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Reflections On Aspects of Marxist Anti-Utopianism - Paul B. Smith
Reflections On Aspects of Marxist Anti-Utopianism - Paul B. Smith
Reflections On Aspects of Marxist Anti-Utopianism - Paul B. Smith
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
Article views: 83
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Critique
Vol. 37, No. 1, February 2009, pp. 99120
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.
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. 153167, 155.
2
L. Sekelj, ‘Marx on the State and Communism’ in Praxis International, 3:4 (January 1984), pp. 359368,
360.
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.
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. 476517, 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. 435514, 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 18701871 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.
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. 98115, 9899.
104 P. B. Smith
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
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
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. 1819.
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
33
Mannheim, op. cit., pp. 176177.
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
36
K. Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction (18431844), in Marx, Early Writings, trans R.
Livingstone and G. Benton (London: Penguin, 1992), pp. 243257, 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 3031
(1998), pp. 4970. Also see H. Ticktin, ‘Where Are We Going Today? The Nature of Contemporary Crisis’, in the
same issue, pp. 2148.
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.
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. 226227.
112 P. B. Smith
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. 182187.
47
Meszaros, op. cit., p. 296.
Critique 113
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.
48
I. Meszaros, ‘Marx ‘‘Philosopher’’’ in E.J. Hobsbawn (ed.) The History of Marxism, Vol. 1.. (Brighton:
Harvester Press, 1982), pp. 103135, 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. 101102.
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. 15, 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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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. 29. 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. 256257. 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. 104138. 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. 99108.
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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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. 321324, 324.
63
Marx, 1847, p. 43.
64
Ibid., p. 91.
65
Ibid.
Critique 117
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. 99108.
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
70
F. Engels, ‘Preface’ (1885), Capital, Vol. II (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1933), pp. 728. 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. 191214.
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.