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this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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That's a good point. And yet in western liberal democracies the bourgeois state has become increasingly unwilling or incapable of bringing the rest of the capitalist class to heel. Even traditionally social democratic Europe is becoming more and more neoliberal, while at the same time states in the global south that are trying to assert their independence from western neo-colonialism, as well as semi-peripheral states like Russia find themselves going in the opposite direction and rejecting neoliberalism in favor of a more state led model, if only for the purely pragmatic reason that they are finding that neoliberalism is not just a hindrance to their development but is actively anti-development. The western states that have embraced it have been de-industrializing and de-developing before our eyes.
And the fact that this phenomenon is happening in both bourgeois states like Russia and in proletarian ones like the AES states which had opened up and liberalized to a degree in the 80s and 90s illustrates a point that Marxist-Leninists who support China have been making for a while now: that socialism is not synonymous with economic planning nor capitalism with markets, but that these are merely economic tools that both proletarian and bourgeois states can use. At the end of the day, as you correctly point out, the real determinant of socialism vs capitalism is which class controls the state. And so far Russia is still very clearly a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
So yes, to sum up, you are right, however there is still something interesting happening in terms of the economic model that we are seeing have success and the one which is not.
The bourgeoisie are not a unified monolith. There are sharp contradictions between finance capital and industrial capital. Finance capital's extreme parasitism, self-destructiveness and tendency toward de-development poses a threat to industrial capital and creates inter-capitalist conflict. So i suppose it would be more accurate to say that finance capital does not control the state in state led economies.
I don’t really know which side I fall on exactly, but here’s a debate I was involved in over this about whether that understanding is correct: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/2656976 https://lemmygrad.ml/post/2680725