You’re basically admitting to poor reading comprehension & ignorance of references cited in the articles.
Any dipshit knows that an ideology that is pro-capitalism can’t be leftist. That’s just basic politics really.
Not talking about capitalism, talking about liberalism: liberal leftists exist. Some are socialist. Political scientists recognize them as leftist. Deal with it.
As the article you mischaracterize states
Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy
not an economic one.
liberalism is about liberty from unlimited authority
As the name indicates, liberalism concerns liberty: it’s essentially the position that
- governments exist for the people
- individual human rights & liberties are fundamental
- authority is legitimate only when it protects those fundamental rights & liberties
- the people have an inherent right to obtain a government with legitimate authority.
In particular, when their government lacks or loses legitimacy, the people have a right & duty to replace or change that government until it obtains legitimacy. Such a government prohibits unlimited authority, so it’s mutually exclusive with authoritarianism.
The article continues that liberalism is
based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property, and equality before the law
which reaffirms earlier points & then some. It emerged from the Enlightenment when the authoritarianism of its time was the exclusive power & social hierarchy of feudal, absolute monarchy & aristocracy.
Liberalism sought to replace the norms of hereditary privilege, state religion, absolute monarchy, the divine right of kings and traditional conservatism with representative democracy, rule of law, and equality under the law.
Anyone who read history or philosophy & thought seriously would know this.
The ones that didn’t give up & dismantle themselves, because they couldn’t deliver on their promises[1] or beat the west even on their own terms & measures of success[2]?
Other communist states still exist: Cuba, China, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea. China is a strong contender. However, it achieved its economic edge by liberalizing its state capitalist economy. Its economic inequality is worse than that of liberal democracies in Europe, Canada, East Asia, Australia: check out the detailed view of this world map of gini coefficients. Its civil & political rights are difficult to understate & its recent campaign to repress its LGBT+ population is only the latest episode. Nonetheless, it’s credibly a “more successful iteration of socialism”.
Beyond communist states, social democracies in the West are “successful iteration[s] of socialism” with lower economic inequality.
The Soviet constitution of 1977 made a number of promises it couldn’t realize.
It never fulfilled its founding promise of a communist society. ↩︎
Forced labor camps/Gulags are the opposite of labor free from exploitation.
When the wall fell, East Germany was significantly poorer than West Germany: GDP per capita less than half with lagging living standards. Other economies that started poorer than East Germany beat it or caught up to West Germany.
Chronic shortages increasingly led people to the second economy with its blat (favors) network. They were unable to sustain economic growth to increase living standards.
Eventually, the last Soviet leaders, conceding failure by their own standards (economic, social, & cultural rights) & western standards (civil & political rights), dismantled the system from within: Western governments had exceeded their communist state by all standards.
↩︎