Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
While Marxist–Leninists maintain that workers in the Soviet Union and other socialist states had genuine control over the means of production through institutions such as trade unions, democratic and libertarian socialists argue that these states had only a limited number of socialist characteristics and in practice were state capitalists that followed the capitalist mode of production. In ', Friedrich Engels argued that state ownership does not do away with capitalism by itself, but rather it would be the final stage of capitalism, consisting of ownership and management of large-scale production and communication by the bourgeois state. 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".