I model you a bit like my father, who grew up in a Soviet satelite state, if he had ended up in the US instead of a country with strong socialist history: he will argue for free education, basic income, national healthcare, nationalization of infrastructure and resources (all of which are pretty socialist ideas), but will immediately revert to referring to kolkhoz and aparatschiks if any politician or activist openly endorses socialist views.

The main point where I will agree with you is that USSR and FORCED anything is wrong. But what would be so wrong in expanding and evolving the cooperative model and letting workers owning their companies become the norm? To me it is all about making that the more efficient way to run a company, so people do it voluntarily. This could be accomplished by changing some of the laws regarding liability, taxation etc to reflect their intended purpose (or by going full way to corporate personhood and making something like a transnational impossible, i.e. if you want to do business in that country, you need to get a "corporate passport"). The current US system is broken. USSR was broken. Let's try to mix and match and add new things. Marx was probably right in his diagnosis of the fatal tendency of capital to consolidate and turn free market capitalism into crony capitalism. The efficient solution to this seems to be the german, scandinavian, canadian mixture of the two. Heck, even china on the more dystopian side "works" because they combine the two