If capitalism is a market-based system, Mao's China and Stalin's USSR were certainly not state capitalist. Today's America, Bailout Nation is more state capitalist, populated by too big to fail financial institutions.
The US transitioned from empire demolition to empire building with astonishing speed in 1944-47. I've written about the Indochinese part of the story here: https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/mythbusting-tour-vietnam-a-war-with-no-winner-part-1-393f013bff01 (one of 3).
I was #96 in the draft lottery when Kissinger and Le Duc Tho signed a month before my 18th birthday. So it's personal.
The Latin American part of the story is still more squalid: https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/post-cards-from-the-border-refugee-crisis-e152c3a7e96c
I live in Latvia. If you want to see the detritus of how state-controlled economies worked, come visit. I also went to Hungary in 1980 and 1988 and Yugoslavia in 1980 and 1986 and saw the communist mafia system's dysfunction up close.
Controlled experiments in evidence-based economics:
West vs East Germany (Mercedes vs Trabi)
South vs North Korea
South Korea GDP per capita in 1961: same as India.
Now: >10x as high as India.
Taiwan vs pre-1979 China
Hong Kong vs pre-1979 China
Singapore vs pre-1979 China
(all 3 examples with the same culture and people)
Miami vs Havana Cubans (same culture, same people)
post vs pre 1991 India (the licensing Raj)
Poland today vs Poland in 1991.
Dutch Disease Netherlands vs the Netherlands now
China has the largest middle class in the history of the world, created by Deng Xiao Ping's market-based reforms begun in 1979. The capitalist cat catches mice better than the CCP cat. Argue with results and you lose the argument. Same for Vietnam. They're nasty regimes but produce very high growth and far more prosperity than their planned economy predecessors. I'm no apostle of efficient markets, but it's clear that no economy can function without a market-driven price discovery mechanism that prevents farmers from feeding subsidized bread to pigs--a common Soviet practice.
Of course, an unregulated purely capitalist system with no social contract won't last five minutes, just like a road network with no traffic rules and lights. The essential question is whether the rulers who make the system's rules are subject to the rules the rest of us have to live by. No complex society can prosper without socialist and capitalist parts. The question is who gets the socialism and who gets the capitalism. In the American plutocrats' plantation big business gets socialism (big tech's royalty-free use of the fed-financed DARPA internet, GPS and mobile phone tech and big pharma's harvesting of fed-financed university research) and the rest of us get cutthroat, social darwinist capitalism. The social market economies of the Nordic countries, Germany and the Netherlands and Australia, Canada and NZ strike a more reasonable balance. Any American who can't see this suffers from American exceptionalist not invented here syndrome.
