But, of course, Marx and Engels did not end their analysis of capitalist development at the point of the dominance of the private industrial capitalist (the monopoly of private capital), and the nation state. Those were simply moments in the process of development of capitalism as a necessarily global system in which, also, the free market competition it had been based around becomes a regulated and planned production, even within the capitalist system itself. They set out how capitalism itself evolved in the 19th century, so that what had once been a progressive development in the form of the private industrial capitalist and the nation state, became a fetter on its further development, and that fetter was burst asunder, by the development of large-scale, socialised capital, state-monopoly capitalism/imperialist capital.
In other words, all of those things that the moral socialists and petty-bourgeois nationalists see as an evil that must be resisted in the name of their “anti-capitalism” and “anti-imperialism”, Marx and Engels saw as the fundamental, progressive signs of the metamorphosis of this mode of production into Socialism. Moreover, as I have set out, elsewhere, Lenin, also, makes this point, as against the petty-bourgeois, ultra-Lefts of his time.
“… socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly.“This is precisely the case with our “Left Communists”, who in words (and of course in their deepest convictions) are merciless enemies of the petty bourgeoisie, while in deeds they help only the petty bourgeoisie, serve only this section of the population and express only its point of view by fighting—in April 1918!!—against . . . “state capitalism”. They are wide of the mark!… the continuation of the anarchy of small ownership is the greatest, the most serious danger, and it will certainly be our ruin (unless we overcome it), whereas not only will the payment of a heavier tribute to state capitalism not ruin us, it will lead us to socialism by the surest road. When the working class has learned how to defend the state system against the anarchy of small ownership, when it has learned to organise large-scale production on a national scale, along state capitalist lines, it will hold, if I may use the expression, all the trump cards, and the consolidation of socialism will be assured...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.… 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.
“. . . 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 ”.
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