The term "state capitalism" is also used by some in reference to a
private capitalist economy controlled by a state, often meaning a
privately owned economy that is subject to statist economic planning. This term was often used to describe the controlled economies of the Great Powers in the First World War.
State capitalism has also come to refer to an economic system where the
means of production are owned privately, but the state has considerable
control over the allocation of credit and investment as in the case of France during the period of dirigisme after the Second World War. State capitalism may 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.
Libertarian socialist Noam Chomsky applies the term "state capitalism" to economies such as that of the United States,
where large enterprises that are deemed "too big to fail" receive
publicly funded government bailouts that mitigate the firms' assumption
of risk and undermine market laws and where the state largely funds
private production at public expense, but private owners reap the profits. This practice is often claimed to be in contrast 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 1917 October Revolution.
The common themes among them identify that the workers do not
meaningfully control the means of production and detect that commodity
relations and production for profit still occur within state capitalism.
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.
Origins and early uses of the term
Wilhelm Liebknecht: "Nobody has combated State Socialism more than we German Socialists"
The term was first used by Wilhelm Liebknecht in 1896 who said: "Nobody has combated State Socialism more than we German Socialists; nobody has shown more distinctively than I, that State Socialism is really State capitalism".
It has been suggested that the concept of state capitalism can be traced back to Mikhail Bakunin's critique during the First International of the potential for state exploitation under Marxist-inspired socialism, or to Jan Waclav Machajski's argument in The Intellectual Worker (1905) that socialism was a movement of the intelligentsia as a class, resulting in a new type of society he termed state capitalism. For anarchists, state socialism
is equivalent to state capitalism, hence oppressive and merely a shift
from private capitalists to the state being the sole employer and
capitalist.
During World War I, using Vladimir Lenin's idea that Czarism was taking a "Prussian path" to capitalism, the Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin
identified a new stage in the development of capitalism in which all
sectors of national production and all important social institutions had
become managed by the state—he termed this new stage "state
capitalism".
After the October Revolution, Lenin used the term positively. In spring
1918, during a brief period of economic liberalism prior to the
introduction of war communism and again during the New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921, Lenin justified the introduction of state capitalism controlled politically by the dictatorship of the proletariat to further central control and develop the productive forces:
Reality tells us that state capitalism would be a step forward. If in a small space of time we could achieve state capitalism, that would be a victory.
Lenin argued the state should temporarily run the economy, which would eventually be taken over by workers.
To Lenin, "state capitalism" did not mean the state would run most of
the economy, but that "state capitalism" would be one of five elements
of the economy:
State capitalism would be a step forward as compared with the present state of affairs in our Soviet Republic. If in approximately six months' time state capitalism became established in our Republic, this would be a great success and a sure guarantee that within a year socialism will have gained a permanently firm hold.
Use of the term by the left
Socialists
The term "state capitalism" has been used by various socialists, including anarchists, Marxists and Leninists.
Anarchists
Perhaps the earliest critique of the Soviet Union as state capitalist was formulated by the Russian anarchists as documented in Paul Avrich's work on Russian anarchism.
This claim would become standard in anarchist works. For example, the prominent anarchist Emma Goldman in an article from 1935 titled "There Is No Communism in Russia" said of the Soviet Union:
Such a condition of affairs may be called state capitalism, but it would be fantastic to consider it in any sense Communistic [...] Soviet Russia, it must now be obvious, is an absolute despotism politically and the crassest form of state capitalism economically.
When speaking about Marxism, Murray Bookchin said the following:
Marxism, in fact, becomes ideology. It is assimilated by the most advanced forms of state capitalist movement—notably Russia. By an incredible irony of history, Marxian 'socialism' turns out to be in large part the very state capitalism that Marx failed to anticipate in the dialectic of capitalism. The proletariat, instead of developing into a revolutionary class within the womb of capitalism, turns out to be an organ within the body of bourgeois society [...] Lenin sensed this and described 'socialism' as 'nothing but state capitalist monopoly made to benefit the whole people'. This is an extraordinary statement if one thinks out its implications, and a mouthful of contradictions.
