Capital itself, thereby brings about the social revolution that creates the productive relations, and social relations of socialism, but this is only one aspect of socialism. In order for it to be Socialism, as opposed to being simply social-democracy based upon large-scale, planned and regulated monopoly capitalism/imperialism, it requires that all of this capital be under the direct democratic control of the workers themselves, and that, in addition, the workers, on the basis of this, create their own semi-state, which reflects the now dominant socialist ideas that are engendered by these new productive and social relations. Without that, at best, we have the sham of bourgeois social-democracy, or at worst the regimes of Stalinism or Nazism. As Lenin put it in 1918, in his essay on Left-Wing Childishness,
“To make things even clearer, let us first of all take the most concrete example of state capitalism. Everybody knows what this example is. It is Germany. Here we have “the last word” in modern large-scale capitalist engineering and planned organisation, subordinated to Junker-bourgeois imperialism. Cross out the words in italics, and in place of the militarist, Junker, bourgeois, imperialist state put also a state, but of a different social type, of a different class content—a Soviet state, that is, a proletarian state, and you will have the sum total of the conditions necessary for socialism...
At the same time socialism is inconceivable unless the proletariat is the ruler of the state. This also is ABC. And history (which nobody, except Menshevik blockheads of the first order, ever expected to bring about “complete” socialism smoothly, gently, easily and simply) has taken such a peculiar course that it has given birth in 1918 to two unconnected halves of socialism existing side by side like two future chickens in the single shell of international imperialism. In 1918 Germany and Russia have become the most striking embodiment of the material realisation of the economic, the productive and the socio-economic conditions for socialism, on the one hand, and the political conditions, on the other.”
And Lenin, quotes his own previous comments, written in September 1917, prior to them taking power, in The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It
““. . . Try to substitute for the Junker-capitalist state, for the landowner-capitalist state, a revolutionary-democratic state, i.e., a state which in a revolutionary way abolishes all privileges and does not fear to introduce the fullest democracy in a revolutionary way. You will find that, given a really revolutionary-democratic state, state-monopoly capitalism inevitably and unavoidably implies a step, and more than one step, towards socialism!
“. . . For socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly.
“. . . State-monopoly capitalism is a complete material preparation for socialism, the threshold of socialism, a rung on the ladder of history between which and the rung called socialism there are no intermediate rungs” (pages 27 and 28)
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