The biggest rebutal I see in the eyes of the average person to "socialism" and "communism" is that it's utopic, that it relies on bad assumptions, that it doesn't work in reality etc. In essence, that we're advocating for something that can't be and that we have no alternative to capitalism.
And, to that effect, what are we even advocating for ? It appears to me that we have a bunch of different movements with many different goals that don't actually ressemble one another. Yet, despite this, very few of these movements have actual "models", it just seems like they want to reform or do a revolution for the sake of action rather than purpose.
Shouldn't we concentrate on clear objectives and goals before having all this talk about how marxism-leninism-maoism-gonzalo thought is superior to cybernetic-trotskism-councilism in achieving [we run into the problem here]?
>inb4 abolition of private property, abolition of capitalism, abolition of alienation
We can't actually base our objectives around these vagues goals though, or at least not at the current time and at the forefront. Abolition of private property doesn't mean anything if there's no framework to offer an alternative or to replace it. Marx laid us many goals but, given that he didn't specify what or how, shouldn't it be up to us to conceptualize the type of system which we want in accordance with the relevant theories he proposed.
Apart from small intellectuals scattered everywhere (Cockshott, Schweickart etc), there seems to be an evident lack of clear model that actually adresses the critique of marx's ambitions and dismisses its apparent utopianism.
There is none because Marx decisively made sure to never leave a direct manifesto on what to do, it should be noted however he derided labor notes, value hours, and a bunch more stuff, how much of this was just critique or openly disownment is questionable, so you can vaguely estimate what Marx wanted, but he wouldn't care for it either, Marx like Nietzsche was about the process and less about any end goal because end goals are utopian in of themselves.
I'm not a communist anymore, all I know is that marxism is objectively the best ideology, more than that I don't care about le revolution that will come when I'm dead or too old to give a fuck.