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I think you're exaggerating the scale of nationalization in Western society after the second imperialist war. For example, I have seen figures according to which the public sector in Italy did not exceed 40%, and in England 25% of industry. Nevertheless, I agree with you there has been a high level of nationalization and state control in the West for several decades.
Some researchers describes the Soviet economy as a "mobilization" economy. As Mike Harman wrote to me "as when in war-time countries certain aspects of capitalist process are modified but not done away with. Who would say the USA ceased being capitalist during WW2?"
This is the most interesting question for me. The fact is that in the era of world wars, many authors wrote that capitalism is over! Theories of bureaucratic collectivism, military socialism, etc., appeared. Many wrote about it. Walter Rathenau, Ernst Jünger, Max Shechtman...
Some researchers, such as Shechtman, believed that a world war or the monopolism and the gigantism of modern capitalist production led to over-centralization of management and a concentration of resources in the hands of the state. So a state distribution of industrial products and food would lead to the transformation of capitalism into a system of totalitarian bureaucratic society based on central planning - "bureaucratic collectivism".
In Russia anarchist Andrei Andreev and some other people developed similar ideas but they did not associate these ideas with war. They believed that the class of owners can be replaced by a new class of exploiters - educated management, intellectuals. By the way, they voiced this idea half a century before John Kenneth Galbraith and his theory of industrial society, in which management plays a Central role, including state management.
Andreev believed that the left parties, with their ideas of a centralized state and a planned economy, really reject capitalism. But they do so not becouse they want create a classless society, but to put management in the place of exploiters. So for the left-wing parties, capitalists are "class enemies" as competitors in the struggle for control of property and for the right to exploit workers.
Andreev believed that within capitalism there were conditions for the maturation and development of a new exploitative but non-capitalist system, and the left parties are connected with the interests of new exploiters, who replaced the old ones, just as the capitalists replaced the feudal lords.
John Kenneth Galbraith the famous USA economist believed in the role of government in economic planning. He thought that the motivation of large corporations depends on the influence of "technostructure" or departmental management, and such corporations are governed by the desire for security and expansion, rather than the pursuit of maximum profit. In the book "Economic theory and social goals" J. K. Galbraith noted that corporations managed by the technostructure make up the planning subsystem of the economy, and small firms - the market subsystem.
Let me tell you what I think. I am not a fanatical proponent of the theory of the Asian moud of production in the spirit of Wittfogel or Baro. But I believe that this approach should be taken into account, as well as the theory of bureaucratic collectivism etc.
Currently, the spectacular counter-offensive of neoliberalism has thrown this opportunity away. But in the world of the future, we can see a new round of protectionism and world wars, hot and cold. And who knows what will become, for example, China? We can see the new rise of the masses in China, and why don't you let us see the new Mao or Qin Shi Huang?
Just... The concept of state capitalism raises too many questions to be considered basic. Realy! 
I'd also try messaging individual admins: Steven, Juan Conatz, or, dare I say it, the ever-present Mike Harman.
Right, and that makes sense. Whether the managers are capitalists, workers, or even some mixture of both, they don't constitute a class of their own; they are recruited from one or more of the existing classes of capitalist society. They may enjoy particular benefits not available to others and they certainly perform a distinct social function, but they do not form a separate class, since they ultimately relate to the means of production either as capitalists (like you say) or as workers.
On the other hand, if we are going to say that in the USSR, the bureaucracy collectively owned the means of production, and therefore formed a class, we must be very careful about what that implies. One explanation is that the bureaucracy somehow autonomized itself (as suggested by Kautsky, who would claim in his late years that in the USSR, the State stood above both labor and capital) and constituted itself into a new class – that is the basis of all the "bureaucratic collectivism" / "managerial revolution" theories. However, then we face the problem of (1) postulating an entirely new mode of production totally unknown to classical Marxism1 and (2) suggesting that a class only constituted itself after coming to power.
The other option is that the Soviet bureaucracy corresponded to one of the historically known ruling classes. We both agree that the bureaucrats were not bourgeois, and I don't think that anyone would seriously argue that they were ancient Greece-style slave-owners or feudal lords, either. So what are we left with? The ruling class of the Asiatic mode of production, apparently. But that might not get rid of the problem either. I feel like my knowledge of Marx is insufficient here, but the impression I got is that he was unwilling to explicitly talk about classes in connection with the Asiatic MoP. In many places, he refers to the ruling minority in control of the Asiatic State as a "clique" or "higher community" rather than a class, and he stresses the communal ownership of land. Perhaps Zimin was on to something when he described the Asiatic MoP as a failed transition between classless and class societies that had some features of both.
I still think there is something to be said for the idea that despite the (admittedly convincing) appearances, the Soviet bureaucracy was not, in the strict Marxist definition of the term, a class.
I totally agree, and I'd further add that getting hung up on the purely nominal / formal existence of certain features of Soviet society has done great harm to Marxist analyses of the USSR. The Trotskyist conception of a degenerated workers' state is obviously the most egregious example, but Bordiga was guilty of this, too: it was enough for him that there were distinct enterprises in the USSR that paid their workers' "wages", put "prices" on their products, and generated "profits" while "trading" among themselves, and he never raised the question of whether the content of those forms was the same as in capitalism. (Then again, people like Chattopadhyay did raise that question and came to the conclusion that it was.)
That's a really important observation. If the Bolshevik-created state apparatus ended up absorbing the old Czarist bureaucracy, that would support Wittfogel's model of a "relapse" into the Asiatic mode of production after a brief revolutionary period that presented an opportunity for change.