Yup. Also shot the anarchists, that worked with them and wanted democracy, in the back of the head during a meeting, The USSR then also did imperialism in their neighboring countries, deported a ton of people from those countries to death camps in siberia and allied with the nazies dividing Europe in their treaty

That's kind of the point of horseshoe economics, "the people own the economy" is impossible to implement without an intermediate agency to actually oversee the day to day of said economy.

What's that entity? The government. Any conceptual type of non-state entity would just be governance in nature regardless of title, and therefore still essentially operate as "a state" if not the same state that the federal government exists as.

Though as someone who works in modern IT I foresee the future of robotics and AGI allowing for the kind of economic automation that would make communism inevitable eventually as jobs are reduced over time in the course of the next hundred or two hundred years.

Didn’t the USSR just do state capitalism, and not actual communism or socialism?

The Soviet idea was that 1) if it's state-owned, then it's people-owned and not capitalism, 2) it's people-owned, because USSR is a union of soviet republics, where soviet is a democratic (initially) entity, 3) it's socialism, not communism, as we've not built that yet, 4) it's still socialism as we use money to buy things and not receive them as we need automatically, as the planning precision doesn't allow for this.

(A soviet is initially like an elected body, where every member on level zero is elected by constituency, like certain factory's workers or inhabitants of some street, as this thing was static in the USSR, or on every level above zero by an underlying level soviet ; the main difference between this and normal democracies is that those factory workers or that underlying soviet can vote anytime to recall and replace their representative, which turned out to make it more authoritarian all by itself ; well, also obviously these in fact decided nothing in the USSR anyway, the party structures did).

I guess that's the best way put it I saw in this post. I'd just add that after growing up in soviet and postsoviet state, and later coming to western Europe, my first impression was that they somehow almost managed to build here what "communist" soviet party tried to build so unsuccessfully.

Even Marx thought that path to communism is through capitalism, what soviet state did is something very different.

lol, no it wasn't. They had a planned economy.

I love when people employ the Socratic method tactfully lol.

The USSR was definitely communist. They called themselves communist, were inspired by communists and implemented communist policies.