You’re really hitting the nail on the head with respect to why our study is never finished. Dialectics requires us to look at everything in its context, not just metaphysically (ie, isolated, static, unchanging). The USSR, for example, was both tremendously progressive with respect to Tsarist Russia and its contemporaries, while having real struggles and flaws.

Socialism became scientific with the creation of dialectical materialism, ie seeking materialist explanations for real phenomena, and using dialectics as the methodology. When applied to history, we see socialism not as an idea to be implemented, ie “utopian” in thinking, but as it develops historically. In capitalism, markets centralize over time, while raising the number of proletarians and decreasing the number of bourgeois, creating the conditions for collectivized ownership and distribution.

The proletariat as a ruling class is unique in that, rather than seeking perpetuation of its status, seeks to end itself as such. This is why dialectical materialism is a proletarian ideology, seeing everything as it comes into and out of existence, as a process and in constant motion, because all previous ruling classes sought to explain their rule as permanent.

The part where this breaks with anarchism for me is the fact that anarchists, ultimately, seek to implement society in a way that goes against how capitalism progresses. This is why it’s so difficult to start a cohesive anarchist movement that lasts, it isn’t because it’s impossible, but because anarchists are “working against the wheel of history,” so to speak, in trying to decentralize all production and distribution. It certainly isn’t impossible, but it’s orders of magnitude more difficult at scale. Locally is where anarchism has its advantages.

This was a bit of a ramble, but this will all make much more sense after reading Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, I hope. I’m not telling you to abandon your anarchism or anything, just that this is the work that personally marked the end of identifying as an anarchist, so it will probably give you a good deal to think about at a minimum.