its main features, but very different political conclusions are drawn from it. Political implications The strategic political implication of stamocap theory towards the end of the Joseph Stalin era and afterwards was that the labour movement should form a people's democratic alliance under the leadership of the communist party with the progressive middle classes and small business against the state and big business (called monopoly for short). Sometimes this alliance was also called the anti-monopoly alliance. At the 1965 Afro-Asian Conference, delivered at the Second Economic Seminar of Afro-Asian Solidarity in Algeri, Che Guevara argued that "[e]ver since monopoly capital took over the world, it has kept the greater part of humanity in poverty, dividing all the profits among the group of the most powerful countries. The standard of living in those countries is based on the extreme poverty of our countries". Neo-Trotskyist theory In neo-Trotskyist theory, such an alliance was rejected as being based either on a false strategy of popular fronts, or on political opportunism, said to be incompatible either with a permanent revolution or with the principle of independent working class political action. The state in Soviet-type societies was redefined by the neo-Trotskyists as being also state-monopoly capitalist. There was no difference between the West and the East in this regard. Consequently, some kind of anti-bureaucratic revolution was said to be required, but different Trotskyist groups quarreled about what form such a revolution would need to take, or could take. Some Trotskyists believed the anti-bureaucratic revolution would happen spontaneously, inevitably and naturally, others believed it needed to be organised—the aim being to establish a society owned and operated by the working class. According to the neo-Trotskyists, the communist party could not play its leading role because it did not represent the interests of the working class. Criticism When Eugen Varga introduced the theory, orthodox Stalinist economists attacked it as incompatible with the doctrine that state planning was a feature only of socialism and that "under capitalism anarchy of production reigns". Critics of the stamocap theory (e.g. Ernest Mandel and Leo Kofler) claimed the following: Stamocap theory wrongly implied that the state could somehow overrule inter-capitalist competition, the laws of motion of capitalism and market forces generally, supposedly cancelling out the operation of the law of value. Stamocap theory lacked any sophisticated account of the class basis of the state and the real linkages between governments and elites.