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In theory, maybe, but in practice this runs into many, many problems.
First- do you evaluate ideologies on what they claim they want, or how they are in practice? I.e, take Stalinists who say they to totally remove hierarchy once capitalism is totally defeated, but until they have a very strict hierarchy with the Party on top. Are they more or less leftist than social democrats who want to remove most of hierarchy but are still okay with parents controlling children and the hardest workers having some more money than people on welfare, and who actually implement anti-hierarchical policies? It's a rare person who'll call Biden farther left than Stalin, but I consider Stalin far more hierarchical.
Second- Removing hierarchies in practice
It makes sense to remove explicit legal hierarchies, like ones that say you must obey a king, or that the government will not allow you to do drugs and if you do the police will throw you in prison. That is coherent as an anti-hierarchy position. But removing voluntary hierarchies does not. If two people sign a contract, such that Alice is the employer of Bob and Bob must do what Alice says, and in exchange Alice pays Bob a salary, with either party being free to cancel the contract at any time, that is hierarchical according to leftists. So far leftists would want to stop that. But the only way to stop it is to institute another hierarchy- some sort of government and some sort of police force to declare it illegal and to enforce its illegality. Therefore, a "pure leftist" is a contradiction. And I expect in reality, you wouldn't even be able to get close to being a pure leftist before running into significant issues.
Since we are speaking pragmatically, I would apply the rule you set forth in your original post:
Thus, Stalin is to the left of Biden.
Consider two tribes: Tribe A, which has a norm that the chief and his buddies have the power of life and death over everyone else, and will apply it according to their private notion of what constitutes justice, and Tribe B, which has a system of courts and laws and a norm that no tribesman may be deprived of life or property without due process. Applying the distance-from-pure-leftism metric, we can see that the norm in Tribe B is closer than Tribe A to theoretical pure leftism (where all would be treated equally, regardless of merit or station), and that leftists would prefer Tribe B over Tribe A.
It would be a mistake, though, to conclude that a commitment to justice (by which I mean “the giving of what is deserved”) and due process is therefore a feature of leftism; rather, in historical context, it is just an intermediate, instrumental goal. While Tribe B might be stable, with most members adhering to its norms, the leftmost elements in Tribe B will be dissatisfied with the unequal outcomes (even if those outcomes are just). They will eventually start to wring their hands about the disparate impact of the justice system (either by race or wealth or what have you) or maybe how society actually creates criminals and so they shouldn’t be punished, but only helped, and they will begin to abandon the norm of the pursuit of justice / due process once it is in the rear-view mirror on the road to increased equality / abolition of hierarchy. The historical Tribe B revolutionaries who dethroned the chief and established the courts in the first place — leftists themselves, likely, in relation to the norms in their day — will eventually be recast by the purer leftists of the future as only slightly less noxious right-wingers than the chief himself, so that the march to total equality — the true terminal goal — can continue.
The Social Democrats in your example are not as committed to equality as the Communists. They are like the Tribe B moderates in that they ascribe some ultimate, non-instrumental value to competing values, such as personal liberty, and therefore, they are not as purely leftist. The Communists were, at least ostensibly, aiming for greater equality than the Social Democrats. If they thought they could get there through liberalism and democracy, they might go that route, but the police state route is acceptable, too.
To my mind, the reason that leftists are opposed to hierarchies is not because they dislike organization, but because they abhor the notion that one person should have greater social status or prestige than another. The underlying feeling is something like: Bob should not even be able to pay Alice a salary because he ought not to have more money than her in the first place. Even if it were accepted that the reason Bob has more money is because he was born more talented than Alice and his labor is therefore more valuable, that is not Alice’s fault, and she should be made equal to Bob. How exactly this is going to work is typically left as an exercise to the reader.
We are in agreement here — systems such as Communism are necessarily to the right of theoretical pure leftism and yet have failed miserably — but that hasn’t stopped people from trying. Very committed leftists would (incorrectly, in my opinion) resolve your paradox by asserting that once we have more equality, things will just magically work out, and we won’t need the police anymore.
My characterization of “pure leftism” is just a theoretical ideal — a single point in political space, useful for evaluating how leftist a particular position is. The fact that leftism, beyond a certain extreme, is probably unworkable in the real world is not a criticism of the measurement system.
Maybe you'll just dismiss this as another "left as an exercise to the reader", but let's say we forget money, and directly consider exchange of services. Let's say Alice really want a servant, like the previous scenario, but her society has abolished currency so she has no money to pay Bob with. She can still pay with services or goods she crafts herself. Maybe she's a brilliant poet that can write a poem that can move Bob to tears in five minutes, and Bob happily embraces being her full time servant in exchange for one such poem a day. Would leftists somehow try to shut down that moneyless hierarchy too? You can replace "poem" for anything too- maybe she cooks excellent meals, maybe she has a green thumb and can grow far more produce than any other individual, maybe she's a brilliant engineer who can design and build an entire house by herself.
And of course, once you allow for that sort of hierarchy, you by necessity allow for much more complex ones. Perhaps Alice pays Bob with a fraction of her own labour, and also employs a couple other people like Charlie and David the same way, all of them pledging 8 hours of their days to her. But she then has each of them use 4 of those 8 hours to do services for another 3 even less productive people to get those 3 people to do her 8 hours of service a day- and so on until she has a network of hundreds working for her. All voluntary, all without money or even necessarily any private property at all, yet without a doubt a hierarchy.
