Feel like I see this a lot so gonna clarify something:

The socialist nations of the 20th Century, such as the Soviet Union, Cuba, Vietnam, Burkina Faso, China and others, were never Communist in practice. They were/are led by Communist parties, but they were not Communist.

To understand Communism we must first understand the nature of the state:

The state exists to mediate and contain conflicts between classes that have inherently contradictory class interests. For example, the inherent contradictory interests between slaves and slave masters.

The way this usually manifests is that the dominant economic class in different societies (slave masters in slavery, lords in feudalism, capitalists in capitalism) becomes too the dominant political class.

This means that the state exists as a tool of repression by one class over the other. That is the primary function of the state; repression of one class by another. This also intersects and manifests along lines of race, gender and sexuality too.

Communism is a society in which there is no classes - there is no overclass and no underclass. That means there is no contradictory class interests between people. This means that the need for the state as a tool of repression by one class over another is gone.

In Communism, there *is no state*. Forget what your school textbooks and teachers told you - Communism is NOT where the "government owns everything". It is a stateless, classless, moneyless society.

Now, you can see where the problem is where we look at 20th Century socialist states and see this was not the case. They were Communist *in ideology*, but socialist in practice. Specifically for most of them they practised an ideology called Marxist-Leninism.

I'm not interested in getting into a sectarian leftist argument about ML but here is basically what Marxist-Leninism is:

- It is the belief that the revolution, to happen successfully, requires a vanguard; this is a group of the most revolutionary people with the most tact and leadership qualities. It rejects the notion a revolution can last without leadership and revolutionary theory.

- It is the belief that the state cannot be abolished immediately but must "wither away". The reason the state cannot be abolished immediately is because of a swift and immediate backlash by the bourgeois imperial powers (Russian Civil War, Bay of Pigs, Vietnam War, etc...)

- As technology advances to the point where economic labour becomes less and less necessary, class divisions erode away over time. As class divisions erode, so does the state. Under ML, the state becomes a tool by the workers to repress the bourgeoisie.

- It is also the belief that if the state becomes ran and operated by the workers then the state owning the means of production is the workers controlling the means of production via the state which they elect representatives to through various mechanisms.

- Socialism is meant to act as a lower stage of Communism - the transitionary phase. Technology has not yet allowed us to fully erode class divisions and thus a lower stage of Communism where workers own the means comes before Communism where the means are held in common.

I am NOT arguing as to whether this manifested in reality in places like the Soviet Union, I'm not arguing about any of that. I'm just laying out what Marxist-Leninists believe (although this was a simplification I think I covered the primary points)