Political Memes

it is though.

Should have put it clearer: you assume the scale of liberal/authoritarian is only applicable to capitalism. Of course it is, just not only to that. Its a metric to describe societies, capitalistic ones and others.

classical liberalism in the political science sense is explicitly pro-capitalist at its foundations. ie it means support of individual rights, rule of law, free markets and private property.

No, liberalism is not explicitly pro capitalism. liberal people historically (for example in the French revolution) were pro democracy, as democracy is more liberal than what they had at the time, feudalism. It is true that a lot of them were also pro capitalist, but there were (and are) also a lot anarchists and communists among the liberal.

You think of liberal in the sense of a political system again, which in the scientific meaning of the term it just is not.

Imagine an anarchist society with no markets, no rule of law, no private property. Such a society still has means of control, social isolation, or rejecting people from it.

This society can be more liberal (you can be gay, you can dress like you want, you can move a lot or stay in one place, you could criticize freely and you could have spiritual believes how you want)

Or this society can be more authoritarian (you are expected to behave a certain way, love a certain way, dress a certain way and dont criticize societal norms)

In an anarchist society the means of control are social rejection, in a (fully) capitalist one its money, in (fully) Democratic one its law, in a theocracy its faith. Most societies are mixes of those.

Those are wildly different, but all can be more liberal or more authoritarian. The scale of Liberal or authoritarian describes how much control is asserted, not by what means the control is achieved and who or how many hold it.

the material conditions that allow free accumulation of capital necessarily require enforcement mechanisms (ie property law, police, courts, borders, prisons) which are themselves authoritarian. you can't cleanly separate the economic from the political dimension because the economic system requires political enforcement to exist.

Yes off course they do, some political systems need a more authoritarian policy (facism > feudalism > capitalism > democracy) than others. And some systems tend towards authoritarian policy by design, even if they actually need liberal policy to not die (e.g. our beloved parliamentarian democracy we have in Europe or our beloved two state hyper capitalism in america)

But now you are talking about state forms. Those can be left or right, and come in many levels of authoritarian, but its still a different question to ask.

So again:

State form: the method from which control is derived (faith, money, social norms, combat strength, parliament, councils, social norms)

Left/right: a measure of how distributed that power is amung the people (few: right, Manny: left)

Authoritarian/Liberal: how heavily that control is used (less: liberal, more:authoritarian)

I am aware that in political campaigns and nonscientific debate those terms are thrown around a lot and get used for wildy inadequate things (neoliberal, national socialist, liberal party of Britain, etc. Pp). Mostly in an order to deceive. That's why I make my whole point, it is important to define the words you are talking about in the same way to understand each other. That's why I speak of the political scientific meaning of the words. The technical terms if you want. And in those, authoritarian vs liberal as two ends of a spectrum are quite useful to describe and compare different societies.

EDIT: TO answer your melodramatic last sentence, what those freedom means to a hungry homeless person: Nothing! Therefore a society in which the means of control (money) is used so heavily a person has nearly no options/choices is not a liberal one.

Capitalism has that tendency to get more and more authoritarian, because of the baked in need for continuous accumulation of capital, even to the point where it stops being capitalism and starts being facism.

You can't have authoritarian liberalism, that's an oxymoron.

Its like saying you have hot cold.

Both are adjectives on opposite ends of a spectrum. You need a state form in there to make sense.

Liberal parliamentarism ✅

Authoritarian capitalism✅

Liberal socialism✅

Authoritarian theocracy✅

Liberal authoritarianism ❌

Authoritarian liberalism ❌