The author is right. Democratic Socialists look to every failed socialist experiment and say “that wasn’t real Socialism”, but you never hear anyone say “that wasn’t real capitalism.”
Experiments in Socialism
It’s got to do with some of the responses to my book Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies. The book shows how Western intellectuals have long had a habit of lauding socialist experiments as long as they were in their prime, only to disown them later, now claiming that they were never “really” socialist to begin with. One of the most common responses I have been receiving lately is:
But you could say the exact same thing about capitalism! Is your next book going to be called “Capitalism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies”
It reminds me a bit of playground spats, where children whose verbal abilities are not that well developed yet often respond to taunts by simply redirecting the same taunt back: “No, you are!”
This, of course, only works in a pot-calling-the-kettle-black situation, where your opponent is indeed guilty of the same thing they are accusing you of. And this really isn’t the case here. You could not say the same thing about capitalism. Show me an example of free-market liberals acting in the same way as the socialist intellectuals I am citing in the book. Name a country that free-marketeers used to praise to the skies, and that they now dismiss as “not REAL capitalism.”
You can’t. Because this does not happen.
Read the whole thing. https://fee.org/articles/why-you-never-hear-anyone-say-that-wasnt-real-capitalism/