My point is that that single point in theoritical space is non-existent. Unless you mean the point is just how much people pledge themselves to the idea of "no hierarchy" with no relation to how anti-hierarchical they are in real life or even how hierarchical their utopian vision is. In which case I think that is a coherent measurement system to compare parties by, but also a pretty useless measurement system that doesn't tell you anything practical. Why should anyone care how much lip service a party pays to "no hierarchy"?
The point of my method is to apply a metric that enables us to answer this question: given two political positions, which is more leftist?
Let’s suppose that we live in a society like the one that your Alice lives in, where currency has been abolished and Alice has a network of hundreds of laborers who work for her, all happily, freely, and voluntarily, either (a) in direct exchange for her poems, or (b) in exchange for the labor of people who work in direct exchange for her poems. Alice’s poems are a form of wealth, and you correctly note that a hierarchy has been created, with Alice at the top. She likely enjoys a great deal of social status and prestige in this hypothetical society.
Now let’s suppose that there are two competing political parties: the Yellows and the Pinks, who take the following positions:
Yellows: “It is fine that Alice has such status and prestige — this system of voluntary association incentivizes the production of her poems, a valuable resource; it allows everyone involved the freedom to do what they like, and it makes society wealthier while directly harming nobody. It is nothing like the bad old days when people had to work for wages to survive.”
Pinks: “What right does Alice have to put on such airs? It is an accident of fate that she has this peculiar capacity to produce beautiful poetry. Morally, she has a duty to willingly share this gift with the community instead of exploiting it. We find it very problematic indeed that good people should be obliged to labor for hours every day only to receive a poem that takes her mere minutes — in the comfort of her well-appointed living quarters, we might add — to put forth. The watchword of the day should be: poems from each according to their ability, and to each according to their needs, with special privileges for none. Alice should be set to producing poems all day for the benefit of all; her needs will be adequately taken care of in return, the same deal as everyone else. She is not better than anyone else.”
Now, using the distance-from-pure-leftism metric, it is pretty clear which of the parties is more leftist.
My claims are (1) that this metric can generally be pretty handily applied to any two political positions addressing the same issue, and will predict with good accuracy which will be perceived as more leftist, and (2) given a political position that is not equivalent to pure leftism, I can use the metric to construct a position on that same issue that is recognizably further to the left of it.
Your pinks party does sound rather leftist after that one paragraph. If you added another paragraph with what the Pinks would actually do about it, I think they'd sound a lot less leftist, since any sort of enforcement mechanism would be a hierarchy. I don't think the party that suggests throwing people in jail for trading poems would be recognizably more leftist than a party that is willing to just stick to currency abolition but otherwise lets people live free.
Your framework also doesn't work well for comparing parties that are different amounts of leftist on different issues. Lets say there's a country of Examplestan, in which everyone is a fervent follower of Examplestani Leftism. They all work hard to make Examplestan a better place, they don't use any currency and simply ask for goods and services but never ask for more than they need, no one ever coerces anyone or creates any sort of hierarchy within Examplestan. However, they think every human outside of Examplestan is less than a worm. They don't expand past their borders, but anyone who enters Examplestan from the outside is either shot dead or enslaved because of their ethnic impurity. Is Examplestan far right or far left?
You've already said your model fails at describing how far right parties are, at best it can try to calculate how not-leftist a party is. But it also cannot accurately assess any party which are left on some issues and right on other issues, since it can't asses the issues they're right-wing on. Which is many parties.
Where would it place something like Ba'athism? Or Peronism?
In my model, you simply would not try to compare them to Democrats or Republicans or Stalinists or Nazis, at least not in an international context. You can try to guess where a Peronist or Stalinist or Ba'athist would fall if you brought them into the context US election, or brought the US parties into the context of a specific foreign election, but you couldn't compare them in a purely international context. If you do compare them in an international context, that goes outside my model.
And I think trying to model them in an international context is a flawed endeavor doomed to fail, personally. There's a reason why people argue about whether Peronists and Ba'athists are far left or far right or if you need to bring a political compass in it whatever- I don't think it is possible to compare parties in an international way. I think people intuitively use the principles I've laid out when modeling domestic politics, without consciously knowing what those principles are. And people try to apply the same principles to international politics to come up for a label for Ba'athists or Peronists, but they can't draw an intuitive conclusion and start disagreeing with each other and even themselves about where such parties fall. They start making up rules like yours and try to calculate how anti-hierarchy a party is in sum, or a right-libertarian might say the more pro-freedom a party is in sum the more right-wing they are, or they might use some other model. Whatever set of rules they use, it doesn't work well, because it's an impossible to task.
Like we agreed as a guiding principle, any definition should match how people actually use the terms left and right. If people call the same party both left and right, then it's impossible for any definition that assigns each party to a single point on a line to function. I don't know whether people inside Argentina call Peronists left or right, but whatever they call Peronists inside their country, I'm sure it's internally consistent, although perhaps only for a single election and are not consistent across time even within Argentina. Same with Ba'athists in Syria.
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