alienating activists and militants with their organisational principles and manipulative tactics within popular structures and groups. At worst, these parties can seize power and create a new form of class society (a state capitalist one) in which the working class is oppressed by new bosses (namely, the party hierarchy and its appointees). Classical and orthodox Marxists Immediately after the Russian Revolution, many Western Marxists questioned whether socialism was possible in Russia. Specifically, Karl Kautsky said: After 1929, exiled Mensheviks such as Fyodor Dan began to argue that Stalin's Russia constituted a state capitalist society. In the United Kingdom, the orthodox Marxist group the Socialist Party of Great Britain independently developed a similar doctrine. Although initially beginning with the idea that Soviet capitalism differed little from western capitalism, they later began to argue that the bureaucracy held its productive property in common, much like the Catholic Church's. As John O'Neill notes: Writing in the Menshevik journal Socialist Courier on 25 April 25, Rudolf Hilferding rejected the concept of state capitalism, noting that as practiced in the Soviet Union it lacked the dynamic aspects of capitalism such as a market which set prices or a set of entrepreneurs and investors which allocated capital. According to Hilferding, state capitalism was not a form of capitalism, but rather a form of totalitarianism. Communist left and council communists Another early analysis of the Soviet Union as state capitalist came from various groups advocating left communism. One major tendency of the 1918 Russian communist left criticised the re-employment of authoritarian capitalist relations and methods of production. As Valerian Osinsky in particular argued, "one-man management" (rather than the democratic factory committees workers had established and Lenin abolished) and the other impositions of capitalist discipline would stifle the active participation of workers in the organisation of production. Taylorism converted workers into the appendages of machines and piece work imposed individualist rather than collective rewards in production so instilling petty bourgeois values into workers. In sum, these measures were seen as the re-transformation of proletarians within production from collective subject back into the atomised objects of capital. The working class, it was argued, had to participate consciously in economic as well as political administration. In 1918, this tendency within the left communists emphasized that the problem with capitalist production was that it treated workers as objects. Its transcendence lay in the workers' conscious creativity and participation, which is reminiscent