Critique

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Reflections on Aspects of Marxist Anti-Utopianism

Paul B. Smith

To cite this article: Paul B. Smith (2009) Reflections on Aspects of Marxist Anti-Utopianism,
Critique, 37:1, 99-120, DOI: 10.1080/03017600802598260

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 Critique
Vol. 37, No. 1, February 2009, pp. 99
120

Reflections on Aspects of Marxist

Anti-Utopianism
Paul B. Smith
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This article argues that Marx and Engels’ anti-utopianism was consistent and based on
objective political and economic criteria. Marx and Engels were critical of the ideas and
practices of followers of the early founders of socialist theory. Politically, they argued these
followers were sectarian. Theoretically, a utopian understanding of political economy was
partial and pseudo-scientific. This explained how the means sectarians promoted for
achieving the socialist goal were ineffective. Utopianism consisted of a mismatch between
ends and means. It was a form of unrealisable socialism. Marx and Engels did not try to
prevent people thinking imaginatively about the classless society of the future. This is a
distortion. It originated with Bernstein’s revisionism. Stalinism and bourgeois sociology
consolidated this misunderstanding. As a result anti-utopian Marxism has appeared to
be an inconsistent form of conservative subjectivity.

Keywords: Utopianism; Political Economy; Socialism; Partiality; Social Science

Introduction
Was Marx and Engels’ thinking about their socialist predecessors inconsistent? Were
Marx and Engels anti-utopian utopians? If Marx and Engels were the most utopian of
all the socialists, this was because they upheld a vision of ultimate human liberation.
Yet they rebuked other socialist thinkers for their utopianism.1
Marx and Engels hid their utopia of total and final de-alienation behind a scientific
screen. Their utopia was a Hegelian absolute, entailing the end of history.2 This
utopia was heavily indebted to their predecessors. For example, Saint Simon
influenced their notion of the withering away of the state. Babeuf contributed to
their idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Owen and Fourier gave them the idea

1
‘Marxism’s anti-utopianism has weakened and subverted its utopianism, to the considerable detriment of
Marxism itself, both in theory and in practice’. S. Lukes, ‘Marxism and Utopianism’ in P. Alexander and R. Gill
(eds) Utopias (London: Duckworth, 1984), pp. 153
167, 155.
2
L. Sekelj, ‘Marx on the State and Communism’ in Praxis International, 3:4 (January 1984), pp. 359
368,
360.

ISSN 0301-7605 (print)/ISSN 1748-8605 (online) # 2009 Critique

DOI: 10.1080/03017600802598260
 100 P. B. Smith

of the abolition of the distinction between town and country. Fourier pioneered the
concepts of alienated labour and women’s liberation. Owen anticipated Marx and
Engels’ ideas of communist organisation.3
Marx and Engels’ anti-utopianism took two forms. In the first form they used the
term ‘utopian’ pejoratively.4 In the second form their scientific pretensions prevented
them from clarifying the nature of utopian ends and means and the relationship
between the two.5
In this article, I shall argue a contrary position to the above. I argue that, whilst Marx
and Engels were well aware of how the term ‘utopian’ could be used in a disparaging way,
they were careful to use it to refer to an aspect of objective reality. This was the mismatch
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between the goal of a rational alternative to capitalism and an effective means of achieving
this goal. According to Marx and Engels, this mismatch was the result of partially theorised
understandings of economic categories. In support of my argument, I refer to Marx’s
critique of Proudhon’s and Owen’s relationship to Smith and Ricardo’s political economy.
The article falls into six sections. In the first, I examine Marx and Engels’ political
writings. What is the evidence of their pejorative use of ‘utopian’? My answer is that
the struggle against sectarianism gave the term a polemical tone. In the second, I give
a historical account of the origins of Marx and Engels’ alleged inconsistency. This
refers to the writings of Bernstein. I describe social democratic anti-utopianism as
‘revisionist’. In the third, I show how Mannheim’s sociology and Stalinism
consolidated revisionist anti-utopianism into an ideology. This has influenced
consciousness in the 20th century. In the fourth, I introduce Istvan Meszaros’
criterion of partiality. This is utopianism as pseudo-universality and partial remedies
for global problems. In the fifth, I discuss problems with this criterion. Finally, I
discuss the relevance of political economy to an understanding of utopianism.

The Struggle Against Sectarianism

Marx and Engels’ political writings, such as the Communist Manifesto (1848), the Class
Struggles in France (1850) and The Civil War in France (1871), have provided most of
the evidence for the position that their anti-utopianism was pejorative in nature. Marx
and Engels engaged in polemical battles with sectarian followers of Owen, Fourier,
Cabet (and later Proudhon) throughout this period. Although commentators have
noted Marx and Engels’ praise for the content of early socialist literature, they have
tended to interpret this either as evidence of the derivative nature of Marx and Engels’
own political ideas or of an inconsistent anti-utopian utopianism. Indeed, without
some knowledge of Marx’s writings on utopian political economy, a subjective attitude
to rival socialist doctrines appears striking. This appearance, however, has its own
genesis and maturation. I shall discuss this later below.

3
V. Geoghegan, Utopianism and Marxism (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 2.
4
Marx and Engels used ‘utopian’ as an ‘epithet of denigration to be splashed onto any theoretical opponent’.
F.E. Manuel and F.P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), p.698.
5
Lukes, op. cit., p. 166.
 Critique 101

A superficial reading of the Communist Manifesto might lead to thinking Marx and
Engels’ anti-utopianism was pejorative. The Manifesto’s literary form and rhetorical
purpose gave the text a declamatory tone. Moreover, Marx and Engels used the term
‘fantastic’ when discussing early socialist literature. They described followers of
Robert Owen, Fourier and Cabet as attempting to realise castles in the air. This usage
appears emotive*implying disapproval or condemnation.
It has led commentators to argue that the crucial element of Marx and Engels’
critique was that they opposed early forms of socialism because these included
blueprints of the socialist society of the future. Thus, according to Stephen Lukes, Marx
and Engels saw ‘the very project of speculating about the ideal society as ‘‘utopian’’’.6
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The hypothesis has been that Marx and Engels held that workers should be discouraged
from imagining what a society freed from capitalist social relations could be like.7 This
has become a common view of the nature of Marx and Engels’ anti-utopianism.
As far as I am aware, Marx and Engels did not use the term ‘blueprint’ in any of
their writings. They did, however, refer to the process of planning. The setting of
imaginative goals and the attempt to realise these in the present were essential aspects
of human nature. If Marx opposed devising blueprints then it seems strange he chose
the architect (and his or her use of imagination) to exemplify what was distinctively
human in the labour process*not the bee.8 For Marx and Engels, planning was
essential both as a means of achieving socialism and for the establishment of a society
of individual freedom. Marx and Engels conceived of planning holistically*planning
for the whole of society as well as its parts. They thought of it as the conscious
regulation of the economy and society by the associated producers themselves.
Far from disparaging the writings of their socialist predecessors, Marx and Engels
thought it was important that workers use them for thinking about the classless
alternative to capitalism. Towards this end, Marx and Engels encouraged workers to
study socialist literature other than their own. Early socialist literature was full of
materials valuable for proletarian enlightenment precisely because it suggested that
the disappearance of class antagonisms was possible.
Marx and Engels considered the early socialists revolutionary. They did not direct
their polemic against them in the Manifesto. They targeted the reactionary
sectarianism of their followers. The latter advocated the original views of their
masters rigidly. They were hostile to the progressive development of the proletariat.9
The vigour of Marx and Engels’ political attack on socialist sectarianism gives
‘utopian’ a pejorative tone. However, they wanted to encourage discussion on the
nature of a future classless society. They were not trying to prevent it.

