Marxist theorists never meant state capitalism to describe a successor to capitalism

Evidence

In fact neither Engels nor Bukharin nor Lenin, when they used the term state capitalism', was referring to a nonsocialist system which could succeed capitalism. Bukharin had only mentioned such a possibility once, in his Imperialism and World Economy, first published in 1918. Dwight Macdonald quoted the passage in his essay on The End of Capitalism in Germany’, published in 1941 in the Partisan Review, one of the most interesting forums in the United States for discussion on the interpretation of fascism … Were the commodity character of production to disappearfor instance through the organization of all world economy into one gigantic State trust, the impossibility of which we tried to prove in our chapter on ultra-imperialismwe should have an entirely new economic form. This would be capitalism no more, for the production of commodities would have disappeared; still less would it be socialism, for the power of one class over the other would have remained (and even grown stronger). Such an economic structure would, most of all, resemble a slave-owning economy where the slave market is absent. … Nazi Germany’s imperialist autarky policy made a transference of this idea to a single country or a single power system (although this was far from what Bukharin intended) seem quite plausible. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1173

Categorization

• XREF: How a theoretical category (state capitalism) gets hijacked from its originators’ intent and redeployed for a new referent (fascist Germany) parallels how other loaded terms migrate meaning.
• SHARE: Someone studying the intellectual genealogy of the term state capitalism or the Partisan Review circle would appreciate the Bukharin-quote-via-Dwight-Macdonald provenance chain.