Radical council workers rejected state socialism as a new form of capitalist domination

Evidence

Th e strategies, however, diff ered. Whereas the miners with the Sankey Committee and the farmers and builders with their cooperatives or guilds attempted an alliance with the state to overcome the pillars of capitalism, the British and Italian councils declared war on the entire capitalist system— defi ning themselves in opposition to both the state and the private capitalists. Indeed, they abhorred the statism of the more docile reconstructionists, and they refuted the reconstructionist ideal of a transition from war collectivism to a socialist state, including the notion that it would serve as the path to workers’ emancipation. State ownership was understood as “the fi nal word in capitalist domination” and “pregnant with sinister dangers for the workers, who would become state serfs” (Th e Socialist, September 1916, from Hinton 1973, 47). — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 466

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to the long socialist debate on whether state ownership liberates or merely re-ranks workers as ‘state serfs’ — echoes anarcho-syndicalism and council communism against statist Leninism; connects to reading on Zamyatin’s We for a fictional treatment of the state-machine absorbing the individual. — connects to: Italian Socialists rejected parliamentarism while using elections to cultivate class consciousness — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 348; State-capitalism theory downgrades the economic base in favor of direct political domination — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 600; Overcoming capitalism alone would not prevent new forms of domination — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1568 (+2 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: when did the Labour/left shift from this hostility to state socialism to embracing nationalization as emancipation?

Broader Connections

• State-capitalism theory downgrades the economic base in favor of direct political domination #corroborates (0.88) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 600
• Overcoming capitalism alone would not prevent new forms of domination #corroborates (0.80) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1568
• Black radicals rejected Marxism for its Eurocentric blindness to racialism’s role in capitalism #complicates (0.80) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1437
• Oppositional workers’ organizations mirror capitalist structure and thereby absorb class struggle #exemplifies (0.75)