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Re:On being the right size (1928) by vidarh on Monday October 14, 2013 @07:01AM (#6546522)
State socialism is arguably not Marxist, but Leninist. Many Marxist will also disagree with the term state socialism (many describe those regimes as state capitalist, on the basis that the organisation of capital remains as it does in market capitalist countries - de facto if not de jure concentrated on the hand of a small upper class that is exploiting the working class for profit).

But the criticism above seems to me to even describe "state socialism" in a way that is even largely incompatible with Leninist theory (though not with Stalinist practice).

Re:On being the right size (1928) by dnautics on Monday October 14, 2013 @11:19PM (#6551304)
keep in mind that Lenin was in his late teens when Tucker wrote this, so Leninism couldn't have existed as a commonly accepted political philosophy. For convenience, I've only taken the end of the Tuckerian analysis, so there are a few steps from Marxism to get to this point. This was a direct extrapolation and direct criticism of Marxism, and unless Tucker was a time traveller, it could not have been anything else (much less Stalinism).

It would be valid to invoke some sort of mechanism that prevents Marxism from getting to the point of state socialism where this quote takes off; but of course, empirically, Tucker's model seems to have been shown true in a few cases, so I would suggest there would need to be a heavier burden on describing exactly what needs to be different, and why.