END OF GERMAN CAPITALISM
209
can we not look for the development of the 'State--capitalist trust'
to work the same way?
Such,
in
fact, has been the expectation of most Marxists dur·
ing the last quarter-century. The early congresses of the Third
International were well aware of the trend towards 'State capital–
ism' which set in during the last war, and Lenin correctly predicted
the future rise of "vast State-capitalist and military trusts." The
crucial error of Marxist thought on this subject, however, was that
it was expected that this historical trend would intensify the social
and economic contradictions of capitalism-whereas it has actually
resulted in the destruction of capitalism itsslf and, consequently,
in the transposing of these contradictions into quite different terms.
(To say that fascism is not threatened by the contradictions of capi–
talism is not to say that it hasn't its own contradictions, in some
ways more serious than the capitalist ones.)
Consider, for example, Bukharin's
Imperialism
and
World
Economy.
First published in 1915, this book is more to the point
today than Lenin's better known
Imperialism,
since it deals mostly
with the question which is so crucial today: State intervention into
the
capitalist economy. Bukharin's is an extraordinarily prescient
book in some ways, and an extraordinarily shortsighted one in
others. Both in its vision and in its blindness it is typical of the
twentieth-century Marxist tradition.
Bukharin predicts in detail the rise of the 'State-capitalist
trust':
Competition reaches the highest, the last conceivable state of
development.
It
is now the competition of State capitalist trusts
in
the world market. ... The remnants of the old laissez-faire
ideology disappear, the epoch of the new 'mercantilism,' of impe·
rialism begins. ... With the growth of the importance of State
power, its inner structure also changes. The State becomes more
than ever before an 'executive committee' of the ruling class....
Thus the government is de facto transformed into a 'committee'
elected by the representatives of entrepreneurs' organizations....
A remarkable passage to be written in 1915! Yet the really
amazing thing is that Bukharin, like the other great Marxists, could
have seen so clearly the line of development world capitalism was
to
take after the war without apparently recognizing, even as a
theoretical possibility, that the rise of 'State capitalism' might
seriously affect and even destroy the capitalist system itself. It