6
Ibid., p. 157.
7
Geoghegan, op. cit., p. 2.
8
K. Marx, Capital, Vol. I (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co. Ltd., 1906), p. 157.
9
They referred to the ‘miraculous effects’ sectarians attributed to utopian ‘social science’. K. Marx and F.
Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 6 (London: Lawrence
and Wishart, 1976), pp. 476
517, 517.
 102 P. B. Smith

According to Marx and Engels, followers of Owen, Cabet and Fourier reproduced
ideas formed before class antagonisms had taken on a distinct political and economic
character. They ignored workers as potential agents of social change by appealing to the
emotions and the philanthropy of the bourgeoisie. They were blind to social changes
that had empowered workers. Workers were aware of a rational alternative to
capitalism. They were conscious that collective political and economic action could
bring this alternative into being. Socialist sectarianism had made rejection of political
action into a doctrine. It had become preoccupied with failed social experiments. As
Marx explained elsewhere, these experiments were doomed because their intellectual
foundations rested upon an undeveloped form of political economy. This entailed
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partial accounts of the nature of value, surplus value, money and capital. I discuss the
nature of the partiality of these accounts in greater detail below.
In Marx’s 1850 work, The Class Struggles in France, Marx’s heroic and declamatory tone
reflected a struggle underway between followers of different socialist systems. Marx
described workers being increasingly drawn to revolutionary socialism. This declared the
permanence of the revolution and the class dictatorship of the proletariat. Workers were
making the necessary connections. They could see permanent revolution and the
dictatorship of the proletariat as moments of transition to socialism. According to Marx,
workers had a different understanding of the means of achieving socialism from the
doctrinaire teachings of the sectarians. Doctrinaire socialism upheld unrealisable means. It
was therefore utopian. Arguments for the unrealisable nature of these means rested upon
Marx’s critique of the partiality of utopian political economy. Commentators have
ignored arguments Marx’s contemporaries would have known well. The connection
between political economy and Marxist anti-utopianism would have been obvious within
a culture that accepted the truth of the labour theory of value.
By the time of the Paris Commune*over 20 years after the Manifesto*Marx
suggested sectarian socialists had become figures of fun. The tone of The Civil War in
France was more relaxed and confident than that of the Manifesto. The latter is full of
warnings that sectarians were attempting to deaden the class struggle and reconcile
class antagonisms. In contrast, Marx’s final draft of 1871 expressed confidence that his
readers knew about the bourgeois composition of sectarian groups. These were out of
touch with the changed reality of proletarian consciousness. Workers had adopted
socialism as the final goal in their movement for liberation. They advocated revolution
as the means. Their consciousness of the nature of the socialist project was more
advanced than that of the sectarian followers of the founders.
In the first draft of The Civil War in France, Marx summarised his earlier thinking on
socialist sectarianism. The dangers sectarians posed to class formation were ebbing
away. Early socialist thinkers had identified the ‘goal of the social movement, the
supersession of the wages system with all its economical conditions of class rule’.10 Marx
stressed that workers had not abandoned this goal. On the contrary, they had

10
K. Marx, First Draft of the Civil War in France (1871), in Marx, Collected Works, Vol. 22 (London: Lawrence
and Wishart, 1986), pp. 435
514, 499.
 Critique 103

incorporated it into their liberation movement. Workers’ thinking on the society of the
future shared with the founders the perception of goals. They differed on the means. On
the one hand, the means had an intellectual component. The historic and material
conditions for social transformation from bourgeois to the new society needed
understanding. On the other hand, working class organisations had come into being.
These had the potential to carry through the transition from capitalism to socialism.
The confident tone of 1870
1871 reflected the success of the Commune. The goal
of a socialist society had become part of the subjectivity of workers. The First
International and revolutionary forces in Paris had organised and educated them. The
political struggle against sectarian barriers had been won. Socialist consciousness was
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implanted within the proletarian movement. The advances Marx achieved in political
economy made this victory possible.

The Origins of Revisionist Anti-Utopianism

Eduard Bernstein, the founder of modern social democracy, was the first to argue Marx
and Engels were inconsistent anti-utopian utopians. Bernstein loathed speculating
about the future. In his 1899 book The Preconditions of Socialism, he suggested that
Marx was opposed to describing the socialist goal. To do so was utopian.
Bernstein presented Marx’s theory of history and political economy as scientific
and therefore opposed to utopianism. He also argued that Marx’s theory of
revolutionary socialism was unscientific and therefore utopian. Marx had used the
Hegelian dialectic. This was an unscientific method. Marx was therefore inconsistent.
He was scientific and unscientific. He was anti-utopian and utopian.
Politically, Bernstein clothed his arguments in orthodoxy. Bernstein was continuing
the struggle against sectarianism. The sectarians were followers of Marx. Bernstein
targeted the leadership of the British Social Democratic Federation, in particular
Belfort Bax. By implication, he also attacked other leaders of the Second International
for their utopianism.11 The leadership of the Second International had similar
perceptions of socialist ends and means to Marx and Engels. Many of them had
written about the society of the future.12

11
Bernstein regretted that ‘many utopian notions’ had crept into the speculations of his contemporaries.
These were either fantasies or broad outlines of ‘the probable course of development towards a socialist order’. If
they rejected speculation on the nature of a socialist society, these outlines could be non-utopian. E. Bernstein,
‘General Observations on Utopianism and Eclecticism’, in H. Tudor & J.M. Tudor (eds), Marxism and Social
Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988 [1896]), p. 74.
12
Angenot claims to have analysed 80 examples of literature in French and German produced by intellectuals
active within the European socialist movement from 1889 to 1914. He mentions works by Bebel, Kautsky, Jaures
and Vandervelde as the most prominent of those who produced ‘detailed blueprints of the ‘‘collectivist’’ society
that was to succeed the*supposedly imminent*proletarian revolution and the collapse of capitalism’. M.
Angenot, ‘Society After the Revolution: The Blueprints for the Forthcoming Socialist Society published by the
Leaders of the Second International’, in P. Parrinder (ed.), Learning from Other Worlds (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press: 2000), pp. 98
115, 98
99.
 104 P. B. Smith

