ok, so that's kind of the topic of the thread i guess.
personally, i don't think it's possible to envision.
so, preface. i'm not arguing for communism here. i'm just sick of certain ideas of something being intrinsically a failure because of failed revolution, as it's just pick-n-choosy.
people talk 1550 capitalist speculations in this thread (haven't read the whole thing), but i think a more apt comparison is the french revolution (interestingly, apt like literally the majority of revolutions throughout history). if that was the essence big L liberalism, liberalism would by definition be horrifying and noone would argue for it. and by liberalism here, i mean the abolishing of monarchy and the rise of democracy. modern conservatism is not the conservatism of the time, however heinous paleos are.
yea yea, liberalism is still arguably horrifying. but i'm talking like robespierre. and he was just a locus of the terror. mass slaughter of so many people. mass atrocities. secret police. famines. rabid warfare and blind zeal.
the liberals even got the "good parts" wrong more often than not. libertines come to mind (not thinking of de sade here, but people more... sympathetic than people like him). cult of reason. a lot of really weird stuff they figured would be the new world, which never came to pass.
even the american success story of liberalism is somewhat schewed. it's easy to be a continental success when you outnumber and outgun your imperialistic targets. it's easy mode. even so, the us was a backwater for a long time, and its own backyard was filled to the brim with atrocity, even beyond the "question" of enslavement, eg patrician pseudonobility. maybe no specific robespierre but if 1800 usa is liberalism i ain't having none of it, thank you.
communism is more an offspring of liberalism than antithetical to it, when you look at the ideological roots and the humanist arguments present. dealing with actual communist literature should enlighten one of that. it's very explicit what communists traditionally value and why they push for what they do. most people think marx was basically stalin, or have some Red Alert sense that communism seeks to make everyone grey goo people. it's not the case at all.
the thing with revolutions is that more often than not it's a power vaccuum that then consolidates into some terror regime. like, goddamn weimar. it's rolling the dice every time. the path of the west to its current riches is marvelously lucky when you look at the details, and could be seen as a historical fluke in the future. that's what the chinese (and the illiberals of eastern europe) do, after all, and china is on the path to be the next world leader.
have to say, though, if it's a fluke, i kind of like it over a goddamn monarchy. i'm not arguing for revolution either. i'm just saying that viewing liberalism a natural, relatively painless path while communism was "proven wrong" is inane. we're still in a potential aftermath of a french revolution, which was, y'know, proven god-damn-wrong in its day.
and don't get me started on the sovjet situation. as the other superpower, it was definitely second, politically isolated, and actively entrenched by the west. i am happy it didn't succeed, for obvious reasons, but it still wouldn't have succeeded as a capitalist nation if it was in that situation.
