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.
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
I misspell it everytime I type it.