of ways in corporate decisions, whether it be pricing, whether it be Coca-Cola, whether it be Intel, and maybe [...] Such policies represent a betrayal of America’s founding principles. The nation was built not on state control but on liberty, private property, and the right to pursue happiness without government coercion. If those ideals are abandoned, state capitalism will not make America great again—it will make it unrecognizable. Economics, Regulation, Government and Politics, Libertarianism This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.