There'd have been no "European-style neoliberal socialism" without the much harsher communist experiments.

After considering your otherwise insightful and thoughtful post overnight, it occurred to me that perhaps your comment above might not be quite on.

The social liberalism of the twentieth century was not necessarily a tamed and moderated version of Communist dictatorship. It may have been just the other way round: systematic and brutal suppression by the establishment of legitimate worker grievances and concerns made the excesses of Lenin and Mao possible, if not inevitable. Only later did the pendulum swing back to a more moderate center, like you find today in Western Europe, the USA, and some parts of Asia and Oceania.

Socialist thought has a history that far antedates the great Red tyrannies of Russia and China. It even antedates Marx. Ever since the early nineteenth century, a rich tradition and literature of anarchist and socialist movements laid the groundwork, there were union movements, worker's movements, think of the Paris Commune, the spontaneous and violent uprisings of the mid-nineteenth century, even the Molly Maguires and innumerable other grass-roots episodes that arose naturally as the Industrial Revolution transformed the social and political landscape. Much of this background has been systematically ignored, even covered up in our histories and education. This stuff didn't come out of a time warp, it was a response to a social need. And don't forget the great anarchist geographers, like Kropotkin and (ahem) Reclus. There is a rich historical and intellectual tradition here that goes way back.

Mao and Lenin, (and Hitler and Mussolini too) were not the initial reaction to the abuses and excesses of the Industrial Revolution, they weren't an aberration that sprang from nowhere, spurred by a handful of mad, charismatic, and evil geniuses. They were the inevitable result of constant and systematic suppression and violence by a power structure that stubbornly refused to give in an inch, until the growing pains and dislocations of the 18th and 19th centuries festered into the gangrenous horrors of 20th century totalitarianism.

What was it JFK said? (I paraphrase), "If you make peaceful change impossible, you make violent revolution inevitable."