"Direct, transactional government intervention in companies to secure critical industries and serve other policy ends will inevitably lead to favoritism, inefficiency, higher costs, and lower growth. Frontier companies are already pulling away from their competitors; discretionary intervention may further increase market concentration and widen the gap between the large incumbents and industry champions that benefit from government deals and access and the companies that do not.

Even for the businesses that benefit, the new discretionary state capitalism is a mixed blessing. They will face rising uncertainty and risk falling into governments’ cross hairs as everything from antitrust approvals to international mergers and acquisitions becomes less subject to predictable rules and more subject to the whim of political processes. Governments, meanwhile, may be eager to use the full range of tools available to them, but a heavy-handed, volatile state can quickly dampen economic activity and competition. Discretionary policymaking can distort corporate behavior, pushing companies to focus less on productivity and more on lobbying for political favor. And perhaps most important, a government will not succeed in securing its country’s economic future through investment in critical technology and manufacturing unless it also addresses underlying constraints, such as labor availability, skills gaps, or a burdensome regulatory environment. Economic history is littered with experiments in state capitalism that ended in failure, including U.S. price controls in the 1970s, which contributed to energy shortages and did little to tame inflation, and the 1975 nationalization of British Leyland Motor Corporation, which struggled mightily despite billions in government investment and was eventually dissolved. Policymakers keen on muscular intervention today must tread carefully or risk meeting the same fate."

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/trouble-state-capitalism#
#USA #Trump #StateCapitalism #Kleptocracy

State Capitalism – Be careful what you ask for!
Good Read!

By anointing winners and losers, State Capitalism may well create an enduring snake pit of favoritism, inefficiency, higher costs, lower growth, and stunted innovation. And it’s not just losers that lose, the “winners” will also face rising uncertainty and risk of falling out of favor with business operations subject to unpredictable rules and to the flights of fancy of political actors.

Access to foreign markets will become more uncertain/possibly curtailed as more and more countries seek to promote domestic champions and reduce dependence on foreign goods. Ultimately, state capitalism is self-defeating. The U.S. has maintained its lead over China due to the dynamism of open markets and the predictability of the rule of law. Replacing a system of economic rules with a system powered by political whims will be geopolitical economic malpractice. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/trouble-state-capitalism #Capitalism #StateCapitalism #Politics #Markets #Risk #Business #Innovation

Trump’s State Capitalism

https://murica.website/2026/01/trumps-state-capitalism-2/

It's really simple:

Unless you really love deepthroating #Trump's #boot and suck his dick whilst kissing the ring, you don't do #business in the #USA - period!

• The #US is ruled by it's #oligarch who has less patience than a spoiled rich brat who never got to learn to accept "No!" for an answer but also who can't be assed to remember or follow his own terms, which makes him worse than the worst cases of "ADHD" I could ever remember, let alone imagine.

This makes the #US a worse juristiction than "P.R." #China, #Russia and even #Somalia when it comes to #business because in those places the heads up top will generally leave businesses alone (As long as they pay their taxes / bribes / protection in time and don't meddle with politics!), whereas #Trumpism combines all the disadvantages of #fascism, #StateCapitalism, #warlordism and general #LateStageCapitalism without any of their "merits" for those who want to do business.

• Add to that the audacity of the US government to want to enforce it's laws and terms to businesses and assets overseas via #embargos that only serve #blackmail of #economies, and one gets only reasons to not wanting to do busiess there, even if we ignore the sinking net income and life expectancy of #USians...

The only way to fix this is to treat the US like #NorthKorea and completely isolate it: politically, socially, economically, militarily and technologically!

• Anything else is just normalizing #Neoimperialism at this point!

#commentary #sarcasm #politics #USpol #economy #tech

"Given what we know about the limited net surplus actually squeezed from agriculture and the scale of human loss, a softer, more balanced socialist strategy looks economically plausible and morally preferable. A reformed NEP with hard investment targets could have delivered comparable industrial capacity by the early 1940s, with fewer long-term distortions and a very different distribution of gains.