While speaking about Leninism, the authors of An Anarchist FAQ say:
Rather than present an effective and efficient means of achieving revolution, the Leninist model is elitist, hierarchical and highly inefficient in achieving a socialist society. At best, these parties play a harmful role in the class struggle by alienating activists and militants with their organizational principles and manipulative tactics within popular structures and groups. At worse, these parties can seize power and create a new form of class society (a state capitalist one) in which the working class is oppressed by new bosses (namely, the party hierarchy and its appointees).
Russian communist left
Another early analysis of the Soviet Union as state capitalist came from various groups advocating left communism. One major tendency of the 1918 Russian communist left criticized the re-employment of authoritarian capitalist relations and methods of production. As Valerian Osinsky
in particular argued, "one-man management" (rather than the democratic
factory committees workers had established and Lenin abolished)
and the other impositions of capitalist discipline would stifle the
active participation of workers in the organization of production—Taylorism converted workers into the appendages of machines and piece work imposed individualist rather than collective rewards in production so instilling petty bourgeois
values into workers. In sum, these measures were seen as the
re-transformation of proletarians within production from collective
subject back into the atomised objects of capital. The working class, it
was argued, had to participate consciously in economic as well as
political administration. This tendency within the 1918 left communists
emphasized that the problem with capitalist production was that it
treated workers as objects. Its transcendence lay in the workers' conscious creativity and participation, which is reminiscent of Marx's critique of alienation.
These criticisms were revived on the left of the Russian Communist Party after the 10th Congress in 1921, which introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP). Many members of the Workers' Opposition and the Decists (both later banned) and two new underground Left Communist groups, Gavril Myasnikov's
Workers' Group and the Workers' Truth group, developed the idea that
Russia was becoming a state capitalist society governed by a new
bureaucratic class. The most developed version of this idea was in a 1931 booklet by Myasnikov.
Mensheviks and orthodox Marxists
Immediately after the Russian Revolution, many Western Marxists
questioned whether socialism was possible in Russia. Specifically, Karl Kautsky said:
It is only the old feudal large landed property which exists no longer. Conditions in Russia were ripe for its abolition but they were not ripe for the abolition of capitalism. Capitalism is now once again celebrating a resurrection, but in forms that are more oppressive and harrowing for the proletariat than of old. Instead of assuming higher industrialized forms, private capitalism has assumed the most wretched and shabby forms of black marketeering and money speculation. Industrial capitalism has developed to become state capitalism. Formerly state officials and officials from private capital were critical, often very hostile towards each other. Consequently the working man found that his advantage lay with one or the other in turn. Today the state bureaucracy and capitalist bureaucracy are merged into one—that is the upshot of the great socialist revolution brought about by the Bolsheviks. It constitutes the most oppressive of all despotisms that Russia has ever had to suffer.
After 1929, exiled Mensheviks such as Fyodor Dan began to argue that Stalin's Russia constituted a state capitalist society. In the United Kingdom, the orthodox Marxist group the Socialist Party of Great Britain
independently developed a similar doctrine. Although initially
beginning with the idea that Soviet capitalism differed little from
western capitalism, they later began to argue that the bureaucracy held
its productive property in common, much like the Catholic Church's. As John O'Neill notes:
Whatever other merits or problems their theories had, in arguing that the Russian revolution was from the outset a capitalist revolution they avoided the ad hoc and post hoc nature of more recent Maoist- and Trotskyist-inspired accounts of state capitalism, which start from the assumption that the Bolshevik revolution inaugurated a socialist economy that at some later stage degenerated into capitalism.
Rudolf Hilferding, writing in the Menshevik journal Socialist Courier
April 25 1940 rejected the concept of state capitalism, noting that, as
practiced in the Soviet Union, it lacked the dynamic aspects of
capitalism such as a market which set prices or a set of entrepreneurs
and investors which allocated capital. Thus, state capitalism was not a
form of capitalism but a form of totalitarianism.[41]
Shachtmanite Trotskyists
Leon Trotsky
said the term state capitalism "originally arose to designate the
phenomena which arise when a bourgeois state takes direct charge of the
means of transport or of industrial enterprises" and is therefore a
"partial negation" of capitalism. However, Trotsky rejected that description of the Soviet Union, claiming instead that it was a degenerated workers' state. After World War II, most Trotskyists accepted an analysis of the Soviet bloc countries as being deformed workers' states. However, alternative opinions of the Trotskyist tradition have developed the theory of state capitalism as a New Class theory to explain what they regard as the essentially non-socialist nature of the Soviet Union, Cuba, China and other self-proclaimed socialist states.
