However I think in your analysis you are separating capitalism, the economic base, from liberalism, the ideological superstructure.

That's not my doing. They have already been separated through ideological means - it's the reason why working class people in the US (for instance) can be convinced that a political establishment that obviously and overtly only represents oligarchic elite interests will, somehow, also end up representing their interests as long as they "vote harder" (or whatever gimmicky party line they come up with next).

The reason elites and alienated workers adhere to liberalism is because it validates lived experiences,

You're putting the cart before the horse. Liberal narratives bases itself on the lived experience of the working class - or, to be more accurate, liberal narratives bases itself on the lived experience of those elements of the working class whose support it needs to maintain the status quo - not the other way around. Examples are not hard to find - the "bUt wHeRe wIll tHE mOneY cOmE fRoM?!?" (or it's various variations) gibbering you see liberal economic pundits peddle on tv screens every time somebody proposes building any kind of infrastructure that will benefit the working class is thoroughly based on the mundane, end-of-the-month economic pressures plenty of working class families can identify with. That is why it works so well. In fact, it works so well that it literally becomes self-perpetuating - the working class conflating the economic pressures of working-class economic deprivation with national and even global economics allows the liberal media machine a cornucopia of ways in which to easily justify the machinations of the status quo.

Faced with this kind of enemy, it shouldn't be that hard for the left to see that leftist ideas of "educating" the working class into radicalism is a stillborn one that is based on romanticised - I would even say magical - thinking... yet it is.

Perhaps you can already tell by now... my background is in propaganda. And the left gets theirs very, VERY wrong.

But if you tell that liberal union member that liberalism is like a fucked up evil ideology,

There's a very big difference between telling somebody that liberalism is a "fucked up evil ideology," and simply exposing liberalism as the fundamentally oligarchic ideology it is, always has been and always will be. The former does not explain why Obama promised "Yes We Can!" and then spent his regime-time bailing out corporations with public money while the working class was kicked further into the economic abyss of (so-called) "austerity" - the latter does. With the latter, there simply aren't too many dots for the average working class person to connect.

but attacking the ideology itself is too abstract, too philosophical, as an approach all on its own.

Since when? The reactionaries are literally attacking ideologies all the damn time - even including liberalism itself when most of the people propagating these narratives qualify as private-property loving liberals themselves! It certainly doesn't seem too abstract for them, does it now?

Are you suggesting right-wingers are "too philosophical?"

The last person who told me not to use terms like “socialism”

That's just a purely operational thing. In my experience, any political conversation involves somebody calling me a socialist or a communist five minutes in - my response is usually just, "And what if I am?" and then I carry on regardless.

and many socialists start out as progressive liberals

Yeah... and it shows. The "kid glove" treatment liberalism gets from the left shows. And the working class notices it as well. Working class people all over the world loved watching Richard Spencer getting punched by an antifascist - they literally swoon over Luigi Mangione. Yet, despite all this, the working class has as little confidence in the left as ever.

Why is that?