Marx and Engels are very insistent that liberalism is a tool of the bourgeois.

Although, I think more often than not defining anything short of hardcore central control to achieve some notion of socialism, probably scientific because utopian is naive and fucking libs blah blah, is just used by crypto fascists to give their violent bigoted authoritarian tendencies an aire of legitimacy. Pretty much what the Bolsheviks did to turn the initial revolution into a fascist cesspit.