While both the mass strike debate of the Second International and the theory of council communism were more than mere reflections of real struggles, they did refer to such struggles — “The soviet was not a theoretical discovery” (Guy Debord). Today’s musings on a new society, however, seem to be mere abstract utopianism, exactly the kind rejected by an entire lineage of critical theorists, from Marx to the famous Bilderverbot of Frankfurt’s late Marxists. This line of thought saw utopias as presumptuous phantasies and held that it should be left to the people liberating themselves to determine the new forms of their collective life. Against ready-made outlines of a “liberated society”, counterposed to the status quo in a purely abstract way, the Frankfurt School rightly insisted on working from concrete social contradictions: only the proletarians themselves, through lengthy class struggles, might eventually be able to build a new society. Communism should not be an ideal but a “real movement”. Endnotes, Contours of the World Commune, Endnotes #5, p.163

“The significance of Critical-Utopian Socialism ... bears an inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and all theoretical justification. Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavour, and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realisation of their social utopias, of founding isolated ‘phalanstères’, of establishing ‘Home Colonies’, of setting up a ‘Little Icaria’ ... and to realise all these castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois.” [Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 6, pp. 515–16.] The fundamental error of the utopian socialists which gives rise to this unacceptable political position is the expectation that society can be changed by the appeal to all classes on the basis of reason and justice, and the belief that their blueprints of the good society will be the cause of social transformation. It is this idealist, as opposed to materialist, concept of social change which is the real problem. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.60

It is clear that the basis of Marx’s and Engels’s criticisms of utopian socialism is not an objection to speculation about the future, but a difference of view about the process of transformation. As Vincent Geoghegan puts it, ‘what is under attack here is not anticipation as such, but rather the failure to root this anticipation in a theoretical framework cognizant of the essential dynamics of capitalism’. […] Utopian socialism draws up schemes for the future. Its main fault however is not that it does this, or that the schemes themselves outline the wrong sort of future, but that it entails an idealist model of social change, suggesting that the mere propagation of such schemes will have a transformative effect. Utopia here is effectively defined in terms of its function, which is seen as a negative, counter-revolutionary, one: "The chief offence does not lie in having inscribed [a] specific nostrum in [a] programme, but in taking a retrograde step at all from the standpoint of a class movement to that of a sectarian movement.” [Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 24, p. 93] In their terms the key question is whether movements foster a deeper understanding of the class struggle, or whether they disguise it behind plans to persuade all classes to combine in the construction of a society based on harmony. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 64, 66