God forbid you take ownership in your child ' s education . <| sep |> The Marxist understanding of capitalism is almost the mainstream one , it just uses different terms for the same phenomena and places its emphasis more in production and less in distribution . private property which was very limited in the USSR . Almost all the MoP belonged to the government The means of production was owned as private property by their entrenched elites , yes . prices in Capitalism , the prices are set by the market They ' re never fully undistorted , though it ' s true the USSR did more to steer them than America . Competition What ? You ' re saying when monopolies form in capitalism it stops being capitalism ? Capital accumulation That occurred in the USSR like normal . Voluntary exchange as defined in a Capitalistic context , there wasn ' t voluntary exchange I ' m pretty sure ordinary Russians got to choose their area of work , what groceries to buy and so on . If you refused to work , you could be thrown in a jail or gulag . If you refused to work in the West at the time you ' d get kicked out of your home and starve or freeze . If enough people refuse to work all at once they basically call in the army . this post is getting way to long and you won ' t read This is a weird insult , I ' m on a pretty small monitor right now and I don ' t even have to scroll to see your whole comment . you probably know everything on this post , and still claim that USSR was Capitalist Meh . I don ' t even know why I ' m effortposting about this . It doesn ' t ultimately matter what label you insist things qualify for . You want to call North Korea socialist , whatever , go ahead , that just means it ' s not the kind of socialism I ' m interested in . The main point I was making was already stated in the comment where I said this 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 .