The language can get tricky because we tend to use capitalist to mean both 1 economic actors who circulate capital in production and 2 people who advocates for or defend a system characterised by such . Sometimes a person acts as a capitalist or a state acts in such a way that upholds capitalist property relations and so are capitalists in the first sense but don ' t defend the existing system and perhaps advocate for some other system and so are not capitalists in the second sense . Because it ' s possible to run a business while advocating for socialism , it ' s possible for somebody to qualify as the seemingly contradictory socialist capitalista person who is a socialist ideologically but who is a capitalist by their actions , that is by their relation to other people in the economy . Things might be more clear if we used liberal to mean an advocate of capitalism and reserved capitalist only for the people who occupy that role in production when people accuse Stalin or whoever else of being a capitalist , that doesn ' t mean they ' re accusing him of being a liberal , but of acting , through the state he commanded , in a capitalist way . The US didn ' t care about the ideological battle between liberalism and socialism . The American and Russian governments were just two imperialist powers in competition for control of the world ' s resources . I think this would have been the case even if the USSR wasn ' t calling itself socialist .