Bernstein claimed to be following Marx by opposing what remained of socialist

utopianism.13 For Bernstein, utopianism involved speculating about the nature of a
future society. It also entailed thinking that the working class seizing revolutionary
power could achieve socialism. Thinking about the final goal of socialism was
utopian. The idea the working class could become the ruling class was utopian. He
appealed to the authority of Marx and Engels’ writings, quoting out of context. He
used selective quotes to argue against discussion of the final goal. The most famous of
these was Marx’s comment on a contemporary review of Capital in a positivist
journal. Marx wrote that the reviewer had reproached him for not ‘writing receipts
for the cookshops of the future’.14 Bernstein used an incredulous remark directed
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sarcastically at a positivist reviewer as a warning. Speculating about the socialist goal

was unorthodox.15
Bernstein argued against workers’ revolutionary power and the notion of the
dictatorship proletariat. He alleged that an unscientific dialectical method had
deceived Marx and Engels. It had given them a miraculous and mistaken belief. This
was in the creative power of force. Hegelian dialectics led to irrational beliefs. These
were typical of petty bourgeois visionary dreamers. To believe in the creative power of
workers was utopian in a pejorative sense. The potential force of workers was
contrary to common sense and experience. It was imaginary.16
Bernstein’s idea that Marx and Engels were opposed to speculating about the final
goal of socialism is false.17 Bernstein misinterpreted a quote from The Civil War in
France in order to support this contention. In context the quote proves the opposite.
In support of his notion that the final goal of socialism was nothing but the labour
movement was everything, Bernstein quoted Marx declaring that workers have ‘no
ready-made utopia to introduce par décret du peuple’ and that they ‘have no ideals to
realise, but to set free elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois
society is pregnant’.18
Bernstein’s use of this passage is peculiar. Marx was criticising those who thought
socialism could be introduced immediately through a coup d’état. He was arguing for
workers’ democratic planning*in this case, their actual influence within the Paris
Commune.19 Setting free elements of the new society referred to the material
conditions necessary for the realisation of the socialist goal of free individuality (such
as automation and a short working week). It also implied political measures involving

13
E. Bernstein, The Preconditions of Socialism, ed. & trans. H. Tudor (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993 [1899]), p. 8
14
Marx, Capital, Vol. I, op. cit., p. xxvi. ‘Receipts’ is the literal translation of the German rezepte. Rezept also
means ‘prescription’ and can be translated figuratively as ‘recipe’.
15
Bernstein, 1896, p. 74.
16
Bernstein, 1899, p. 35.
17
‘Bernstein was . . . not justified in invoking Marx’s authority for his views’. L. Kolakowski, Main Currents of
Marxism: 2. The Golden Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 109.
18
Bernstein, 1899, p. 192.
19
‘This was the first revolution in which the working class was openly acknowledged as the only class capable
of social initiative’. K. Marx, The Civil War in France (1871), in Marx, Collected Works, Vol. 22, (London:
Lawrence and Wishart, 1986), p. 336.
 Critique 105

planning from below (such as the abolition of class property, the expropriation of the
expropriators and the establishment of co-operative production). 20
Bernstein used the quote to support the notion that Marx was opposed to
speculation about the nature of the future society because workers had no ‘ideals to
realise’. On the contrary, Marx stated that workers had a full consciousness of their
historical mission. This was based on the ideal of freeing themselves and the elements
of the new society trapped within the womb of bourgeois society. The ideal new
society involved planning, workers’ control, co-operatives and nationalisation.
Moreover, given a command of political economy, these ideals were realisable.
Rather than proving that the final goal of socialism was not on the workers’
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agenda, these results of workers’ power were essential to Marx’s notion of transition.
It was measures such as these Bernstein argued were the product of Marx’s
unscientific dialectical method. This was further corrupted with ideas taken from
Blanqui. In other words, Marx and Engels were presupposing an inappropriate
seizure of power by the revolutionary party of the proletariat against the interests of
the workers. Bernstein blamed the Hegelian element in their theories for Marx and
Engels’s heedless passing over of the ‘grossest errors of Blanquism’.21
Taken out of the context of Marx’s ideas of transition, Bernstein’s use of this quote
is often used to illustrate Marx’s alleged hostility to speculation concerning the
society of the future.22 On the contrary, the Paris Commune had shown the socialist
goal was possible and potentially realisable. It was no longer an utopian idea. Workers
had a clear perception of a classless, democratically planned society. They had a
consciousness of themselves as a collective agency capable of bringing this society into
being. Moreover, this awareness excluded socialism by state decree. On the contrary,
realisation of the socialist ideal entailed struggles and processes that transformed
circumstances and men. Implicit in this passage is, therefore, a critique of the
Blanquist notion of a putsch or coup d’état. In contrast to Bernstein, who attacked
Marx’s notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a residue of Blanquist
utopianism, Marx suggested that a political party imposing socialism from above
would be utopian. The state could not bring a ruling class into being. On the
contrary, a new ruling class could transform the state.

Anti-Utopianism as Ideology
Bernstein’s revisionist anti-utopianism consolidated the pejorative use of ‘utopian’.
Following Bernstein, social democrats used ‘utopian’ to attack the alleged Blanquism
of the Bolsheviks. However, Stalinism made use of the word for the most destructive

20
Marx referred to communism as regulating ‘national production upon a common plan’. This meant
workers in power would take production under their own control. Marx, 1871, p. 335.
21
Bernstein, 1899, pp. 43, 46.
22
Lasky uses this quote as an example of Marx ’s ‘esotericism of ultimate aims’ i.e. that he hid his own
utopian vision of a ‘new heaven and earth’ behind criticisms of ‘images of paradise and utopia’. This suggests that
Marx was dishonest. It also restates the allegation that he was an inconsistent anti-utopian utopian. M.J. Lasky,
Utopia and Revolution, (London: Macmillan, 1976), p. 39.
 106 P. B. Smith

of purposes. By 1928, Stalinists were using ‘utopian’ in order to dismiss critical

thought, denounce difference of opinion and ostracise dissent. 1928 is significant
because it coincides with two important historical moments. The first was Stalin’s
first five year plan and the regime’s campaign against intellectuals.23 The second was
the publication of Karl Mannheim’s book Ideology and Utopia. Both campaign and
book were to strip the concept of utopia of any socialist content and reduce it to a
form of subjective mentality, type or outlook.
Stalin’s campaign included an attack both on Marxists and on all the forms of
debate and social experimentation that had flourished since the October Revolution.
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Stalin linked the striving for social equality with utopian socialism. He made sure that
debates on proletarian art and morality and experiments in town planning were
ended. Rural and urban communal living were attacked for their utopian
egalitarianism.24 Modernist town planners and architects were attacked for their
westernism and utopianism.25 Lazar Kaganovich, one of Stalin’s henchmen, stated
that since Soviet Russia was already socialist, there was no need to speculate about the
desirability or future design of cities. Town planners were denounced as utopians and
Trotskyists.26 Utopian egalitarianism was characterised as an undesirable form of
mentality or outlook associated with pathological or deviant psychological types.
At the same time, Mannheim argued that the utopian mentality originated in
irrational wish fulfilments directed at non-existent objects typical of fantasies and
dreams. He praised Stalin for giving methodological sanction to political experi-
ence.27 Stalin, not Marx or Hegel, was Mannheim’s authority on dialectics. He
thought that Stalin had achieved a highly flexible synthesis of the rational with the
irrational. This enabled theory to be revised in the light of the effects that political
activity had on reality through generalising from the experience of the labour
movement.
Following Bernstein, Mannheim thought that one of the most significant steps
Marx took was to attack the utopian element in socialism.28 According to Mannheim,
Marx’s anti-utopianism was scientific because, like him, Marx recognised that
utopian ideas had a social function. However, by identifying the causes of utopian
ideas as psychological, Mannheim detached the concept of utopia from socialism. All
political doctrines were utopian, according to Mannheim, when they functioned to
express the unfulfilled wishes and fantasies of a subordinate class in its struggle for
power. After a subordinate class takes power, the same ideas function as ideology.
This is a form of mind control over the masses. Thus, Mannheim argued, both
liberalism and conservatism had utopian forms historically.

23
R. Stites, Revolutionary Dreams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 227.
24
Ibid., p. 232.
25
Ibid., p. 237.
26
Ibid., p. 238.
27
K. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul, 1936), p. 113.
28
Ibid., p. 112.
 Critique 107

Mannheim thought Marx was wrong to think of ideology as false consciousness.

Mannheim criticised Marx for thinking he could unmask ideology if that meant
proving it to be false. If unmasking ideology made sense, then it was the process of
exposing the irrational psychological drives that predisposed individuals to believe
certain political doctrines. The value-free model of sociology Mannheim took from
Weber barred him from discussing whether any particular set of political ideas could
be true or false. Mannheim criticised Marx for failing to see that his own ideas had
utopian elements that could function as ideology.29 According to Mannheim,
Marxism as ideology was a synthesis of liberal-bourgeois generalising tendencies
with conservative historicism.30
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Mannheim hoped his subjective, psychogenetic characterisation of utopianism

would be useful to a ruling elite hoping to control the unconscious motivations and
presuppositions that brought certain modes of thought into existence.31 These modes
of thought included social democratic and Stalinised ideal types of ‘Marxism’.
Marxism functioned both as a controlling ideology in the Soviet Union and as a
utopian expression of the repressed desires of workers in the non-Soviet world.
Mannheim’s Marxism was both the anti-utopian doctrine of the Soviet elite and the
utopian aspiration of the economically oppressed proletarian.32
Both Stalinists and sociological followers of Mannheim benefited from presenting
Marx as an inconsistent anti-utopian utopian. Stalinists could denounce dissident
Marxist critics of the totalitarian and inegalitarian nature of the regime as ‘utopian’.
This served to isolate and silence them. Followers of Mannheim, on the other hand,
argued that, as a variety of socialist doctrine, Marxism failed to recognise its own
utopianism and therefore its own sociological function and psychogenesis in
irrational unfulfilled desires. Mannheim provided the theory for Bernstein’s doctrine
that Marx was an anti-utopian utopian. He explained this with an appeal to what he
thought was a value-free sociology of knowledge. Stalinism, on the other hand, put
Bernstein’s doctrine into practice: praising Marx’s anti-utopianism in order to
suppress left-wing criticism of the regime whilst arguing that Marx’s egalitarian and
libertarian perception of socialism was unrealisable in the present and the foreseeable
future.
Both Stalinism and Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge functioned to close down
the possibility of a debate on the viability of the means to achieving the end of
socialism. Both conceived of critique as a form of personal attack. This was an explicit
practice for Stalinists for whom all differences of opinion were met with forms of
verbal and physical abuse. It was implicit in Mannheim’s distinction between
particular and total ideology. Particular ideology was, for Mannheim, the attempt to

29
Ibid., p. 69.
30
Ibid., p. 136.
31
Ibid., p. 5.
32
Ticktin argues that there was no ideology in the USSR, ‘but rather a complex relation of doctrines and
belief patterns. These reject ‘the essence of Marxism’. H. Ticktin, Origins of the Crisis in the USSR (Armonk: M.E.
Sharpe: 1992), pp. 18
19.
 108 P. B. Smith

unmask the latent irrational unconscious motives that lay behind political discourse.
Exposure of hidden motives behind political ideas and doctrines caused psychic
damage to the person exposed. It was experienced as a political attack. It could only
be avoided by adopting the non-normative and value free notion of total ideology.
Sociologists of knowledge were therefore to avoid any discussion of the truth or
falsity of the doctrines they described in order to appear objective. Social scientific
critique of socialist theory was isolated from any normative or veridical judgements.
The intention was to abolish the element of critique concerned with the evaluation of
the truth or falsity of certain beliefs and replace this with a value-free sociology.
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From 1928 onwards, an unchallenged consensus arose that Marx and Engels were
inconsistent anti-utopian utopians. With Stalinism in mind, utopianism became any
irrationally motivated doctrine that had the power to mobilise the oppressed masses.
New exploitative elites arose on the back of movements of the oppressed. These elites
then turned utopian ideas into ruling ideologies. Within political discourse, ‘utopian’
became a term of relative abuse. One person’s utopia was another person’s dystopia.
According to Mannheim, the ideology of the ruling elite generated such disapproval.
Rulers labelled all challenges to their rule as utopian from their point of view.33
Judgements of viability, possibility and practicality were relative to the interests of
certain individuals or groups either already in power or aspiring to take power. These
judgements were subjective and unrelated to any notion of objective reality or
universal criteria. As Geoghegan puts it, they were ‘dreams masquerading as an attack
on dreaming’.34 This made a discussion of the relationship between socialist means
and ends impossible. All forms of anti-utopianism tended to support the conservative
viewpoint that large-scale or sudden progressive change was harmful, destabilising or
destructive of order and tradition.35

Anti-Utopianism and Partiality

Throughout most of the 20th century, the notion that there might be a criterion by
which it is possible to distinguish between a utopian and scientific understanding of
the relationship between the means and ends of the socialist project has been lacking.
The question of the relationship between socialist ends and means was addressed
either dogmatically or according to its sociological function. It has been difficult to
discuss intelligently whether some perceptions of means are realisable and others not.
In contrast, Marx clearly thought these issues were important. I shall argue here he
used philosophical and economic criteria to answer the question of realisability. What

33
Mannheim, op. cit., pp. 176
177.
34
Geoghegan, op. cit., p. 6.
35
For a recent reworking of this theme see J. Gray, Black Mass (London: Allen Lane, 2007). The success of
anti-utopianism as ideology has been so great that critics of it concede that politics should be concerned with
management rather than any ideas that might be considered utopian. See A.C Grayling, ‘Through the Looking
Glass’, New Humanist, July/August 2007, p. 36.
 Critique 109

follows is a discussion of a candidate for this criterion. This is Istvan Meszaros’

criterion of partiality.
Meszaros’ starting point is a quotation from Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right. Marx writes of the struggle for German liberation in 1843 that:

It is not radical revolution or universal human emancipation which is a utopian

dream for Germany; it is the partial, merely political revolution, the revolution
which leaves the pillars of the building standing [Marx’s emphasis].36

Meszaros comments that Marx’s insight here is enormously important methodolo-

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gically. It offers a ‘key to understanding the nature of Utopianism as the inflation of

partiality into pseudo-universality [Meszaros’ emphasis]’.37
In this case the partiality was a form of political action that excluded economic
understanding and transformation. In effect, Marx thought that, in order to engage
with the socialist project, a moral position that condemned the way in which
particular people were enslaved, brutalised, and oppressed was necessary but not
sufficient. Political action inspired by the goal of ending all forms of oppression,
exploitation and degradation was also necessary but insufficient.
An understanding of the economic causes of these phenomena and how they
effected people globally was necessary. Economic categories of explanation with
universal instantiation such as labour, commodity, value, and capital were required
for a global perspective on the task of liberation. Explanations of capitalism that had a
partial understanding of its nature would produce partial programmes for liberation.
Partial forms of anti-capitalism and perceptions alternatives to it would therefore be
utopian.
This interpretation of Marx contrasts partiality with universality. It is concerned
with categories informing the understanding. However, Meszaros also opposes a
partial to a global form of movement. This is movement within an evolving social
totality. It is an ontological opposition and Meszaros contrasts this with Marx’s
method in the following: ‘Utopianism is, by contrast, necessarily inherent in all
attempts which offer merely partial remedies to global problems.’38 Here the focus is
on global problems caused by contradictions within the social totality. The global
problem Marx addressed in 1843 when he wrote The Jewish Question and the Critique
of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right was that of human emancipation. He criticised strategies
of national, religious and ethnic liberation that focused on politics to the exclusion of
other spheres of social action as a partial means and therefore utopian.
Marx argued that political action aimed at securing civil liberties for Jews and for a
unified independent state for Germans*however noble and inspiring*would not
solve the problem of liberation for these groups as individuals. Jews and Germans