The discussion goes back to internal debates in the Left Opposition during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Ante Ciliga,
a member of the Left Opposition imprisoned at Verkhne-Uralsk in the
1930s, described the evolution of many Left Oppositionists to a theory
of state capitalism influenced by Gavril Myasnikov's Workers Group and other Left Communist factions. On release and returning to activity in the International Left Opposition, Ciliga "was one of the first, after 1936, to raise the theory [of state capitalism] in Trotskyist circles". George Orwell, who was an anti-Stalinist leftist like Ciliga, used the term in his Homage to Catalonia (1938).
After 1940, dissident Trotskyists developed more theoretically
sophisticated accounts of state capitalism. One influential formulation
has been that of the Johnson–Forest Tendency of C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya who formulated her theory in the early 1940s on the basis of a study of the first three Five Year Plans alongside readings of Marx's early humanist writings. Their political evolution would lead them away from Trotskyism. Another is that of Tony Cliff, associated with the International Socialist Tendency and the British Socialist Workers Party
(SWP), dating back to the late 1940s. Unlike Johnson-Forest, Cliff
formulated a theory of state capitalism that would enable his group to
remain Trotskyists, albeit heterodox ones. A relatively recent text by Stephen Resnick and Richard D. Wolff, Class Theory and History,
explores what they term state capitalism in the former Soviet Union,
continuing a theme that has been debated within Trotskyist theory for
most of the past century.
Compare with other left-wing theories regarding Soviet-style societies: deformed workers' states, degenerated workers' states, new class, state socialism and bureaucratic collectivism.
Use by later left communists and council communists
The left communist/council communist traditions outside Russia consider the Soviet system as state capitalist. Otto Rühle, a major German left communist, developed this idea from the 1920s and it was later articulated by Dutch council communist Anton Pannekoek, for instance in "State Capitalism and Dictatorship" (1936).
Use by Maoists and anti-revisionists
From 1956 to the late 1970s, the Communist Party of China and their Maoist or anti-revisionist
adherents around the world often described the Soviet Union as state
capitalist, essentially using the accepted Marxist definition, albeit on
a different basis and in reference to a different span of time from
either the Trotskyists or the left-communists. Specifically, the Maoists
and their descendants use the term state capitalism as part of their
description of the style and politics of Nikita Khrushchev and his successors as well as to similar leaders and policies in other self-styled "socialist" states. This was involved in the ideological Sino-Soviet Split.
After Mao Zedong's death, amidst the supporters of the Cultural Revolution and the "Gang of Four",
most extended the state capitalist formulation to China itself and
ceased to support the Communist Party of China, which likewise distanced
itself from these former fraternal groups. The related theory of Hoxhaism was developed in 1978, largely by Socialist Albanian President Enver Hoxha, who insisted that Mao himself had pursued state capitalist and revisionist economic policies.
Most current communist groups descended from the Maoist
ideological tradition still adopt the description of both China and the
Soviet Union as being "state capitalist" from a certain point in their
history onwards—most commonly, the Soviet Union from 1956 to its
collapse in 1991 and China from 1976 to the present. Maoists and
"anti-revisionists" also sometimes use the term "social imperialism"
to describe socialist states that they consider to be actually
capitalist in essence—their phrase, "socialist in words, imperialist in
deeds" denotes this.
Use by liberal economists
Murray Rothbard advanced a right-libertarian analysis of state capitalism
Murray Rothbard, an anarcho-capitalist philosopher, uses the term interchangeably with the term state monopoly capitalism
and uses it to describe a partnership of government and big business in
which the state intervenes on behalf of large capitalists against the
interests of consumers. He distinguishes this from laissez-faire capitalism where big business is not protected from market forces. This usage dates from the 1960s, when Harry Elmer Barnes described the post-New Deal economy of the United States as "state capitalism". More recently, Andrei Illarionov, former economic advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin, resigned in December 2005, protesting Russia's "embracement of state capitalism".
