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. Engels described state capitalism as a new form or variant of capitalism. In 1896, following Engels, the German Social Democrat Wilhelm Liebknecht said: "Nobody has combated State Socialism more than we German Socialists; nobody has shown more distinctively than I that State Socialism is really State capitalism." It has been suggested that the concept of state capitalism can be traced back to Mikhail Bakunin's critique during the First International of the potential for state exploitation under Marxist-inspired socialism, or to Jan Wacław Machajski's argument in The Intellectual Worker (1905) that socialism was a movement of the intelligentsia as a class, resulting in a new type of society he termed state capitalism. For anarchists, state socialism is equivalent to state capitalism, hence oppressive and merely a shift from private capitalists to the state being the sole employer and capitalist. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism and Imperialism and World Economy, both Vladimir Lenin and Nikolai Bukharin, respectively, had similarly identified the growth of state capitalism as one of the main features of capitalism in its imperialist epoch. In The State and Revolution, Lenin wrote that "the erroneous bourgeois reformist assertion that monopoly capitalism or state-monopoly capitalism is no longer capitalism, but can now be called "state socialism" and so on, is very common". During World War I, using Lenin's idea that tsarism was taking a Prussian path to capitalism, the Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin identified a new stage in the development of capitalism in which all sectors of national production and all important social institutions had become managed by the state—he termed this new stage state capitalism. After the October Revolution, Lenin used the term state capitalism positively. In spring 1918, during a brief period of economic liberalism prior to the introduction of war communism and again during the New Economic Policy (NEP) of