36
K. Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction (1843
1844), in Marx, Early Writings, trans R.
Livingstone and G. Benton (London: Penguin, 1992), pp. 243
257, p. 253.
37
Istvan Meszaros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (London: Merlin Press, 1970), p. 75.
38
Ibid., p. 297.
 110 P. B. Smith

were humans oppressed in ways other than on the basis of their nationality, religion
or ethnicity*the most obvious of which was their economic oppression as workers.
This was an oppression with a global character. From this perspective, national
liberation*or the nationalism of the oppressed*was a utopian political doctrine.
For Marx, the chief global problem was, of course, the social form that human
social labour takes within a commodity-capitalist society. As Scott Meikle has shown,
Marx and Hegel were Aristotelian essentialists.39 Marx was concerned to discover the
laws that govern the birth, maturation, development, decline, and passing away of
social forms of human labour and their supersession by new forms. These social
forms included different methods of the extraction of surplus labour.
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The law of the normal life of the entity of essence is the law of the unfolding of its
contradiction. In the process of transition from one social form to another there
would be an interaction between the contradictions of the social from that is
declining and dying and the contradictions of the newly emergent social form.
Ontological partiality is therefore a result of the interaction between the contra-
diction between the objective potentialities of the emergent form and a subjective
awareness of these potentialities.
The global problem for socialists is the subordination of human labour power to
the accumulation of capital. Contradictions between forms of exchange and use value
generate global crises on a regular basis.40 These cause systemic global misery and
impoverishment to both high and low paid workers. However, these contradictions
also create the technological and social conditions for the resolution of the problem
globally.
Solutions that ignore the global character of the social problem are, according to
Meszaros’ understanding of Marx, partial and therefore utopian. These include
solutions at a local or national level; solutions limited to exclusively political,
exclusively economic, or exclusively educational projects; and solutions promoting
the interests of a particular oppressed or exploited group to the exclusion of any
other.41
Meszaros restates this understanding when discussing Owen’s plans for workers’
liberation. He argues that Owen’s plans for workers’ liberation based on programmes
of socialist education were utopian because they were a partial remedy to a global
problem. Meszaros thinks socialist education is important and that education is a
necessary means to the realisation of the socialist goal. He thinks socialist education
is an integral and crucial means to the realisation of the emergent proletarian
collectivity, the establishment of a classless society and the struggle for free

39
S. Meikle, Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx (London: Duckworth, 1985), p. 48.
40
For Marx’s theory of crisis, see David Kennedy, ‘A Clarification of Marx’s Theory of Crisis’, Critique 30
31
(1998), pp. 49
70. Also see H. Ticktin, ‘Where Are We Going Today? The Nature of Contemporary Crisis’, in the
same issue, pp. 21
48.
41
Thus today, Marxists tend to argue that movements for women’s, black, gay or national liberation are
utopian if they promote partial solutions to their oppression and ignore the connection with the global struggle
for freedom from economic oppression and for a classless society.
 Critique 111

individuality. However, it is insufficient and requires other conditions in order for the
project to be completed.42
Owen’s position was utopian, according to Meszaros, because Owen recommended
education as a universal solution to the dual problem of workers’ alienation and
capitalists’ hostility to socialism. Owen realised that employers regarded employees as
mere instruments for accumulation and that, in a capitalist society, human
relationships are subordinated to profit-seeking. This was a cause of workers’
economic misery. However, Owen thought that, if employers had an adequate
socialist education, they would recognise that they no longer needed to inflict misery
on their employees.43 Owen was correct to notice that socialist education is an
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important means to achieving the goal of a classless society, but*for good historical
and intellectual reasons*he was unable to recognise that it is only a part of the
project. An exclusive focus on education makes the goal of workers’ liberation
unrealisable.

Problems with Meszaros’ Criterion

How objective a criterion is partiality? As I have outlined, Meszaros offers two
different understandings of utopianism. The first defines utopianism as the inflation
of partiality into pseudo-universality and the second defines the category as all
attempts to offer partial remedies to global problems.
A problem with the first definition is that it appears to be consistent with
Mannheim’s sociological characterisation of Marxism as a form of utopianism.
Mannheim notes various different possibilities of viewing the world and that ‘every
former intellectual certainty’ rests upon ‘partial points of view made absolute’.44
These former intellectual certainties clearly include Marxism which functioned, for
Mannheim, both as a form of utopianism (serving to create a sense of collective
identity amongst a subordinate class of workers) and also as an ideology of a ruling
elite in charge of the Soviet state. Mannheim took for granted that Stalinism was
socialism brought into being through a proletarian revolution. As such, it realised the
utopian potential of Marxism.
Of course, if Meszaros intended the ‘inflation of partiality into pseudo-universality’
to characterise the doctrine of the possibility of socialism arising in a backward
nation in isolation from the rest of the world as utopian, then Stalinism was the
actual form of pseudo-universality that dominated every kind of thinking on
socialism during the period of its existence. It implies there was an attribution of the
positive attributes of classlessness, democracy and planning to an elitist, undemo-

42
‘The task of transcending the capitalistically alienated social relations of production must be conceived in
the global framework of a socialist educational strategy. The latter, however, should not be confused with some
form of educational utopianism’. Meszaros, op. cit., p. 290.
43
‘It is confidently expected that the period is at hand, when man, through ignorance, shall not much longer
inflict unnecessary misery on man; because the mass of mankind will become enlightened, and will clearly
discern that by so acting they will inevitable create misery to themselves’. Quoted in Meszaros, op. cit., p. 296.
44
Mannheim, op. cit., pp. 226
227.
 112 P. B. Smith

cratic and unplanned regime. Pseudo-universality then has a profoundly delusional

quality lacking any rational*never mind socialist*content. The criterion is
subjective and consistent with Mannheim’s psychological explanation of origins in
individuals’ irrational desires.
Mannheim’s description entailed a subjective characterisation of utopianism as the
imposition (in the case of fascism and Stalinism, through the totalitarian atomisation
of the population) of the idea of different possibilities of viewing the world. These can
reflect the unrealised wish-fulfilments of a single person*the totalitarian dictator.
This is compatible with subjective, psychological understandings of utopianism and,
whilst sociologically correct, uncharacteristically Marxian. It also follows that,
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following a criterion of partiality, it would seem to be appropriate to describe the

