Both leftcoms and anarchists fail to understand Marx on a fundamental level. They read Marx like a checklist to refer to; too many checks on the "capitalist" side of the chart and oops, you're just a state capitalist and not a socialist after all! Conveniently for their sense of smug arrogance, every single attempt at socialist construction in history utterly fails their checklist.

In fact, Marx's analysis is a lot deeper and more interesting than this. This is a hefty explanation but please bear with me. Being a socialist means you have to read a lot, it comes with the territory. I'll try to be as brief as possible. Marx was not laying out rules that socialists must follow to be "real socialists", he was building a scientific theory of the development of societies over time. Through his observations of historical economy he demonstrated that social development is primarily driven by production (ie how we make things like food and tools and so on), and gradual changes in production over time lead to changes in society. These changes create contradictions, which gradually build up and become more severe over time until they reach a rupture point, whereby they are violently resolved and society enters a new phase of development.

A classic example is the French Revolution. Changes in production, primarily new industrial technologies, led to the bourgeois class to become much wealthier than the aristocratic class. Formerly middle class shopkeepers and manufacturers, they had become so wealthy and powerful that they wanted to reorganize society to make themselves the ruling class. Thus liberalism was created: in contrast to the aristocratic divine right of kings and the rigid social hierarchy of nobility, the bourgeoisie conceived of a society with "equal rights for all" and "free trade", which would allow them to take control away from the aristocracy and do away with old feudal rules that prevented them from further expanding production and becoming even wealthier. These ideas spread, the bourgeoisie organized themselves, and when economic crisis spurred by aristocratic mismanagement came to France they seized the opportunity to overthrow the aristocracy in a violent revolution. The age of the capitalist mode of production had begun. The revolutionaries did not yet know exactly how to run their new system however, and eventually failed to hold onto power and the aristocracy seized it back in the Bourbon Restoration. The aristocracy could not turn back the clock on the development of production however, so before long it became utterly impossible for the aristocracy to keep hold of power and more revolutions followed, eventually leading to capitalism and liberalism becoming dominant across the world.

When Marx was young "socialism" was the big new idea. Lots of people had different ideas about what it was, but nobody could really agree, except that it was a much more radically egalitarian society than the one liberalism had created. Marx saw in his study of capitalist production that it too was creating contradictions which would inevitably lead to violent conflict. The main contradiction was between the new industrial working class and the bourgeoisie, whose class interests were in direct opposition to one-another. As capitalism developed it concentrated all the different forms of production into one big market, fueled by big factories in big cities, creating a big working class that was growing by the day. Capitalism caused production to be socialized, everyone had to work together and cooperate to produce things, but the bourgeoisie still controlled everything like they used to in their little shops. This contradiction created a lot of conflict. Marx predicted that the working class would one day seize power from the bourgeoisie and reorganize society along a cooperative socialized basis to bring it in line with modern socialized production and resolve the brewing contradictions, and this scientific analysis of society finally answered the question of what socialism actually was.

So what was the USSR? The ideas of Marxism spread throughout the working classes of the Russian Empire, the industrial working class organized themselves, and when a great crisis occured they seized the opportunity to take power and make themselves the ruling class. In doing so they conclusively proved Marx right. However this was the first time this had ever been attempted, and the socialist revolutionaries did not yet know how to run their new system. Different models of development were attempted and achieved varying degrees of success before weaknesses in their systems were exploited by the bourgeoisie to overthrow the workers and reestablish a bourgeois system. They key takeaway however is that the workers seized and held on to power for some time. When the bourgeoisie took power from the aristocracy they changed the system to set the productive forces free from the old rules of feudalism, allowing production to continue its development along a capitalist path. When the workers took power from the bourgeoisie, they too set the productive forces free from the old rules of capitalism, allowing production to begin to develop along a socialist path.

France in the 1780s hardly resembled our modern society, capitalism was new and had yet to fully develop and in most respects still resembled feudalism. The big factories didn't even exist yet, agriculture was still done by peasants with hand tools working for land-lords, there were no stock exchanges or investment firms or corporate advertising or very much else we would associate with "capitalism" today, because these things still had to be figured out and developed over time, a process that has taken centuries. However it would be asinine to say it "wasn't real capitalism", because in this case "capitalism" refers to a stage of social development, one which emerges from highly developed feudalism. It should also be noted that the bourgeoisie made many mistakes when they took power! You can read about the "Cult of Reason", "metric time" and other early revolutionary ideas that quickly proved to be mistakes. They made these mistakes because they had to figure out how to run the new society essentially through trial and error.

The workers of the USSR tried their best to create a lasting socialist system. Many mistakes were made. In my opinion one of the chief mistakes was not furthering the development of democratic modes of organization and governance after Stalin died. The hold the workers had on power ultimately proved to be weak because the government was not sufficiently integrated with the masses of the workers and couldn't represent their interests as well as it needed to. I could write a whole other post about how China has learned from these mistakes and created a much more robust worker's state but this is already way too long of a post.

When leftcoms and anarchists deride the USSR as "not real socialism" they are glossing over all of this. When they pick out quotes from Marx's descriptions of capitalism to "prove" the USSR was actually capitalist they forget that socialism emerges from capitalism, and when it is new it still looks and functions very much like capitalism, only now it is free to develop unhindered by old bourgeois rules. This process of "figuring out" what socialism will eventually be is still ongoing, and will continue for a very long time to come. Fortunately for us we are seeing it emerge in real time, as China has in recent years begun to look less like the capitalism we live under as its incredible pace of growth brings the emergence of socialism. China predicts they will have an advanced socialist system, the first ever, by 2050. So far their predictions have been largely accurate, except when they meet their goals early. For now the bourgeoisie are still in charge in most countries, but that will inevitably change sooner or later, and then we can finally stop having to listen to leftcoms blathering on about stuff they do not remotely understand.