Bureaucratic party rule can develop into a dictatorship masking capitalist development

Evidence

Demanding a greater intervention of proletarian elements in the life of the party and a diminution of the powers of the bureaucracy, they want basically to ensure the socialist and proletarian character of the revolution and to prevent a gradual transition to that democratic dictatorship—carapace for a developing capitalism—which was still the programme of Zinoviev and Co. in November 1917. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 180

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘carapace for a developing capitalism’ mechanism prefigures the later critique of bureaucratic state-capitalism and connects to concepts of formal vs actual subsumption of labor. — connects to: Schumpeter explained austerity’s failure through the bureaucratization of large firms — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 349; A distinct managerial class merged government and corporate power within capitalism — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 902; Democratic success required communist parties to adopt undemocratic organizational means — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past: The…, 376
• QUESTION: This diagnosis of democratic dictatorship as a shell for capitalism deserves closer study — how does Gramsci differentiate it from a genuinely socialist transition?