People who call themselves socialists but reject communism are either utopianists, electoralists, or confused social-democrats who reject the historically accomplished and real communist projects in favor of a pure as the driven snow mythical socialism that must be ushered in by the masses legally ascending to power within the bourgeois system. They are haunted by the actions of Leninists under the baggage of petty bourgeoise moralizing brainwashing we all go through in the West to view every success as a failure and every failure as a success, and thusly shrink under the accusations from the enemies of the working class of having association to the Revolutionary Left.