Reflections on Aspects of Marxist Anti-Utopianism

Abstract

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.