Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
I cited it as partial evidence, not as evidence by itself. It's evidence that the proletariat remains in control of the state and that huge sections of the economy are not capitalist, as critics of China are quick to quip.
The issue is not *merely* nationalization, but nationalization to what purpose. Control over those industries by social democracy is an imperialist measure, designed to do two things: 1, maintain control in the metropole (you'll notice that the empire was falling apart during that period) by trying to "buy off" the proletariat at home, and 2, to stabilize the economy during both depression and recovery. In social democracy the capitalist class remains in firm control of the state (indeed social democracy happens because they are afraid they will soon lose it, as class antagonisms heighten under late imperialism), and the temporary measure of the nationalizations will be made apparent as they are returned to the control of individual capitalists at earliest opportunity. This is possible because being a capitalist-controlled state, their nationalization means that they never left control of the capitalist class in the first place, that property simply transferred to class control instead of individual control.
But what is the purpose of nationalization under a proletarian state? It is to place the industries and their produce at the disposal of the entire proletariat. The proletariat controls the state, and their state has no interest in perpetuating capitalist relations or structures in society (because all states are class dictatorships that remake society according to the interests of the class that rules it), so their surplus value is disposed of differently. In China, as in the USSR under the NEP, the purpose of creating a capitalist sector and SEZs is to engage in "socialist primitive accumulation." The commanding heights of the economy are maintained so that the workers' state can accrue the necessary capital, via foreign investment and the like, so that it can build up the necessary industries to be able to push forward toward communism in such a way that it can actually be protected and maintained. Soviet Russia in 1921, like PRC in the mid-late 1970s (or Vietnam in the mid-1980s, or Cuba today), could not handle this. They took one step back in order to be able to take two, well-collected steps forward later. Of course the question is not just economic it is geopolitical: both instances also feature imperialist encirclement. In such an environment one must tread very carefully, or any and every mistake will be used against you by your enemy.
But the creation of a capitalist sector does not mean a reversion to a capitalist state, that can only happen through violent dissolution. And we have not seen that in China. So if a worker's state once existed there, then it has never since ceased to.
I've already done this. The soviet is the primary difference structurally, but also important is which the state's violence is wielded against (not "members of which class," because obviously there are still going to be elements of the lower class that harbor counter-revolutionary views and engage in counter-revolutionary acts. This is politics of class and power, not individual ID politics). In a worker's state the law, the police, the army, the systems that maintain power and order, and maintain the balance of forces in society are "biased" in favor of the proletariat. It is more complex than simply holding up two "models" of the state and seeing at face-value which is different. It take class analysis. That is especially true during the age of imperialism, where socialist states do not have the luxury of proceeding toward communism as fast as they would like. Protecting the proletarian dictatorship is the most important thing, because it enables everything else. They're not going to be perfect, model societies according to what the books say they should look like.