The term is not used by the classical liberals to describe the public ownership of the means of production. The Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises
explained the reason: "The socialist movement takes great pains to
circulate frequently new labels for its ideally constructed state. Each
worn-out label is replaced by another which raises hopes of an ultimate
solution of the insoluble basic problem of Socialism—until it becomes
obvious that nothing has been changed but the name. The most recent
slogan is "State Capitalism." It is not commonly realized that this
covers nothing more than what used to be called Planned Economy and
State Socialism, and that State Capitalism, Planned Economy, and State
Socialism diverge only in non-essentials from the "classic" ideal of
egalitarian Socialism".
Use by Italian Fascists
Benito Mussolini claimed that the modern phase of capitalism is state socialism "turned on its head"
On economic issues, Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini
claimed in 1933 that were Fascism to follow the modern phase of
capitalism, its path would "lead inexorably into state capitalism, which
is nothing more nor less than state socialism
turned on its head. In either event, [whether the outcome be state
capitalism or state socialism] the result is the bureaucratization of
the economic activities of the nation". Mussolini claimed that capitalism had degenerated in three stages, starting with dynamic or heroic capitalism (1830–1870), followed by static capitalism (1870–1914) and then reaching its final form of decadent capitalism, also known as supercapitalism beginning in 1914.
Mussolini denounced supercapitalism for causing the "standardization of humankind" and for causing excessive consumption.
Mussolini claimed that at this stage of supercapitalism "[it] is then
that a capitalist enterprise, when difficulties arise, throws itself
like a dead weight into the state's arms. It is then that state
intervention begins and becomes more necessary. It is then that those
who once ignored the state now seek it out anxiously".
Due to the inability of businesses to operate properly when facing
economic difficulties, Mussolini claimed that this proved that state
intervention into the economy was necessary to stabilize the economy.
Mussolini claimed that dynamic or heroic capitalism and the bourgeoisie could be prevented from degenerating into static capitalism and then supercapitalism only if the concept of economic individualism were abandoned and if state supervision of the economy was introduced. Private enterprise would control production, but it would be supervised by the state. Italian Fascism presented the economic system of corporatism
as the solution that would preserve private enterprise and property
while allowing the state to intervene in the economy when private
enterprise failed.
In Western countries
An
alternate definition is that state capitalism is a close relationship
between the government and private capitalism, such as one in which the
private capitalists produce for a guaranteed market. An example of this
would be the military–industrial complex in which autonomous entrepreneurial firms produce for lucrative government contracts and are not subject to the discipline of competitive markets.
Both the Trotskyist definition and this one derive from
discussion among Marxists at the beginning of the 20th century, most
notably Nikolai Bukharin, who in his book Imperialism and the world economy thought that advanced, imperialist countries exhibited the latter definition and considered (and rejected) the possibility that they could arrive at the former.
State capitalism is practised by a variety of Western countries with respect to certain strategic resources important for national security.
These may involve private investment as well. For example, a government
may own or even monopolize oil production or transport infrastructure
to ensure availability in the case of war. Examples include Neste, Equinor and OMV.
There are limits according to arguments that state capitalism
exists to ensure that wealth creation does not threaten the ruling
elite's political power, which remains unthreatened by tight connections
between the government and the industries while state capitalist fears
of capitalism's "creative destruction", of the threat of revolution and
of any significant changes in the system result in the persistence of
industries that have outlived their economic usefulness and an
inefficient economic environment that is ill equipped to inspire
innovation.
In European studies
Several
European scholars and political economists have used the term to
describe one of the three major varieties of capitalism that prevail in
the modern context of the European Union. This approach is mainly influenced by Schmidt's (2002) article on The Futures of European Capitalism,
in which he divides modern European capitalism in three groups:
"Market", "Managed" and "State". Here, state capitalism refers to a
system where high coordination between the state, large companies and
labor unions ensures economic growth and development in a quasi-corporatist model. The author cites France and to a lesser extent Italy as the prime examples of modern European state capitalism. A general theory of capitalist forms, whereby state capitalism is a particular case, was developed by Ernesto Screpanti,
who argued that soviet type economies of the 20th century used state
capitalism to sustain processes of primitive accumulation. In their historical analysis of the Soviet Union, Marxist economists Richard D. Wolff and Stephen Resnick identify state capitalism as the dominant class system throughout the history of the Soviet Union.
