Every time someone critiques capitalism, or suggests alternatives like public ownership, workplace democracy, or real economic self-governance, you can count on a predictable response: someone parachutes into the comments with “Mao! Stalin! Pol Pot!” like it’s a mic drop.
It’s not. It’s a diversion.
This rhetorical move — call it “The Stalin Card” — pretends that any critique of capitalism is a secret endorsement of gulags and state terror. But it confuses branding with substance. As Noam Chomsky has often pointed out, the crimes of authoritarian regimes are very real, and they should be condemned. But to call those systems "socialist" or "communist" is as dishonest as calling the United States a "free market, capitalist democracy.”
Authoritarian states have long used socialist language to mask what were, in practice, rigid top-down hierarchies, often with no worker control, no democratic participation, and no real public ownership. Just as Western empires have used words like “freedom,” “democracy,” and “capitalist free markets” to justify endless war, CIA coups, economic warfare, and corporate oligarchy.
We don’t live in a “free market.” We live in a system where wealth equals power, where corporate monopolies write the rules, and where government routinely socializes losses while privatizing profits. If that’s freedom, it's a very selective one: for the rich, by the rich.
When people talk about socialism today, they’re not talking about Stalin. They’re talking about worker-owned co-ops and democratic control over the essentials of life: housing, healthcare, energy, education. They're talking about replacing billionaire rule with community sovereignty and public ownership - a world where not every pocket of life is ruled and defined by the pursuit of profit.
Anyone that honestly believes Medicare For All is a secret or naive path to tyranny really ought to visit any of the dozens of Western nations that already have some version of universal healthcare. *Checks notes.* Yep. None of them have devolved into authoritarian dystopias.
So no. The real divide isn’t capitalism vs. socialism. It’s authoritarianism vs. democracy.
People advocating for public banking, land trusts, energy co-ops, or worker-owned businesses are not trying to recreate the Soviet Union. They are trying to address the deeper flaw in our current economy: that economic life is governed by institutions the public has no say in.
The principle at stake is democracy. Not top-down control, but distributed participation. Not bigger government, but public institutions that are accountable to the people who depend on them.
We should be learning from the past — including the authoritarian failures of regimes that called themselves socialist — not to shut down the conversation, but to sharpen it. To better understand how systems consolidate power, and how we can build structures that prevent that.
I could personally care less about defending one -ism against another. I care about building systems that are democratic in substance, not just in name.
Let’s stop getting played by Cold War talking points. If the 20th century taught us anything, it’s that concentrated power — in any form, corporate or government — is the problem.
We don’t fix that by swapping out one elite for another. We fix it by organizing real participation, real democracy, into both economic and political spheres of life.
This needs to go far beyond electing representatives to political office, especially when the system those reps enter is structured to serve corporate interests. Even well-meaning politicians can be co-opted by a system that rewards loyalty to donors over constituents. A democratic society can’t be sustained by the hope that a few individuals at the top will do the right thing. It requires systems that give people a meaningful role in decision-making on a regular basis — not just during elections.
It also goes beyond unions — which play an important role in defending workers’ rights within the current system, but still operate within a framework where the ownership and strategic direction of most businesses remain concentrated at the top. Most unions are designed to negotiate with owners, not replace them. And while they can mitigate exploitation, they don’t democratize the workplace itself.
What’s needed is something more fundamental: a shift in how we organize power at every level of society. That means moving toward models of economic democracy, where people collectively own and govern the institutions that shape their lives, not just the government, but also the economy: their workplaces, housing, energy systems, and land.
In practice, this could look like worker cooperatives, where employees collectively make decisions about how their business operates, what to produce, and how to distribute surplus. It could mean community land trusts, where housing is kept permanently affordable and removed from the speculative market. It could mean participatory budgeting, where residents directly decide how public funds are spent in their neighborhoods. It could mean public banking, so that credit flows toward community needs rather than private profit.
These aren’t utopian ideas. They exist now, in real communities, and they work — often more resiliently and ethically than their for-profit counterparts. But they remain marginal, not because they’ve failed, but because they redistribute power. And any system that does that will be resisted by those who currently benefit from its concentration.
This is why we need to be clear: democratic socialism, as many people are using the term today, isn’t about consolidating more state power. It’s about breaking the monopoly that both states and corporations have held over people’s lives, and redistributing decision-making to the people directly affected.
We have to stop asking which elite will be more benevolent, and start asking how to prevent elites from forming in the first place.
The future we should be working toward is one where no small group has the power to decide the fate of everyone else. Where democracy isn’t limited to voting every few years, but is something we practice every day — in our workplaces, our schools, our local economies, and our cultural institutions.
If we want to live in a truly free society, that freedom has to be built into the architecture of our systems — not just proclaimed in their slogans, no matter what ism we're talking about.
Tim Hjersted is the director and co-founder of Films For Action. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas.