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“Burnham and Shachtman maintained that the Soviet Union was no longer a workers state and that the bureaucracy had emerged as the new ruling class in what they referred to as ‘state capitalism.’ Trotsky understood that this position expressed the skepticism of petty-bourgeois strata toward the working class, and already in ‘The USSR in War’ sharpened the question very clearly.”

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/09/28/heal-s28.html

We should more carefully draw the line between Shachtman’s idea of state capitalism and the ideas of Engels and Lenin.

Engels wrote:

But neither the conversion into joint stock companies nor into state property deprives the productive forces of their character as capital… The modern state, whatever its form, is then the state of the capitalists, the ideal collective body of all the capitalists. The more productive forces it takes over as its property, the more it becomes the real collective body of the capitalists, the more citizens it exploits. The workers remain wage-earners, proletarians. The capitalist relationship isn’t abolished; it is rather pushed to the extreme. But at this extreme it is transformed into its opposite. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but it contains within itself the formal means, the key to the solution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism

Engels does not spell out here when exactly “state property deprives the productive forces of their character as capital…” We can assume this has both an economic and political dual-nature. Economically, the wages should always equal the value of the product produced. A worker with a high-value capital machine will earn more without working more than a similar worker with a low-value capital machine or factory. Only freedom for the unions, as supported by the Left Communists, can stop production where low levels of capital development interfere with workers’ attaining equal pay. Politically, since the workers would own the capital and receive a share of the profits, they would also have a vote in the workers’ committees. In practice, however, the Bolsheviks removed elected leaders in the Soviets and replaced them with unelected appointments, many times Tsarist officials or other reactionaries, liberals, and careerists. While some might argue civil war made democracy impossible, the actual history reveals that the worst anti-democratic measures came into affect after the civil war ended.

The Bolsheviks banned the Workers’ Opposition and the Democratic Centralists at the Tenth Party Congress, with a secret resolution, in March 8-16, 1921. The Civil War effectively ended in November of 1920. If the Civil War really brought about “War Communism” and the end of factions, this would not have happened in 1921 but in 1918 when the war began! This is no small matter to just brush off lackadaisically. A similar process occurred after the U.S. Civil War: Abraham Lincoln died like Lenin while Ulysses S. Grant became an exterminator of Native Americans. The political marginalization of the banned factions did not happen secretly or in a non-violent way. The secret resolution created outrage throughout the new Comintern at the Bolshevik secret-police, its anti-democratic crushing of Labor Minister and Executive Committee member Shliapnikov, and his large base of support in the unionized working class.

Lenin also wrote:

State capitalism would be a step forward as compared with the present state of affairs in our Soviet Republic. If in approximately six months’ time state capitalism became established in our Republic, this would be a great success and a sure guarantee that within a year socialism will have gained a permanently firm hold.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism

Lenin intended consciously to implement state capitalism according to Engels’ definition. A year later, he thought, Russia would transition from state capitalism to socialism. Also in the Tenth Party Congress, the USSR switched from its policies of War Communism to the NEP. This coincided with a turn not towards state socialism but state capitalism. It was meant to last 6 months, but it lasted 7 years.