of Marx's critique of alienation. This type of criticism was revived on the left of the Russian Communist Party after the 10th Congress in 1921, which introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP). Many members of the Workers' Opposition and the Decists (both later banned) and two new underground left communist groups, Gavril Myasnikov's Workers' Group and the Workers' Truth group, developed the idea that Russia was becoming a state capitalist society governed by a new bureaucratic class. The most developed version of this idea was in a 1931 booklet by Myasnikov. The left and council communist traditions outside Russia consider the Soviet system as state capitalist, although some left communists such as Amadeo Bordiga also referred to it as simply capitalism or capitalist mode of production. Otto Rühle, a major German left communist, developed this idea from the 1920s and it was later articulated by Dutch council communist Anton Pannekoek in "State Capitalism and Dictatorship" (1936). Trotskyists Leon Trotsky stated that the term state capitalism "originally arose to designate the phenomena which arise when a bourgeois state takes direct charge of the means of transport or of industrial enterprises" and is therefore a "partial negation" of capitalism. However, Trotsky rejected that description of the Soviet Union, claiming instead that it was a degenerated workers' state. After World War II, most Trotskyists accepted an analysis of the Soviet bloc countries as being deformed workers' states. However, alternative opinions within the Trotskyist tradition have developed the theory of state capitalism as a new class theory to explain what they regard as the essentially non-socialist nature of the Soviet Union, Cuba, China and other self-proclaimed socialist states. The discussion goes back to internal debates in the Left Opposition during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Ante Ciliga, a member of the Left Opposition imprisoned at Verkhne-Uralsk in the 1930s, described the evolution of many within the Left Opposition to a theory of state capitalism influenced by Gavril Myasnikov's Workers Group and other left communist factions. Following his release and his return to activity in the International Left Opposition, Ciliga "was one of the first, after 1936, to raise the theory [of state capitalism] in Trotskyist circles". George Orwell, who was an anti-Stalinist leftist like Ciliga, used the term in his Homage to Catalonia (1938). After 1940, dissident Trotskyists developed more theoretically sophisticated accounts of state capitalism. One influential formulation has been that of