[aschampion]

> A utopia which purports to make everyone happy (shouldn't they all?) is one that assumes all people are the same or it endeavours to make them so.

So the contrapositive is that because people differ all societies require some people to suffer? That's a great way to justify all sorts of exploitation.

> In all of the utopias ... including Marx's Communist Manifesto

Ah, the Chicago school framing. What's primarily a positive work describing existing material conditions and relations is utopian, because it is not a kind assessment of those conditions.

[chongli]

That's a great way to justify all sorts of exploitation.

Describing is not the same as justifying. Nature is what created us as individuals. Humanity could have been a vast society of clones (like an ant colony) but it isn't. We take all of the good and all of the bad together when we accept our individuality.

primarily a positive work describing existing material conditions and relations is utopian

It sounds to me like you're conflating the Communist Manifesto with Capital. The Manifesto is distinctly and unabashedly utopian. It is not a critique of any extant society, it is a call to arms. It sets forth a sharply bifurcated worldview, proletariat versus bourgeoisie, and attempts to rally the former in revolution against the latter.

This fact is so obvious, to so many people, that terms like "Communist utopia" and "worker's paradise" have become clichés.

[aschampion]

> Describing is not the same as justifying. Nature is what created us as individuals.

We have little means of empirically separating what is natural versus social construct (or even qualifying what such a distinction means) when it comes to human behavior and society. Claiming that our nature makes inevitable that societies require some significant portion of their constituents to suffer is not simple description, it's a conceit that, like most naturalistic fallacies, is consistently used to excuse and justify existing social order. Viz evopsych, etc.

The premise I'm contesting is that minimizing suffering due to social constructs necessitates homogeny, which is a condition that narratively pits potential social orders against the individual.

> It sounds to me like you're conflating the Communist Manifesto with Capital...It is not a critique of any extant society

The Manifesto contains the class struggle interpretation of history, the labor theory of value, excess value, the means of production, etc. Those are all models and critiques of extant society. It is not as descriptive or theoretical a work as Capital, but it primarily argues for a model of things as they are and have been. To my decades-old recollection only the third section is focused on ideal societies, and a large portion of that on contemporary political movements.

You can disagree with those models of extant society, or like me view them as historically significant but superseded theories, but you must admit the fundamental contrast to something like Moore's Utopia. They both have explicit normative perspective, but the Manifesto's are constructed out of an analysis of existing conditions, whereas Utopia is primarily concerned with describing the order of its hypothetical social ideal. Books like The Road to Serfdom are rarely framed as being utopian despite primarily being normative.

Politics is the art of the possible. Labeling perspectives on social order as "utopian" is a move designed to exclude them from the realm of possibility. I also first read the Manifesto in a political philosophy course as part of a unit on utopianism. It was only years later I realized the framing by the right-libertarian professor to demarcate it from serious political philosophy, despite post-Marxism having at least as comparable a profile as an academic philosophical tradition to the just-market apologetics that made up the remainder of the course.

[chongli]

Claiming that our nature makes inevitable that societies require some significant portion of their constituents to suffer is not simple description, it's a conceit that, like most naturalistic fallacies, is consistently used to excuse and justify existing social order.

If you eradicate violence then those who love violence will suffer. You can't please everyone. This is not a normative claim, it's a fact of individuality. If your Utopian society is free of violence, then you must exclude people who love violence. How you accomplish this without committing violence is another matter.

you must admit the fundamental contrast to something like Moore's Utopia

I don't, actually. More was every bit a critic of his contemporary society as Marx was of his. The difference between More and Marx is that More was one of the most brilliant rhetoricians of all time. Taking the form of a Socratic dialogue, Utopia employs a pair of interlocutors, one of whom is the author himself, in order to present a critique of enclosure and the excesses of nobility that flew right over most nobles' heads. To call it "primarily concerned with describing the order of its hypothetical ideal" is to completely miss the author's point. I suggest you read it again.

[AnimalMuppet]

Because people differ, attempts to make a society where one kind of people will be perfectly happy make other kinds of people very unhappy. The contrapositive is that making a society where nobody is very unhappy means making a society where nobody is perfectly happy.