Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
In "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism" and "Imperialism and World Economy", both Vladimir Lenin and Nikolai Bukharin, respectively, had similarly identified the growth of state capitalism as one of the main features of capitalism in its imperialist epoch. In "The State and Revolution", Lenin wrote that "the erroneous bourgeois reformist assertion that monopoly capitalism or state-monopoly capitalism is no longer capitalism, but can now be called "state socialism" and so on, is very common". During World War I, using Lenin's idea that tsarism was taking a Prussian path to capitalism, the Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin identified a new stage in the development of capitalism in which all sectors of national production and all important social institutions had become managed by the state—he termed this new stage "state capitalism". After the October Revolution, Lenin used the term "state capitalism" positively. In spring 1918, during a brief period of economic liberalism prior to the introduction of war communism and again during the New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921, Lenin justified the introduction of state capitalism controlled politically by the dictatorship of the proletariat to further central control and develop the productive forces, making the following point: