I agree with you on the necessary uncertainty of outcome, whether or not we strive toward the "final goal of socialism" (= universal social emancipation of humanity from exploitation & oppressions), but there are a multitude of examples, major & minor, that can show how the absence of socialism as the political objective to strive for makes a difference in what political actions to take & how.
Suppose we decide that socialism is not possible & that particular antagonisms we experience are permanent, for all the permutations of relations of power. Then, many antagonisms among the working class take on a quality of the zero-sum game at the level of experiences & perceptions, that is, subjectively (though *even* under capitalism the zero-sum game does *not* quite correspond to reality). If white workers get jobs, others don't, & vice versa. If many immigrant workers enter into the labor market in a large number, wages of native-born workers who compete for the same jobs may go down. If anti-immigrant sentiments rise out of native-born workers' desire to improve their wages & working conditions, immigrant workers lose out, some of them dying & suffering under the precarious conditions imposed by smugglers. If poor nations industrialize, with many factory jobs moving from rich to poor nations, a large number of workers in rich nations may lose their jobs. If rich nations' workers succeed in enacting protectionist measures, workers in poor nations suffer, along with workers who are not employed by protected industries in rich nations, since they have to pay higher prices, etc. If unions succeed in protecting the job security of all teachers, whatever the quality of their performance, students & parents may have to put up with indifferent or even abusive ones. If students & parents assert control over teachers (which, more often than not, gets coopted & used by management for their purpose), teachers' autonomy & even job security may be threatened, and labor discipline intensifies.
What is the basis of solidarity between different groups of working-class individuals, whatever their race, gender, nationality, ability, trade, and so on, if not the final goal of socialism? Why not compete, rather than cooperate, if we are to remain under capitalism forever? Why not strive to beat out our competitors (= fellow workers), trying to monopolize goodies (= jobs, higher wages, promotions, etc.) by racism, sexism, protectionism, craft unionism, etc. -- or more individually, by sucking up to bosses, snitching on trouble-makers to curry favors, etc.?
In short, the absence of the final goal of socialism on our political horizon makes us all docile prisoners of the Panopticon, or combatants in Hobbes' "bellum omnium contra omnes."
As for Hobbes & Foucault, Marshall Sahlins has this to say:
***** "A man of a thousand masks," one of his biographers said of Michel Foucault, so how seriously can we take the guise he assumed to say that power arises in struggle, in war, and such a war as is of every man against every man. "Who fights whom?" he asked. "We all fight each other." Critics and exegetes hardly notice Foucault's connection to Hobbes except to mention the apparently radical disclaimer that his own notion of power is "the exact opposite of Hobbes' project in _Leviathan_." We have to give up our fascination with sovereignty, "cut off the king's head," free our attention from the repressive institution of state. Power comes from below. It is invested in the structures and cleavages of everyday life, omnipresent in quotidian regimes of knowledge and truth. If in the Hobbesian contract subjects constitute the power, the Commonwealth that keeps them all in awe, in the Foucauldian schema power constitutes the subjects. All the same, the structuralism the later Foucault abandoned for a sense of the poly-amorphous perverse, this structuralism taught that opposites are things alike in all significant respects but one. So when Foucault speaks of a war of each against all, and in the next breath even hints of a Christian divided self -- "And there is always within each of us something that fights something else" -- we are tempted to believe that he and Hobbes have more in common than the fact that, with the exception of Hobbes, both were bald. (_Waiting for Foucault_ 37-8) *****
Yoshie