Sooooo you’re both right. According to MLs, there must be a “transitional socialist state” to guide society to communism, which is supposed to be a stateless society with a gift economy instead of market economy.

Of course in practice they never get past the transitional phase. Anarchists often criticize these countries as being “state capitalist”, in the sense that the state takes the place of the previous capitalist class, and continues the business of exploitation as usual.