State monopoly capitalism
The theory of state monopoly capitalism was initially a neo-Stalinist doctrine popularised after World War II. Lenin had claimed in 1916 that World War I had transformed laissez-faire capitalism into monopoly capitalism,
but he did not publish any extensive theory about the topic. The term
refers to an environment where the state intervenes in the economy to
protect large monopolistic or oligopolistic businesses from competition by smaller firms. The main principle of the ideology is that big business, having achieved a monopoly or cartel position in most markets of importance, fuses with the government apparatus. A kind of financial oligarchy
or conglomerate therefore results, whereby government officials aim to
provide the social and legal framework within which giant corporations
can operate most effectively. This is a close partnership between big
business and government and it is argued that the aim is to integrate
labor unions completely in that partnership.
State monopoly capitalist (stamocap) theory aims to define the
final historical stage of capitalism following monopoly capitalism,
consistent with Lenin's definition of the characteristics of imperialism
in his short pamphlet of the same name. Occasionally the stamocap
concept also appears in neo-Trotskyist theories of state capitalism as well as in libertarian
anti-state theories. The analysis made is usually identical in its main
features, but very different political conclusions are drawn from it.
Political implications
Ever since monopoly capital took over the world, it has kept the greater part of humanity in poverty, dividing all the profits among the group of the most powerful countries. The standard of living in those countries is based on the extreme poverty of our countries.
— Che Guevara, 1965
The strategic political implication of stamocap theory towards the end of the Joseph Stalin
era and afterwards was that the labor movement should form a "people's
democratic alliance" under the leadership of the Communist Party with
the progressive middle classes and small business against the state and
big business (called "monopoly" for short). Sometimes this alliance was
also called the "anti-monopoly alliance".
Neo-Trotskyist theory
In neo-Trotskyist theory, such an alliance was rejected as being based either on a false strategy of popular fronts, or on political opportunism, said to be incompatible either with a permanent revolution or with the principle of independent working class political action.
The state
in Soviet-type societies was redefined by the neo-Trotskyists as being
also state-monopoly capitalist. There was no difference between the West
and the East in this regard. Consequently, some kind of
anti-bureaucratic revolution was said to be required, but different
Trotskyist groups quarreled about what form such a revolution would need
to take, or could take.
Some Trotskyists believed the anti-bureaucratic revolution would
happen spontaneously, inevitably and naturally, others believed it
needed to be organized—the aim being to establish a society owned and
operated by the working class. According to the neo-Trotskyists, the
Communist Party could not play its leading role because it did not
represent the interests of the working class.
Criticism
When
Varga introduced the theory, orthodox Stalinist economists attacked it
as incompatible with the doctrine that state planning was a feature only
of socialism and that "under capitalism anarchy of production reigns".
Critics of the stamocap theory (e.g. Ernest Mandel and Leo Kofler) claimed the following:
- Stamocap theory wrongly implied that the state could somehow overrule inter-capitalist competition, the laws of motion of capitalism and market forces generally, supposedly cancelling out the operation of the law of value.
- Stamocap theory lacked any sophisticated account of the class basis of the state and the real linkages between governments and elites. It postulated a monolithic structure of domination which in reality did not exist in that way.
- Stamocap theory failed to explain the rise of neo-liberal ideology in the business class, which claims precisely that an important social goal should be a reduction of the state's influence in the economy.
- Stamocap theory failed to show clearly what the difference was between a socialist state and a bourgeois state, except that in a socialist state the Communist Party (or, rather, its central committee) played the leading political role. In that case, the class-content of the state itself was defined purely in terms of the policy of the ruling political party (or its central committee).
In popular culture
- WALL-E has the "Buy n' Large" corporation, which acted as the de facto and possibly de jure government in the decades before, and after, the evacuation of Earth.
