The Marxist tradition has for the most part been strongly antipathetic to utopianism, which it has understood as the construction of blueprints of a future society that are incapable of realisation; the charge of utopianism has also been levelled at Marxism by its opponents, using a similar definition. Throughout the twentieth century there have been notable exceptions to the dominant unpopularity of utopianism (including the views of Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse and Edward Thompson, discussed in subsequent chapters) but the idea that utopia can be valuable for Marxists has always been a minority view. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.41

The roots of Marxist objections to utopia can be found in the writings of Marx and Engels; however, their criticisms of utopian socialism have been used illegitimately as justification of a general rejection of descriptions of the future socialist society. The concept of utopia deployed in this rejection, besides being a political weapon in a process of ‘annihilation by labels’, conflates two issues: speculation about the future, and the possibility and means of transition to socialism. The real dispute between Marx and Engels and the utopian socialists is not about the merit of goals or of images of the future but about the process of transformation, and particularly about the belief that propaganda alone would result in the realisation of socialism. The general orientation to utopia that has developed not only misrepresents the views of both Marx and Engels, but has had thoroughly deleterious effects on the socialist project in the past hundred years. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.41

Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e. human) being – a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equal naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature, and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 3, p. 296. (Cited in Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.47)

Marx’s suggestions as to the nature of communist society range from very abstract principles put forward in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts to the more specific statements in the Grundrisse. In Marx’s early writings the goal of communism is the transcendence of alienation, the overcoming of the estrangement of human beings from themselves which results from the institution of private property. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.47

although it [communism] is in one sense a goal, it is not very specific about the precise institutional arrangements which will prevail. There are two reasons for this. The more fundamental objection to describing communist society is that the needs, wants and capacities that will develop within it are neither static nor predictable from within the constraints of capitalism. In addition there is a strategic reason for silence: the criticism of utopian socialism in terms of its supposition that its schemes would be self-realising would be undermined by appearing to offer a competing plan of the good society. Hence Marx’s reluctance to identify communism as a state rather than a process: "Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 5, p. 49) Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.50

The abolition of private property through social ownership transforms the nature of work. It is alienated labour which is the root of alienation; hence it is only through the transformation of the work process and its place in communist society that human estrangement can be overcome. A key issue here is the division of labour, which turns people into extensions of the productive process and prevents the full development of each individual’s broad potential. Hence the familiar statement in The German Ideology that “in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.47-48

Finally this new society entails the production of a different kind of person, not just in the sense of increasing their powers as atomised individuals but (and in fact this is how the increase of individual powers is possible) as the production of fully social human beings. Alienation affects not just the relationship of people to themselves and to their work, but to one another. The recognition of interdependence and of the social nature of production and of human existence in general leads not only to a transformation of work, but also means that the relationships between individuals both within and outside the work process cease to have the instrumental and competitive nature they assume in capitalist society. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.50

Similarly, ‘in a communist society there are no painters but only people who engage in painting among other activities’. The division between mental and manual labour is abolished, and the division between town and country. On this point, the utopian socialists were commended by Engels in Anti-Dühring: "The utopians were already perfectly clear as to the effects of the division of labour, the stunting on the one hand of the labourer, and on the other of the labour function, which is restricted to the life-long uniform mechanical repetition of one and the same operation. The abolition of the antithesis between town and country was demanded by Fourier, as by Owen, as the first prerequisite for the abolition of the old division of labour altogether ... abolition of the antithesis between town and country ... has become a direct necessity of industrial production itself ... . The abolition of the separation between town and country is therefore not utopian.” Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.48

In the Grundrisse it is made clear that the new human being who develops with communist society does so through the expansion of ‘free time which is both leisure and time for higher activity’, which transforms ‘its possessor into another subject’. Work remains a realm of necessity in contrast with the realm of freedom outside work, where human development is an end in itself. This does not mean, however, as one commentator has suggested, that the problem of freedom is in the Grundrisse reduced to the problem of free time, nor does it mean that the realm of work consists of alienated labour. Work does not become ‘pure fun, pure amusement, as in Fourier’s ... childishly naive conception’, since ‘really free work ... is also the most damnably difficult, demanding the most intensive effort’. But if ‘labour cannot become a game, as desired by Fourier’, it remains to his great credit that he ‘stated that the ULTIMATE OBJECT is the raising of the mode of production itself, not [that] of distribution, to a higher form’. And the nature and conditions of work are to be transformed so that work, while necessary, is nevertheless free: "Work involved in material production can achieve this character only if (1) its social character is posited; (2) if it is of a scientific character and simultaneously general [in its application], and not the exertion of the worker as a natural force drilled in a particular way, as a subject, which appears in the production process not in a merely natural, spontaneous form, but as an activity controlling all natural forces.” (Marx, Grundrisse, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 28, p. 530; Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 29, p. 97) Work in communist society is both greatly reduced and transformed in character. These features depend upon the expansion of productive powers, made possible in the first instance by capitalism but then exponentially so by its demise. Abundance is a necessary condition for communism. These four key features – the abolition of the division of labour, the development of individual potential, the transformation of work and the increase in material prosperity (made possible by the social ownership of the means of production) – are summed up in the Critique of the Gotha Programme: "In a higher phase of a communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of common wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!“ (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 24, p. 87.) Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.49-50

