Socialists will often claim that liberals aren’t one of them, and to a degree, this makes sense. Liberals embrace commodity fetishism and social alienation. They’re also compromising by simply providing public goods to avoid completely redistributing the means of production to a dictatorship of the proletariat.
However, when you look at socialists themselves, they’re compromising the exact same way. That is by advocating socialism, they’re expecting to be provided with the roles of bureaucrats who aren’t expected to perform concrete labor themselves. Instead, they get to administer the means of production in the name of the proletariat. They don’t need to own it. They just need to control it. Likewise, they embrace the dialectic of life in how there’s a chance that they’ll be excluded from bureaucracy just out of bad luck, but that they have to take the chance in order to be socially competitive. If they don’t take the chance, then their peers will…
…so I don’t really see a difference. On one hand, yes, I can agree that liberals aren’t socialists, but on the other, socialists are really just doing the exact same thing as liberals except to a stronger degree.
Furthermore, for all that socialists emphasize history, they don’t emphasize tradition. They despise tradition and behave like liberals anyway unless that tradition is feminist or multiculturalist. Heck, many socialists forget about commodity fetishism anyway and relish in being Bohemian Bourgeois.