Comic Strips

I did watch it, just posting a 4 minute video from an anarchist YouTuber doesn't mean I immediately need to agree with it. Anark coats it as a Marxist critique, but it's thoroughly an anarchist critique attempting to claim higher and universal legitimacy by invoking Marx and Engels, but what Marx and Engels described as state capitalism was Bismarck's Germany, which had the large firms and key industries absolutely privately owned with minor exceptions like railways.

The state in Bismarck's Germany played a hand in directing the private economy, while retaining class relations. It wasn't because they had a state, it's because the base of production was capitalism, subject to the M-C...P...C'-M' circuit. Anark's critique is ignorant at best to dishonest at worst. Here's Engels directly speaking about it:

For only when the means of production and distribution have actually outgrown the form of management by joint-stock companies, and when, therefore, the taking them over by the State has become economically inevitable, only then — even if it is the State of today that effects this — is there an economic advance, the attainment of another step preliminary to the taking over of all productive forces by society itself. But of late, since Bismarck went in for State-ownership of industrial establishments, a kind of spurious Socialism has arisen, degenerating, now and again, into something of flunkyism, that without more ado declares all State-ownership, even of the Bismarkian sort, to be socialistic. Certainly, if the taking over by the State of the tobacco industry is socialistic, then Napoleon and Metternich must be numbered among the founders of Socialism. If the Belgian State, for quite ordinary political and financial reasons, itself constructed its chief railway lines; if Bismarck, not under any economic compulsion, took over for the State the chief Prussian lines, simply to be the better able to have them in hand in case of war, to bring up the railway employees as voting cattle for the Government, and especially to create for himself a new source of income independent of parliamentary votes — this was, in no sense, a socialistic measure, directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously. Otherwise, the Royal Maritime Company, the Royal porcelain manufacture, and even the regimental tailor of the army would also be socialistic institutions, or even, as was seriously proposed by a sly dog in Frederick William III's reign, the taking over by the State of the brothels.

Instead, what needs to happen is proletarian revolution, and gradual appropriation of property into the hands of the new, proletarian state, until all property is collectivized and the proletarian state is no more:

When, at last, it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a State, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not "abolished". It dies out. This gives the measure of the value of the phrase: "a free State", both as to its justifiable use at times by agitators, and as to its ultimate scientific inefficiency; and also of the demands of the so-called anarchists for the abolition of the State out of hand.

So yes, I did watch it. It's one of those videos that only really makes sense to people that haven't put in the time to take Marxism seriously, and just want to quotegrab Marx and Engels to give their points higher legitimacy. Even Anark's examples of Chile and Yugoslavia were more market-focused and less collectivized, Yugoslavia in particular relied on IMF loans to keep going. Anark's mislabling of socialism as intrinsically worker-ownership and not collectivized ownership pretty much leaves only anarchism and anarchist adjacent ideologies as socialist. And, the USSR and PRC, Cuba, etc. do have worker democracy:

I'm sorry I took your video seriously, I guess? I dunno, were you just wanting me to concede the point outright?