The ‘Norming’ of the Working Day

The concept of state monopoly capitalism has become well established in contemporary Marxist thought. This concept was introduced by Lenin during World War One to indicate the circumstance where the bourgeois state was required overtly to intervene in the economy in order to secure the reproduction of the social formation. 1 On the one hand, this meant that the concept of the ‘night-watchman’ state which had been theorized for the preceding stage of competitive capitalism had been transcended. On the other hand, this meant that the centralization and concentration of capital reflected in the development of oligopoly corresponded to a social form wherein ‘society’—apart from the ‘state’—clearly could not reproduce itself. This suggested the possibility, if not the necessity, of the further development of state planning, planning which would be an index of the demise of capitalism.