industrial policy state capatalism

• Bolsheviks before the Revolution

  • Supported worker control of industry through factory committees
• What happened after workers removed managers and specialists without replacements

  Chaos ensued
• State Capitalism

  Implemented by Lenin, replacing elected committees with single directors
• Former managers and specialists were reinstated
• Centralization of industry control

  VESENKHA (Supreme Council of Economy) centralized industry control via local organs (Glavki) from Dec. 2, 1917
• Lenin's pragmatic approach

  Contradicted socialist principles
• Negotiating with capitalists and reinstating bourgeois specialists went against worker-led control
• Workers Opposition voiced concerns about pay inequalities and Party dominance over industry
• Trotsky's defense of state capitalism

  Cited Marxism's promise of economic equality in a future state of abundance
• Centralizing state bureaucracy

  Undermined local soviets' independence
• Collaboration with factory committees

  Diminished
• Expansion of Bureaucratic Centralism

  Increased under War Communism from June 1918
• Reflective of a top-down revolution where a small workers party controlled a large peasant country