capitalist nightmare

Last night, i dreamt that i was with a business associate, working out of a temporary office in a new high-rise building. We were both new to the job. Our company had rented a conference room, and set up flimsy room dividers and logos, trying to give the appearance of solidity. We were trying to sell some product or service to potential clients. We shucked and jived, always walking a high-wire act in danger of being exposed as insubstantial. Many of our marks walked out, but we were unfazed. One visitor saw through our facade, shook our walls a bit, and left. We suddenly noticed a news telecast about a man who had been found with knife wounds, and died. We knew they would trace the murder to us, as the victim had been a potential client who had left our building after receiving the fatal wounds. I was pretty sure we had repeatedly stabbed him, but my memory was hazy, as our obsessive focus had been on making the sale. My partner and i quickly but quietly made plans to throw each other under the bus, as we knew that the authorities were probably outside the building already. We tried to think of any escape plan, content to sacrifice each other.
Sometimes the connection between dreams and consciousness is tenuous. Other times, the connection is as obvious as a draft-dodging leader taking a photo op in a military uniform. The thoughts in our mind as we drift to sleep are soon enacted in the imaginarium of our dreams.
Yesterday, i tried to explain to my ex-cold warrior father that the U.S.-Soviet conflict had nothing to do with capitalism vs. communism, as Russia was communist in name only. One might charitably say that the conflict was between capitalism and socialism, but even that misses the mark by a good margin. The U.S. had a free market economy and the U.S.S.R. was state-controlled, but the Soviet Union's brand of socialism was closer to facist totalitarianism (like every other "communist" government of the past century), and our own brand of capitalism had been gradually turning socialist ever since the thirties. Ask yourself this: do you approve of social security? Congratulations, you're a socialist. You disgust me, you bleeding pinko.
Trying to explain to a cold warrior that he wasn't fighting communism, however, is a bit like painting in a blizzard. The thrust of my explanation was that a strong central government is inherently anti-communist, as communism is a system of no government at all. But this sounds like anarchy, which is how my father took it.
A better angle to use is the question of ownership. In communism, everybody owns everything. Everyone has a stake in every aspect of society, and decisions are made by short-term, elected "governments", through majority agreement. Understood in those terms, communism is profoundly more democratic than the bloated plutocracy the U.S. had become by the time of the Cold War.