At what point does communism become utopian. Why is being utopian looked down upon?
'Utopian' is a word people use to deride your platform when it is such a good idea that liberals and chuds need to pretend it's simply impossible to protect their fragile ideologies from the cognitive dissonance of recognizing that leftists are right.
Utopia is actually a good thing, it basically just means 'really good place', but people use it as an insult when they are trapped in capitalist realism and can't imagine better possible futures.
The word 'utopia' was coined in the 1500's for the title of a book about a really good/perfect society. Interestingly, the modern media landscape is dominated by dystopias, rather than the utopias one might expect from healthy minds.
This is because we, culturally, don't tend to look forward to better times, we're all stuck in fear and can only imagine destructive futures. It's a massive cultural blindspot that most of us don't even recognize we have.
In short, 'utopian' is looked down upon because we live in a culture of dystopia-obsessed doomers who are too capitalist realist to imagine better possible futures, let alone utopia.
As @gammison mentioned, there is more to it. In the Marxist sense it means a system that is conceived without studying society and its inner mechanisms, and thus that an utopia is something that will be inefficient to fight capitalism.
So it's good to have utopian hopes, but a society cannot be efficiently built just on these utopians hopes and must emerge from analysis of our current predicament and how to change it, I think in this sense then utopian can have both a pejorative and complimentary meaning
Right, yes. The question didn't frame 'utopian' in the marxist sense, so I went with the the sense that was both the original, and still the most commonly used. Didn't realize that would be controversial hehe
But ya, gammison's take is really good too. I think there's value in both the orthodox marxist take, and my more general take. It kind of parallels what you said, that there are both positive and negative dimensions to envisioning utopia. Which is why I'm not responding to astigmatic's negativity haha
Fully understand you position, I just thought since your answer was the top post it would be worth adding an explanation of that other point of view :p
no this is not what any of us mean when we talk about utopian socialism but nice try
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Engels_Socialism_Utopian_and_Scientific.pdf
Check out the history of socialism post series I've been doing, we will be covering utopian socialists for the next several weeks. To answer your question, utopianism as a pejorative by socialists has it's roots in Marx and Engels criticism of early 19th century socialism. This socialism, extremely varied and interesting to study in it's own right, usually took the form of organizing small scale communes with varying types of political systems, sometimes abolishing all forms of private property and sometimes not. The unification that Marx and Engels saw in them, were that their ideas were not rooted in careful study of history and society, and that they did not recognize how capitalism was developing around them, and thus their solutions would fundamentally not work, as they were not suited for the conditions that surrounded them. Sometimes this took the form of rejecting class conflict as a driving force in history, other times it was more specific to the practical organizing these early socialists were doing. Robert Owen (who I will be doing a post on soon) for example thought the ailment of society could be fixed by reorganizing it into small industrial communes, that would bestow virtue on a virtueless poor. He also believed that the rich bourgeois could be convinced to come to his aid purely by argumentation, and education via newspapers and books etc. He for example went to parliament to proselytize his views and was furious and disenchanted when he was laughed out and his politics became significantly more radical. This means of analysing society without class conflict, or without understanding its driving force in history, and believing in pure ideas was labelled utopian and unscientific by Marx and Engels. Note here scientific takes on a more general meaning of logic and well thought out philosophy. The german term is Wissenschaft. Again, the criticism is that by being utopian, these socialists could not effectively fight capital, even if their system was what Marx wanted. For example Marx praised owenist communes, but did not think they could overthrow capital.
Using other definitions of utopian, like wanting to build a utopia, we could call Marx a utopian but that's not what he meant when he used the term. It's also debatable on how much utopianism (in the sense outlined above) is actually still present in Marx. Some historians and philesophers think there are utopian elements that Marx could not get rid of in his own ideas. I think to some extent this is true.
It's not bad to be a utopian in this second sense. It's good to have ideals, but if we are to believe Marx and Engels, directly building our utopias in the context of the capitalist world in the manner of people like Owen or Saint-Simon does not work, and cannot overturn the system. The "science" showing this is the extrapolations from using the dialectic of class struggle to analyse history. Liberal or conservative criticisms of socialism as utopain take a much less interesting position that any attempts at all to build a better system are either doomed, or actively bad as capitalism is already the best it gets.
I should also note, that calling your socialism "scientific" does not mean its right. For example Bernstein's revisisons of Marx were based in his understanding of the changing nature of class struggle in Germany, and by that metric they are scientific, but are wrong in retrospect obviously. We should never use the term as a metric for a theory being right, it just describes the method taken to get there. A lot of times, the term is used too pejoratively and some of the people who socialists often claim to be utopian, could be viewed as scientific. For example, one can view Kropotkin as a scientific anarchist going off of Marx's use of the word. Doesn't mean Kropotkin is right or wrong, just that his analysis is an analysis based in careful and logical observation of society.
In my view it is not correct to claim that Marxists view scientific socialism as free from bias or ideology. It's not, just as any logical study or philosophy or natural science is not. It's purely the difference in the method of analysis between Marx and other 19th century socialists.
Great effort post, but as a German I have to note that the German term for science is Wissenschaft, you got a typo in there
For me, it starts utopian: classless, stateless, moneyless, police/prison abolition, environmental harmony, abolition of work etc... All sounds awesome! Discussing how society could look in this manner would probably make anyone an ancom, it did for me for sure :)
Liberals (both right and left liberals) basically do this to a lesser extent: we should have more or less separation of state, we should have such and such tax structure etc ... It all ends up being a discussion of ideals.
To me, scientific socialism is taking the conclusion that I agree upon with our ancom comrades and dissecting what steps could and should be taken to get there. Different nationals and societies will have different options available to them to transcend the capitalist mode of production and move toward a socialist mode of production as an intermediate step toward achieving FALGSC. MLs for instance, look at the success of the Russian Revolution under Lenin, and say that "if we want to overthrow capitalism we need to study what they did, and make specific adjustments based on the material conditions that a particular nation faces. We need to spend less time calling out particular nations for not being socialist enough and ask why they deviated from the socialist path, and what the pros and cons of that are".
For what we consider utopian socialists, such as ancoms, they look at the same nations, such as the PRC or USSR and say that they made too many compromises, and every action taken on the name of socialism, must be inherently socialist in nature. MLs and/or others may respond that the revolution would not be successful without making the hard decisions and "playing dirty".
There's a lot more nuance than I'm making there out to be, but that's a skeleton explanation.
Imagine a perfectly round shape. Humanity, with all technology will always just be able to approximate that perfectly round shape. Same with an ideal society or whatever, it will always stay an idea and will never become a reality, we might get closer to it, but not all the way