Whether the sexual division of labour is also to be entirely abolished is less clear. There is certainly support for communal living arrangements as a new productive force, involving the development of new machinery and the abolition of the family, in The German Ideology, which is entirely congruent with Engels’s praise for the saving in labour power implied in Owen’s planned communities. Ollman argues that the communal raising of children is implied by the need that parents be prevented from exercising a destructive influence over their children without forcibly separating them from each other. He does concede, however, that this is never made explicit in Marx’s writing, and that Marx never deals with the limitations child-rearing imposes upon the self-development of adults, in practice usually their mothers, although Ollman asserts that ‘he was surely aware of it’. Although it is clearly intended that the all-round development of the individual in communist society should apply to women as well as to men, the means by which this is to be made possible have to be inferred or invented. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.48

The difference between Marxism and utopian socialism does not, then, rest on the existence or otherwise of an image of the socialist society to be attained, nor even on the content of that image. It rests upon disagreements about the process of transition. Even here the question of who is most utopian in the sense of unrealistic is a matter of dispute. Martin Buber, in Paths in Utopia, defends the orientation of utopian socialism (including not just Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen, but Proudhon, Kropotkin and Landauer) to this problem. Buber’s argument is that a ‘society is naturally composed not of disparate individuals but of associative units’, and that the health of a society depends on the density of voluntary associations that constitute it; capitalist society is thus ‘a society inherently poor in structure and growing visibly poorer every day’. The strength of utopian socialism is that it addressed itself to the issue of ‘a renewal of society through a renewal of its cell-tissue’, and aimed to ‘substitute society for State to the greatest degree possible’.23 Buber argues that neither Marx nor Engels gave sufficient attention to the process of social restructuring, in spite of the assertion that the new society matures in the womb of the old. Organic restructuring necessitates the development of a network of cooperative settlements which go beyond simple consumer or producer cooperatives – as in the Israeli kibbutzim. […] His arguments in favour of cooperative settlements rest upon a recognition that the social relations of production lie at the root of the character of society. His claim, however, is that the post-revolutionary leap and the dictatorship of the proletariat involve a contradiction between means and ends which is not present in utopian socialism. The so-called utopian does not believe in this post-revolutionary leap, but in ‘continuity within which revolution is only the accomplishment, the setting free and extension of a reality that has already grown to its true possibilities’. In Buber’s view the ‘utopian’ approach to the problem is more realistic, since it is difficult to see how the centralisation of the first phase of socialism will give way to full communism. In other words, the expectation that the state will somehow wither away is itself utopian, i.e. unrealistic. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.53-54

Early in 1852 Marx observed that one response to political defeat was for the working class to retreat into essentially utopian schemes: "In part [the proletariat] throws itself into doctrinaire experiments, exchange banks and workers’ associations, hence into a movement in which it renounces the revolutionising of the old world by means of the latter’s own great, combined resources, and seeks, rather, to achieve its salvation behind society’s back, in private fashion, within its limited conditions of existence, and hence necessarily suffers shipwreck.” [Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 11, pp. 110–11.] Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.61

It is clear that the basis of Marx’s and Engels’s criticisms of utopian socialism is not an objection to speculation about the future, but a difference of view about the process of transformation. As Vincent Geoghegan puts it, ‘what is under attack here is not anticipation as such, but rather the failure to root this anticipation in a theoretical framework cognizant of the essential dynamics of capitalism’. […] Utopian socialism draws up schemes for the future. Its main fault however is not that it does this, or that the schemes themselves outline the wrong sort of future, but that it entails an idealist model of social change, suggesting that the mere propagation of such schemes will have a transformative effect. Utopia here is effectively defined in terms of its function, which is seen as a negative, counter-revolutionary, one: "The chief offence does not lie in having inscribed [a] specific nostrum in [a] programme, but in taking a retrograde step at all from the standpoint of a class movement to that of a sectarian movement.” [Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 24, p. 93] In their terms the key question is whether movements foster a deeper understanding of the class struggle, or whether they disguise it behind plans to persuade all classes to combine in the construction of a society based on harmony. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 64, 66

“The significance of Critical-Utopian Socialism ... bears an inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and all theoretical justification. Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavour, and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realisation of their social utopias, of founding isolated ‘phalanstères’, of establishing ‘Home Colonies’, of setting up a ‘Little Icaria’ ... and to realise all these castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois.” [Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 6, pp. 515–16.] The fundamental error of the utopian socialists which gives rise to this unacceptable political position is the expectation that society can be changed by the appeal to all classes on the basis of reason and justice, and the belief that their blueprints of the good society will be the cause of social transformation. It is this idealist, as opposed to materialist, concept of social change which is the real problem. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.60

It is abundantly clear that in their hands the term is indeed used in a way which emphasises the unrealistic nature of utopia, More’s ‘no place’. However, the imputed lack of realism applies less to the content of the Utopian systems in question than to the models of social change associated with them. Since the primary concern of both Marx and Engels was with fostering such changes, the rejection of utopia is a rejection on the basis of its imputed social function – that of distracting the working classes from more suitable political activity, from ‘conscious participation in the historical process revolutionising society before our very eyes’. Utopian socialism draws up schemes for the future. Its main fault however is not that it does this, or that the schemes themselves outline the wrong sort of future, but that it entails an idealist model of social change, suggesting that the mere propagation of such schemes will have a transformative effect. Utopia here is effectively defined in terms of its function, which is seen as a negative, counter-revolutionary, one: The chief offense does not lie in having inscribed [a] specific nostrum in [a] programme, but in taking a retrograde step at all from the standpoint of a class movement to that of a sectarian movement. In their terms the key question is whether movements foster a deeper understanding of the class struggle, or whether they disguise it behind plans to persuade all classes to combine in the construction of a society based on harmony. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 66