Those who call it such will be denounced as heretics. Nor does it negate socialism. When people who own the means of production oversee only the productive capacity of their own capital, and cease unduly influencing government, education, and other institutions of civil society to the extent they do today, then we will no longer have hegemonic capitalism as we've known it up until now. The most important lesson learned from the withered Soviet experiment with social and economic revolution is that no system can survive for more than a few decades without support of the people. Democracy, true and total democracy, is and always has been the most radical of all political notions, far more so than socialism or communism ever were.
True democracy is dreaded by partisans of the old left and right alike.
Traditional Communists still harbor a disdain for elections, a distrust of populism and a passion for central authority. It is the task of new socialists to lead the old guard to democracy, despite the gigantic challenges facing both socialism and democracy from economic globalization and the profoundly anti-democratic influence of transnational corporatism. Marxists and other orthodox socialists will certainly deride them as revisionist bourgeois incrementalism, simply because neo-socialists allow a certain amount of free enterprise to exist in society. Only when a socialist system is defined by broad democratic processes will people accept its premises long enough to make it work. And this will happen.