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Concept
State capitalism
Summary
State capitalism is an economic system in which the state undertakes business and commercial (i.e. for-profit) economic activity and where the means of production are nationalized as state-owned enterprises (including the processes of capital accumulation, centralized management and wage labor). The definition can also include the state dominance of corporatized government agencies (agencies organized along business-management practices) or of public companies such as publicly listed corporations in which the state has controlling shares.
A state capitalist country is one where the government controls the economy and essentially acts like a single huge corporation, extracting surplus value from the workforce in order to invest it in further production. This designation applies regardless of the political aims of the state, even if the state is nominally socialist. Some scholars argue that the economy of the Soviet Union and of the Eastern Bloc countries modeled after it, including Maoist China, were state capitalist systems, and some western commentators believe that the current economies of China and Singapore also constitute a mixture of state-capitalism with private-capitalism.
State capitalism is used by various authors in reference to a private capitalist economy controlled by a state, i.e. a private economy that is subject to economic planning and interventionism. It has also been used to describe the controlled economies of the Great Powers during World War I. Alternatively, state capitalism may refer to an economic system where the means of production are privately owned, but the state has considerable control over the allocation of credit and investment. This was the case of Western European countries during the post-war consensus and of France during the period of dirigisme after World War II. Other examples include Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew and Turkey, as well as military dictatorships during the Cold War and fascist regimes such as Nazi Germany.
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