Utopia: Imagining Post-capitalist Society

Abstract

In the afterword to the second German edition of Capital, Marx offered his response to a review of his book in the Parisian periodical Revue Positiviste. Particularly irksome, he thought, was their reproach that he confined himself ‘to the mere critical analysis of actual facts’, instead of ‘writing receipts [recipes] (Comtist ones?) for the cook-shops of the future’.1 Marx’s substantial critique of the ‘utopian socialists’ rested on this foundation, as he argued that the energies spent by Robert Owen, Henri de Saint-Simon, and Charles Fourier in imagining future societies, distracted from the real duty of the dissident intellectual — developing a robust scientific theory. Theorising before capitalist social relations had ripened, they were unable to see the conditions that would endow the working-class with political consciousness, instead looking for ‘historical action … to yield to their personal inventive action’. Consequently, they pursued futile dreams, waiting like Fourier in a cafe for the benevolent capitalist to bankroll his scheme, and composing ‘duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem’.2 Fourier dined alone.