Trade predates capitalism and has taken different forms under different modes of production. Its existence under socialism does not make a society capitalist. What defines a social system is who controls the means of production and how surplus labour is allocated. It makes the society very much capitalist because it doesn’t rid it of an owning class. Here the party of the USSR. The Soviet Union inherited a devastated, largely agrarian economy encircled by imperialist states. Socialist construction could not skip stages. The Kuomintang and certain aspects of S. Korea after WWII share a very similar backstory, did they do socialism? You would probably deny this. Public ownership of industry, finance and land became the foundation. Market mechanisms and limited private trade operated within boundaries set by the plan, not as its driving force. Ok, you have centralised state enterprises that did trade with entities in other countries. Ok, you have planning, we have planning in all of capitalism today, capitalism is entrenched by it. It merely exists in an anarchic state, which was also the case for the USSR and its allies, you even had conflicts spurred on by nationalistic perversion that came from the logic of capital between nations that ideologically should have been brethren. Ask yourself why China and Vietnam post-“revolution” didn’t get along for most of their shared history. Under socialism, the law of value is not abolished by decree It is, that is what you call a being programmatic. The early Soviet Union had programmatic characteristics which it lost due to being a rushed development just like any other area on this blue planet late to the table of capitalism. By these measures, the Soviet project lifted hundreds of millions from illiteracy and poverty, built industrial capacity from scratch, and defended social gains against relentless external pressure. Literally Prussia