former Soviet Union as a utopian society. Given the gruesome reality of the regime,
this seems queer. Nonetheless, this position is plausible for some and is consistent
with the nationalism as a utopian means to the end of national liberation.45
It is true that socialism in one country was an unrealisable goal. National socialism
is oxymoronic. However, to use partiality as a criterion for Soviet utopianism would
suggest that regime was ‘socialistic’ in some of its elements. For example, it implies
the Soviet Union was, in part, a planned society within which workers had an element
of democratic control over the surplus product. The USSR evidently did not have any
of these characteristics (in part or as a whole).46 Moreover, to think that the Soviet
Union was in any way an improvement on capitalism is false.
A further problem arises with Meszaros’ second definition of utopianism as partial
remedies to global problems. The global problem Meszaros focuses on is that of how to
bring about human liberation in general and workers’ liberation as a particular means
to this end. His reliance on Marx’s early writings correctly entails the identification of
workers’ formation into a class as the agency for global transformation and universal
human liberation. However, Meszaros’ criticism of Owen’s partial remedy to the global
problem of workers’ economic oppression focuses on Owen’s policies concerning
education. These were partial means when isolated from other forms of workers’ self
activity such as strikes, occupations, and the formation of trade unions and political
parties. Meszaros makes some brilliant observations on the relationship between
Owen’s thinking on proceeding ‘by small degrees’.47 These include the likely failure of
appealing to the capitalist class on the rationality of socialism and how this led to later
forms of liberal welfare and social democratic reforms.
Reliance on writings before Marx had studied either socialist theory or political
economy, might explain why Meszaros ignores one of the most important differences
between Marx and Owen. This is that Marx argued that Owen’s policies and

45
Geohegan describes Stalinism as ‘authoritarian utopianism’. Stalinism is responsible for the beliefs that
Marxism is a form of utopianism and that both utopianism and Marxism are forms of totalitarianism.
Geohegan, op. cit., p. 73.
46
For arguments that the Soviet Union was not a planned society see Ticktin, Origins of the Crisis in the
USSR, op. cit., pp. 182
187.
47
Meszaros, op. cit., p. 296.
 Critique 113

programmes for realisation of socialism were grounded on a partial understanding of

the nature of the capitalist system socialism was intended to replace. The global
problem for Marx included Owen’s partial understanding of basic categories such as
money, value, surplus value, capital and exploitation. Owen’s understanding of these
categories was based on a moral and political appropriation of Smith and Ricardo’s
political economy. As Meszaros notes elsewhere, workers need to become philosophical
in order to realise their potential as the agency for human liberation.48 This entails that
they have as full a knowledge of the determinants of their mental and manual activities
as possible. In others words, the realisation of the socialist goal entails that workers are
capable of gaining accurate information about the social system they intend to abolish.
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They require knowledge of the objective potential that exists within capitalism for its
supersession by a rational planned alternative. The content of their education and truth
value of the social science they learn therefore is a necessary condition for succeeding in
the task of bringing socialism into being (however insufficient, partial*and therefore
utopian*Marxist education might be as an exclusive strategic means).
If the criterion of partiality is to escape exclusively subjective understandings such
as Mannheim’s characterisation of Marxism as a utopian ideology, then its
relationship to objective categories needs to be made more explicit. Within a specific
social form, these categories will need to have a global or universal reality
independently of the minds of any particular individual. The obvious candidates
for these categories can be found within political economy and include labour,
capital, value, commodity and money. The objective criterion of utopianism then
becomes the use of partially understood economic categories and the relationship
between these partial understandings and the means of achieving socialism. A social
science that bases speculation regarding the nature of a future society on tendencies
and potentialities that cannot be realised as long as the value form continues to
dominate social relations of production, distribution and consumption is more likely
to provide an effective means than one that does not.

Utopian Science as Pseudo Science

Marx’s essentialist and dialectical social science can be distinguished from the
scientific aspirations of his predecessors. One reason is that one of Marx’s claims to
have developed a social science rests upon a holistic rather than an empiricist
method. This starts from an analysis of the social whole rather than observable
events.49 It attempts to identify law-like phenomena within an evolving social
totality.50 Despite disagreeing with their method, Marx recognised that Smith and

48
I. Meszaros, ‘Marx ‘‘Philosopher’’’ in E.J. Hobsbawn (ed.) The History of Marxism, Vol. 1.. (Brighton:
Harvester Press, 1982), pp. 103
135, 103.
49
‘Mutual interaction takes place between the different moments [of consumption and production]. This is
the case with every organic whole’. K. Marx, Grundrisse, trans. M. Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973
[1857]), p. 100. See also Carol Gould, Marx’s Social Ontology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978).
50
‘The totality as it appears in the head, as a totality of thoughts . . .the subject society, must always be kept in
mind as the presupposition’. Marx, Grundrisse, op. cit., pp. 101
102.
 114 P. B. Smith

Ricardo had made serious attempts to theorise the laws underlying the phenomena of
a capitalist economy.
However, despite affirming many of the positive aspects of his socialist
predecessors, including Owen, Marx and Engels denied they had made any
contribution to the development of political economy. This is clear if one compares
Marx’s conception of the socialist project with Owen’s. Both Owen and Marx
recognised the potential that machinery has for liberating workers’ from economic
compulsion. Moreover, although Owen’s notion of planning was paternalist and
Marx’s democratic, they both had a conception of a planned classless society as an
alternative to capitalism. In Owen’s case this was the negative goal of ending misery
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and degradation for workers.51 In Marx’s case this was the positive goal of free
individuality*a goal which is, of course, inclusive of Owen’s.
Marx and Owen, however, differed on the means of achieving a planned classless
society. They had different notions of the role of social science in the transition to
socialism. Owen’s notion of a social science, was what he called ‘the science of the
influence of circumstances over the whole conduct, character, and proceedings of the
human race’.52 This was a combination of utilitarian moral philosophy stressing
individuals’ natural sociability (as developed by Scottish moral and social theorists
such as Adam Smith) with necessitarianism derived from Godwin’s appropriation of
Joseph Priestley’s materialist determinism. The first premise of Ownenite necessitar-
ianism is that ‘character was formed for rather than by the individual’.53
Owen and Marx therefore differed on the question of free will. For Owen, free will
was a necessary illusion, whereas for Marx it was compatible with a causally
determined world. Following the German Idealists, Marx’s notion of free will was that
it consisted in the consciousness of necessity. This notion informed his criticism of
18th-century materialism in the third Theses on Feuerbach.54 This form of one-sided
materialism characterised Owen’s conception of a social science based on an
empiricist metaphysics.
Marx and Owen’s relationship to classical political economy was also different.
Marx investigated the laws which regulate labour within capitalism. Owen used it to
give moral justification for his social experiments. When Owen presented his
economic thinking in the Report to the County of Lanark in 1820, he borrowed
insights on labour as the standard of value from Smith.55 Subsequent Owenite

