I know you guys hate Chomsky but he made a really valid point about the movement and it was this: During the Cold War, the 2 leading superstates of the world both ran extensive propaganda campaigns which reached every corner of the world. Both of these campaigns affirmed the notion that the clusterfuck that was soviet socialism was in fact actual communism. Marxist-Leninism became a synonym with socialism and communism over night and instead of educating people and setting things straight, Stalin's campaigns accepted this, as did China and other red states.
It doesn't really matter what brand of leftism you advocate, if it's associated with the word socialism, it will be smeared by every corner of the political world, including mouth-breathing tankies who insist state capitalism is socialism. History has been absolutely and completely twisted to ruin the word socialism, the question is do we accept it and try something else or do we still fight for the word and deal with the images of gulags being conjured up in every mind?
To combat this, Marxist politicians try to get by under the banner of Market socialism or Democratic socialism but the public already has a concrete image of what that 2nd word in both means. Sure Bernie had some success but it wasn't nearly enough to win the presidency and much of his success came from the anti-establishment and grassroots fundraising meme, nobody was cheering over the word socialism, they just reinterpreted the word to mean state hand-outs. Hell, Reddit and leftypol seem to believe that America would have given him the presidency had he won the primaries. This is false, our polling for a Trump vs Bernie election was A. done before ANY concentrated propaganda was thrown his way B. not nearly high enough to suggest that Bernie could win comfortably. He only polled a few points better than Hillary, against Trump, in match ups. By no means were the polls suggesting a landslide victory. As somebody working from the inside, Bernie ran a very white liberal campaign, this would have ruined his turn-out and it did do so during the primaries, it was part of the reason he lost and why black voters flocked to Hillary in droves.
The onus is on us to repackage communism or to somehow extensively educate the public. The traditional methods of promoting and arguing for socialism will never work again.That well hasn't just been poisoned for socialism, the water has been drained and replaced with pure cyanide. You can take a bucket of it and offer it to the public, but nothing will convince the public to start drinking from it asides from a gun threat. This is not me trashing Socialism, this is me giving insight on how badly the public has been indoctrinated to oppose it. I don't have the answer, but I do believe we'd be better off promoting a 3rd way instead of apologizing for the USSR and 3rd world countries with red flags.