A capitalist republic is a socialist propaganda term describing a concept of government that is antithetical to socialist thought. They hold that while a socialist republic is a "dictatorship of the proletariat", a capitalist republic is freedom of the common man to succeed on his own. In On New Democracy, Mao Zedong distinguished his vision of a New Democratic Republic from a capitalist republic, which he characterized as an "old European-American form" of government that was "out of date".