51
‘The science may be truly called one whereby ignorance, poverty, crime, and misery, may be prevented; and
will indeed open a new era to the human race; one in which real happiness will commence, and perpetually go
on increasing through every succeeding generation’. Robert Owen, ‘Report to the County of Lanark’ (1820), in A
New View of Society and Other Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1991), p. 280.
52
Ibid., p. 278.
53
G. Claeys, Citizens and Saints (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 115.
54
‘The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that
circumstances are changed by men and that the educator must be educated himself ’. K. Marx, Theses on
Feuerbach (1845), in Marx, Collected Works, Vol. 5 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), pp. 1
5, 4.
55
‘According to Owen’s new conception*which could have been derived from Smith or any number of other
sources*articles had originally exchanged according to the value or amount of labour contained within them’.
G. Claeys, Machinery, Money and the Millennium (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), p. 45.
 Critique 115

economics took over the notion that labour is the sole source of value from Ricardo.
Owen’s followers, such as William Thompson, John Gray and John Bray, turned
Ricardo’s theory into a moral postulate substituting the doctrine of the ‘worker’s right
to the full product of labour’ for a theoretical conception of value. This was a step
backwards to the normative way that thinkers of the Middle Ages had posed the
question of value.56 Following Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas had condemned the
sinfulness of usurer’s and merchant capital or of ‘buying cheap to sell dear’.57
Owenites, in turn, condemned the buying of labour cheap in order to make a profit
through selling the commodities produced by that labour dear.
Owen claimed to have studied political economy for 30 years before he wrote his
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Report; however, he made no contribution to the development of its theory. On the

contrary, Owen used the notion of labour as the source of value to underpin the
moral basis of his plans for realising a classless society. At the heart of these plans, was
the imperative that money be abolished as gold and silver. Money must take the form
of labour notes. This involved equal exchanges between the amount of labour-time
performed and the amount of labour-time embodied within a commodity.58 As is
well known, Owen became an advocate of various labour-for-labour experiments
including labour exchanges, and a national bank based on labour notes.59 These
experiments and reforms were based on a labour-money theory. This was the theory
that all commodities could be made into money by making them directly
exchangeable according to the actual labour-time expended on their production.60
Marx addressed this theory both in his preliminary studies for Capital and in his
polemic with Proudhon. Marx described Proudhon’s theory of value as ‘the utopian
interpretation of Ricardo’s theory’.61 Ricardo, following Smith, had made labour-time
the determinant of value and it is clear that Marx thought that this was a scientific
advance. In the Poverty of Philosophy, Marx affirmed Ricardo’s criticisms of Smith on
the source of exchange value in labour time in order to show that Proudhon’s notion
of value was inferior to Smith’s. Proudhon had affirmed a confusion within Smith’s

56
I. I. Rubin, A History of Economic Thought, (London: Pluto Press, 1979), p. 348. Owen studied Ricardo
when attending McCulloch’s lectures shortly before he had left for New Harmony in 1824. Claeys, op. cit., p. 53.
57
‘Whosoever buys a thing . . . in order that he may gain by selling it again unchanged and as he bought it,
that man is of the buyers and sellers who are cast forth from God’s temple’. Quoted in Rubin, op. cit., p. 35. See
also Claeys, op. cit., pp. 2
9. Claeys accounts for Owenite moralism*what he calls the ‘principle of just
transfer’*differently. He states ‘it represented a reversion to an anthropological concept of how exchange
worked in primitive societies rather than revival of the subversive views of any earlier theorists’ (p. 189). This
again suggests an origin in Smith’s assumption that in a society of simple commodity producers exchange takes
place according to equal amounts of embodied labour-time.
58
Other advantages of ‘introducing a natural standard of value, and abandoning an artificial one’ include the
improvement of human nature, the end of poverty, the end of bargaining over prices, free trade between nations,
and expanded domestic markets. Owen, ‘Report to the County of Lanark’, op. cit., pp. 256
257. Owen was
therefore the founder of the doctrine that the market is compatible with socialism. This is noted by D. McNally,
Against the Market (London: Verso, 1993), ch. 4, pp. 104
138. McNally states that Owen and his followers were
‘the first market socialists’, p. 4.
59
Claeys, op. cit., p. 56.
60
Roman Rosdolsky, The Making of Marx’s ’Capital’ (London: Pluto Press, 1977), ch. 4, pp. 99
108.
61
Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1955 [1847]), p. 43.
 116 P. B. Smith

writings on the measure of value. This was that the measure of the value of
commodities is the value of labour rather than the quantity of embodied labour-time.
Marx argued that to state that value determines value is viciously circular.
Why did Marx describe Proudhon’s political economy as ‘utopian science’?62 This
was no pejorative use of the term. It was hardly an epithet of disparagement given
Marx’s huge respect for Owen, Fourier and Saint Simon, his socialist predecessors.
He used the term ‘utopian’ to make an explicit methodological point concerning
the partiality of Proudhon’s understanding of the law of value. Marx pointed out
that both Proudhon and Ricardo agreed that value is determined by labour-time
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despite Proudhon’s confusion of labour-time with the value of labour, in other

word, with wages. However, Marx states of Ricardo that he: ‘establishes the truth of
his formula by deriving it from all economic relations [author’s emphasis], even
those like rent, accumulation of capital and the relation of wages to profit, which at
firs sight seem to contradict it; it is precisely that which makes his doctrine a
scientific system’.63
In other words, it was the fact that Proudhon had derived the truth of his formulas
subjectively that made his doctrines unscientific. According to Marx, Ricardo’s system
was scientific because he had made discoveries of universal applicability to a
commodity capitalist form of production. It was Ricardo’s discovery of law-like
tendencies within the totality of economic relations that made the truth of the
proposition that value is determined by labour-time scientific. Ricardo was able to
use these discoveries to attempt to explain and predict the movement of forms of
value such as rent, capital, wages and profits.
Marx’s use of ‘utopian’ to characterise Proudhon’s political economy is therefore
consistent with Meszaros’ interpretation of partiality as a criterion of method.
Proudhon’s theory of value was partial and therefore utopian because his method of
derivation of economic truths*in this case, that labour-time determines value*was
subjective and arbitrary. Unlike Ricardo, Proudhon had not demonstrated the
necessity of this discovery to the totality of capitalist economic relations. Nor had he
derived it from categories with universal instantiation such as commodity, money
and capital. which were, for Marx, the theoretical expression of the historical
movement of production.64
On the contrary, Proudhon had used language such as ‘constituted value’ which
was ‘no more than ideas, spontaneous thoughts, independent of real relations’.65
These ideas were attributed to the movement of pure reason and were subjective in
origin. In this sense the partiality of Proudhon’s theory of value was utopian because

62
‘What we were attacking in M. Proudhon’s theory was the ‘‘utopian science’’ by which he wanted to settle
the antagonism between capital and labour’. K. Marx, ‘Proudhon’s Speech Against Thiers’ (August 1848), in
Marx, Collected Writings, Vol. 7, (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975) pp. 321
324, 324.
63
Marx, 1847, p. 43.
64
Ibid., p. 91.
65
Ibid.
 Critique 117

it was pseudo-scientific. There was no awareness on Proudhon’s part of the labour

theory of value’s origin in actual, objective social relations.
Marx suggested that Proudhon had made no further theoretical advance on
economic ideas originally put forward by Owen and his followers. He took great
pains to show the similarity of Proudhon’s ideas, projects and plans for a socialist
society with those of his Owenite predecessors such as Bray, Hodgskin, Thompson
and Edwards. He called their application of the labour theory of value ‘equalitarian’.
At the heart of his critique was that notion that the utopian interpretation of
Ricardo tied the utility of a particular product conceptually to the labour-time
expended in its production. According to Proudhon and the Owenite thinkers,
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products in a future classless society would be exchanged in ‘the exact ratio of the
labour-time they have cost’.66 Marx argued the opposite: that the social utility
of products in a rationally planned classless society would determine the labour-
time spent in producing them.67 Marx attempted to show that equalitarian
applications of Ricardo could only reproduce capitalistic forms of economic and
social relations. This reinforced alienated social relations rather than effectively
challenging them.
Marx subjected the economic means for realising the socialist project put forward
by Owenites to a thorough critical analysis in the Grundrisse. This critique formed an
important part of the development of his own theory of money as the universal
equivalent of the value of all commodities in production, consumption, distribution
and exchange.
The aim of Marx’s critique was to show that the labour-theory was utopian in a
double sense. Firstly, it was a partial understanding of the nature of money. Secondly,
labour exchanges and a central exchange bank for social planning were not viable
means of abolishing money. He argued these experiments were limited exclusively to
one the aspects of the regulation of working time in the global economy through the
law of value. This is distribution through circulation. As long as the commodity form
dominates the labour process in the spheres of production and consumption, Marx
argued, then market forces would destroy such experiments.68
The experiments were partial in that they attempted to undermine the law of value
in only one aspect of its operation*the distribution of value through the circulation
of money. By implication, the only practicable way of abolishing money and the law
of value, Marx argued, would be to remove all aspects of the mode of production
from its global form as commodity and value, including labour power itself. The only
means to achieving this end could be the global movement of workers towards the
collective appropriation of the means of production including machinery, raw

