Trotsky could write a quarter of a century later, in The Manifesto of the Communist International to the Workers of the World:
The statisation of economic life, against which the capitalist liberalism used to protest so much, has become an accomplished fact . . . It is impossible to return not only to free competition but even to the domination of trusts, syndicates and other economic octopuses. Today the one and only issue is: Who shall hereforth be the bearer of statised production-the imperialist state or the victorious proletariat. 89
What all of them recognised was that state rather than private ownership of the means of production did not alter the fundamental relations of production or the dynamic of capitalist accumulation. For the state, the purpose of nationalised industry was to enable domestic accumulation to match that undertaken by foreign rivals so as to be able to survive successfully in economic and/or military competition. To this end, the labour employed remained wage labour, and the attempt was made to hold its remuneration down to the minimal level required to sustain and reproduce labour power. The state might plan production within the enterprises it owned, but its planning was subordinated to external competition, just as the planning within any privately owned firm was. The self-expansion of capital remained the goal, and this meant that the law of value operated and made itself felt on the internal operations of the enterprises.
In behaving like this, state appointees behave as much like capitalists-as living embodiments of capital accumulation at the expense of workers-as do private entrepreneurs or shareholders.
It was a failure to recognise this that led Hilferding in the 1 920s to come to the conclusion that "organised" capitalism was overcoming the contradictions analysed by Marx. By the late 1 930s state planning in Nazi Germany led him to conclude that what existed was no longer capitalism at all, but a new form of class society, in which "organisation" had superseded "capitalism", and where the driving force had ceased to be profit making to feed the competitive accumulation of rival capitals.
What Hilferding failed to grasp-as do all those today who still identify capitalism with the private ownership of firms competing in free markets-is that the system remained based on competitive accumulation between different capitals, even if these
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Understanding the System: Marx and Beyond