To begin with, our first undertaking is that we must dispel your fundamental error of treating markets and capitalism as synonyms. They are not. Markets predate capitalism by millennia through simple commodity production and exchange, and they will likely outlive it as well. The market is merely a mechanism for resource allocation and a tool to develop the productive forces, not the defining characteristic of a capitalist mode of production. Socialism utilizes the market to build the material wealth required for a higher stage of communism, subordinating it to the needs of society rather than allowing it to dictate social relations.

Furthermore, the expectation of direct, individualized ownership of the means of production is petty bourgeois nonsense. What Marxists actually advocate for is the ownership of the means of production as a class. It is the proletariat, organized as the ruling class, that collectively owns and controls the commanding heights of the economy. Demanding that workers hold literal, individualized deeds to their factories reflects a profound misunderstanding of socialized production and retreats into utopian petit-bourgeois ideology.

Finally, addressing the Trotskyist accusation of state capitalism requires looking past superficial appearances. State capitalism and the primary stage of socialism are necessarily very similar because they share many identical economic forms, such as commodity production, wage labor, and state enterprises. However, analyzing form devoid from class content is nonsense that elucidates nothing. The decisive factor is which class holds political supremacy and dictates the purpose of these economic forms. Under bourgeois state capitalism, the state apparatus serves to maximize profit for the monopoly bourgeoisie. In China, the state is an instrument of the dictatorship of the proletariat led by the Communist Party. Here, state capital is directed consciously to develop the productive forces, eradicate poverty, and build the material conditions for communism. The forms may resemble those of the transition period from capitalism, but the class content is entirely socialist because the market is strictly subordinated to the political and economic objectives of the working class.