66
Ibid., p. 52.
67
Ibid., p. 55.
68
Thus he argues that labour-money would be unable to deal with a rise in the productivity of labour; that
there would be no way of distinguishing and resolving the antagonism between value and price; and that a
central exchange bank would have to have a despotic control over all spheres of production, consumption and
distribution as general buyer and seller of all commodities. See Rosdolsky, op. cit., pp. 99
108.
 118 P. B. Smith

materials and labour. Workers, as a class, liberate their labour power at the same time
as liberating the products of labour from their value form as money, wages and
capital.

Conclusion
In this article, I have argued that Marx and Engels’ anti-utopianism was consistent,
non-utopian and progressive. I have suggested they understood utopianism as a
category with an objective social form. Utopianism had a genesis in literary
imaginings of an alternative to capitalism, a maturation with the writings and
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experiments of the early socialists, and a decline with the sectarian organisational
forms and pro-market policies of their followers. It follows that utopian thinking and
social movements will lose their influence and character during a post-revolutionary
period of transition.
Utopianism involved a critical engagement with an emerging capitalist system and
the theorisation of possible socialist (or communist) alternatives to it. These
alternatives were unrealisable for objective historical and methodological reasons.
In other words, Marx and Engels had clearly defined philosophical and economic
criteria for determining the relationship between means and ends within utopian
systems.
I have shown that there is a strong connection between the theoretical
presuppositions of utopian political economy and the means sectarian followers of
the early socialists adopted to bring into being a classless, moneyless society. Marx
and Engels were critical of the way in which socialists used Smith and Ricardo’s
labour theory of value. Twentieth-century literature on this critique has stressed its
significance for the development of Marx’s theories of money, rent, wages and capital.
Marx’s arguments continue to be important because they demonstrate the
incompatibility between socialism and the market.69 However, they also illustrate
the concept of utopianism. An understanding of this critique is therefore helpful in
developing thinking on the transition from capitalism to socialism.
Many commentators have noticed a difference between Marx and Engels’ and
Proudhon and Owen’s conception of the agency for realising a classless, moneyless
and stateless society. Whereas the latter tended to appeal to the educated
intelligentsia, the former held that the majority of alienated and atomised workers
had the potential to form a class. As a collective agency, this class had the power to set
free the material conditions needed for a socialist society. Marx and Engels argued
these conditions were already present within capitalist social relations. They included
automation, a relative abundance of labour power and labour-time, and the
politicising of workers through their democratic participation in the management
and planning of the productive process.

69
For a thorough discussion of this issue see B. Ollman (ed.), Market Socialism: The Debate Amongst
Socialists (New York & London: Routledge, 1998).
 Critique 119

An essential aspect of Marx and Engels’ concept of utopianism is therefore the

relationship between the goal of socialism and what Marx called utopian science.
Smith and Ricardo’s political economy included, in embryo, the truth that workers
are exploited and generate a surplus which takes the economic form of value. This
insight was a scientific discovery.70 However, the socialist interpretation of classical
political economy was utopian. It was utopian*not because Marx and Engels had a
pejorative attitude to their rivals*but because an understanding of capitalism based
on economic categories drawn from Smith and Ricardo was partial and undeveloped.
The thrust of Marx and Engels’ critique of early socialists’ interpretation of Smith and
Ricardo was to show that their understanding of money, value and labour was
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restricted and limited. A partial understanding of capitalist economic categories led

to experiments with labour-money and labour-exchanges. These proved unviable
means to realising a classless society. Marx and Engels therefore had an explanation
for the mismatch between utopian ends and means.
I have attempted here to give a critique of the anti-utopianism attributed to Marx
and Engels. Marx and Engels’ use of ‘utopian’ is not reducible to their personal
subjectivity*to how they felt about competing socialist thinkers, ideas and doctrines.
Moreover, they were not opposed to thinking about or imagining the society of the
future. Marx and Engels associated utopianism with the goal of a planned classless
society. They shared this goal with other socialists. Historically, utopianism had
objective socialistic content.71 The question was not whether socialism was possible
but whether the purported means were congruent with the goal.
This usage can be contrasted with aspects of present-time consciousness. In a
period of declining capitalism, ‘utopian’ no longer refers exclusively to the realisable
or unrealisable potentialities of classless alternatives to capitalism. Stalinism has made
the concept of a planned society appear inhumane and unrealisable. As a result, the
dominant idea of utopia today is neither objective nor socialistic. ‘Utopian’ refers to
any state of mind which imagines individual or social betterment or improvement. It
encompasses unrealisable projects of every kind from winning the lottery to
campaigns against political regulation of the economy. In the 19th century,
intellectuals thought a future free from torture, slavery, starvation and war was a
non-utopian possibility. At the beginning of the 21st century, many of their

70
F. Engels, ‘Preface’ (1885), Capital, Vol. II (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1933), pp. 7
28. Just as
Priestley and Scheele produced oxygen without being able to theorise it because they were prisoners of categories
based on phlogistic chemistry, so Smith recognised the existence of surplus value as ‘that part of the laborer’s
product for which its appropriator does not give any equivalent’, p. 24. Smith discovered exploitation but had no
theory to explain it.
71
‘We find in Utopia a number of tendencies which are still operative in the Socialist Movement of our time’.
K. Kautsky, Thomas More and his Utopia (London: Lawrence and Wishart, [1888] 1979), p. 161. More argued
that, freed from the commodity form, the agricultural surplus generated within a nascent capitalism was
sufficient to feed the whole of the population. Moreover, within a planned economy, full employment would
diminish necessary labour-time. A shortened working day (More recommended six hours) would enable citizens
to use their free time for education, the arts and leisure, pp. 191
214.
 120 P. B. Smith

contemporaries conceive of these goals as utopian.72 ‘Utopian’ covers both desires for
an escape from economic misery and also social policies that do not immediately
assist the process of capital accumulation. Whereas all forms of non-Marxist anti-
utopianism currently tend to be conservative and reflect a culture of pessimism and
despair, this is not necessarily a permanent condition. Given the demise of Stalinism
and social democracy, it is probable that a concern for an understanding of the
rational society of the future (and how to bring it into being) will become popular
once again. No doubt, the new organisational forms designed for this purpose will
supersede the achievements of those of the past.
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72
For example, see J. Carey, The Faber Book of Utopias (London: Faber, 1999). Carey characterises the belief
that ‘happiness can be achieved through better social arrangements’ as utopian and unwise.