Reply #27: Marx was not for state ownership whatsoever. He identified the State as a Capitalist institution [View All]

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He does this clearly. Marx never advocated for 'state control'. That would (as you correctly assess) be nothing more than state capitalism or as its commonly called 'a degraded worker state'.

Marx called for the withering away of the State and said that it would happen after the working class rose up against its masters. How exactly the withering away would happen he did not make clear. Lenin was the first to take a stab at this. He prescribed (in State and Revolution) that after the Revolution, workers councils would develop. Everyone would make a fair wage. There would be some bureaucrats necessary to keep trains running but they would be servants of the people and paid no more than "an average workman" and given no special pats on the back. The idea was that eventually, once the former ruling class accepted that it was equal to working people--in other words, when there were no 'classes' of people anymore--then even the bureaucratic functions of the State wouldn't be necessary.

But the idea that Marx believed the State should control everything is incorrect. The public should control the means of production, not the State.