But plausibility on paper isn’t the same as political feasibility in 1928–32. Information was thin; the leadership’s worldview was siege-minded, which was hardly irrational given the collapse of collective-security efforts after 1933 and, ultimately, the 1941 German invasion; and incentives inside the party-state pushed toward command solutions. From that vantage point, the crash path felt “inevitable,” even if it wasn’t in a strict economic sense. The late-1980s debates in the Soviet Union revived the counterfactuals, including the idea that Lenin might have kept a mixed economy longer. As Alec Nove cautioned in the last edition of An Economic History of the USSR, it’s far from obvious he would have chosen differently had he lived into the 1930s.

So, I land here: a more humane path was possible, but not likely under the beliefs, threats, and institutions of the time. The lesson isn’t that speed always justifies the means. It’s that the means shape the society you end up with, long after the steel is rolled and the machines are built."

https://deveconhub.com/was-stalin-necessary-three-ways-to-read-soviet-industrialization/

#Russia #USSR #Stalin #Industrialization #NEP #Lenin #StateCapitalism

💯 👉"Critics of socialism argue that it is a cop-out to say that the USSR was not socialist. But it seems clear that in practical terms, those running the system were trying to beat capitalism at its own game. They were not only imprisoned in a competitive logic but also bound by its limited horizons.

Of course, this does not tell us what the Soviet economic system was. To pose that question, as some did in the USSR, was to step outside the ruling order and to invite retribution. The job of the economists that Feygin discusses was to help the system work better.

Yet even some of those who were at the center of these “insider” debates could not help wondering exactly what the USSR was. Feygin in particular instances Yakov Kronrod, who spent four decades or more trying to think not only about reform but also about value relations and the question of alienation and exploitation in the Soviet system (David Mandel’s book on Konrod, Democracy, Plan, and Market, is not cited, however).

In the event, the USSR and the wider Soviet-led bloc collapsed, becoming the “ruin” of Feygin’s title. It failed to catch up with (let alone overtake) the West, and it failed to satisfy the aspirations of its own population. The idea of socialism from above, directed by a plan, has not really recovered. When we think, therefore, of going beyond capitalism, we must think about different ends as well as different means.

A bottom-up, participative system might well be messy in different ways, but it would have to engage people. In the USSR, Soviet workers were never the knowing agents of their own fate. They figured only as a constraint..." 👈💯

https://jacobin.com/2025/11/soviet-economic-reform-workers-feygin/

#SovietUnion #USSR #Socialism #Capitalism #StateCapitalism #EconomicDemocracy #Gorbatchev #Perestroika

"In this episode, join your hosts Sam Thomas (resident Italophile), J.E. Morain, and James Crane for a discussion taking the 1951 polemic, “Murder of the Dead,” as a point of departure for deeper dive into Amadeo Bordiga’s bellicose and beautiful run of essays in eco-communism throughout the 50s and 60s. Topics of discussion include: Bordiga’s critique of a version of the ‘state capitalism’ thesis, the conceptual matrix of living/dead labor and variable/constant capital, the theoretical and stylistic function of ‘invariance’ in Bordiga's writings, coal mine collapses, the flooding of symbols of national pride, and scientific-scatological reflections on the ‘how’s of abolishing the antithesis of town and country. We end with a few remarks on the conquest of the fear of death and the “natural condition of the prosperity of the species” in Bordiga's 1961 “In Janitzio Death is not Scary.”

Other Bordiga essays discussed in the episode:

“The Filling and Bursting of Bourgeois Civilisation” (1951)

“The Human Species and the Earth’s Crust” (1952)

“The Spirit of Horsepower” (1953)

“Weird and Wonderful Tales of Modern Social Decadence” (1956)

“The Legend of the Piave” (1963)"

https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-4-amadeo-141919007?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link

#Marxism #StateCapitalism #Bordiga #Italy #ItalianMarxism