- The Druuge, an alien race in Star Control, are governed by the Crimson Corporation, which owns the Druuge home planet and everything on it. All Druuge are employees and/or shareholders of this corporation and Druuge who lose their jobs are immediately executed for stealing the planet's air, which the company owns, by breathing it.
Current forms in the 21st century
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 enterprises.
China
Many analysts assert that China is one of the main examples of state capitalism in the 21st century. In his book, The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations, political scientist Ian Bremmer
describes China as the primary driver for the rise of state capitalism
as a challenge to the free market economies of the developed world,
particularly in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Bremmer draws a broad definition of state capitalism as such:
In this system, governments use various kinds of state-owned companies to manage the exploitation of resources that they consider the state's crown jewels and to create and maintain large numbers of jobs. They use select privately owned companies to dominate certain economic sectors. They use so-called sovereign wealth funds to invest their extra cash in ways that maximize the state's profits. In all three cases, the state is using markets to create wealth that can be directed as political officials see fit. And in all three cases, the ultimate motive is not economic (maximizing growth) but political (maximizing the state's power and the leadership's chances of survival). This is a form of capitalism but one in which the state acts as the dominant economic player and uses markets primarily for political gain.
Following on Bremmer, Aligica and Tarko further develop the theory that state capitalism in countries like modern day China and Russia is an example of a rent-seeking
society. They argue that following the realization that the centrally
planned socialist systems could not effectively compete with capitalist
economies, formerly Communist Party political elites are trying to
engineer a limited form of economic liberalization that increases
efficiency while still allowing them to maintain political control and
power.
In his article "We're All State Capitalists Now", British historian and Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University Niall Ferguson
warns against "an unhelpful oversimplification to divide the world into
'market capitalist' and 'state capitalist' camps. The reality is that
most countries are arranged along a spectrum where both the intent and
the extent of state intervention in the economy vary". He then notes:
The real contest of our time is not between a state-capitalist China and a market-capitalist America, with Europe somewhere in the middle. It is a contest that goes on within all three regions as we all struggle to strike the right balance between the economic institutions that generate wealth and the political institutions that regulate and redistribute it.
In the common program set up by the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference
in 1949, in effect the country’s interim constitution, state capitalism
meant an economic system of corporatism. It provided that:
Whenever necessary and possible, private capital shall be encouraged to develop in the direction of state capitalism.
Analysis of the "Chinese model" by the economists Julan Du and Chenggang Xu finds that the contemporary economic system of the People's Republic of China
represents a state capitalist system as opposed to a market socialist
system. The reason for this categorization is the existence of financial markets
in the Chinese economic system, which are absent in the market
socialist literature and in the classic models of market socialism; and
that state profits are retained by enterprises rather than being
equitably distributed among the population in a basic income/social dividend
or similar scheme, which are major features in the market socialist
literature. They conclude that China is neither a form of market
socialism nor a stable form of capitalism.
Norway
The government of Norway has ownership stakes in many of the country's largest publicly listed companies, owning 37% of the Oslo stock market and operates the country's largest non-listed companies including Statoil and Statkraft. The government also operates a sovereign wealth fund, the Government Pension Fund of Norway, whose partial objective is to prepare Norway for a post-oil future.
Modern Norwegian state capitalism has its origins in public ownership of the country's oil reserves and in the country's post-World War II social democratic reforms.
Singapore
Singapore's government owns controlling shares in many government-linked companies and directs investment through sovereign wealth funds, an arrangement commonly cited as state capitalism.
Singapore has attracted some of the world's most powerful corporations
through business friendly legislation and through the encouragement of
Western style corporatism, with close cooperation between the state and
corporations. Singapore's large holdings of government-linked companies
and the state's close cooperation with business are defining aspects of Singapore's economic model.
Taiwan
Taiwan's
economy has been classified as a state capitalist system influenced by
its Leninist model of political control, a legacy which still lingers in
the decision-making process. Taiwan's economy
includes a number of state-owned enterprises, but the Taiwanese state's
role in the economy shifted from that of an entrepreneur to a minority
investor in companies alongside the democratization agenda of the late
1980s.
Some Taiwanese economists refer to Taiwan's economy model as "party-state capitalism".
