In Defence of Utopian Socialism Hari Bravery
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Within the writings of Marx and Engels the idea of utopia “acquired heavily pejorative overtones,” dismissed as ahistorical, paternalistic and overly abstract, outlining future social systems founded on philosophical idealism that will never come to fruition due to its divorce from the material conditions of the historical present. However, it is significant to remember that the moniker of ‘Utopian Socialism’ was retrospectively applied by Marx and Engels to previous socialist thinkers (namely Cabet, Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen), thinkers whose ideologies actually had very little relation to one another, aside from a shared tendency to envision a perfected future society based on the principles of institutional design. Let me take some of the primary arguments used by Marxian socialists (the shared socialism of Marx and Engels, as opposed to ideas developed by later Marxists) to disparage utopian socialism and show why these are non-foundational. The empirical criticism of utopian socialism as ahistorical offered by Marx and Engels is that utopian plans and blueprints are unnecessary, since satisfactory solutions to social problems emerge from the unfolding of historical process without themselves needing to be designed. This Marxian argument poses that utopianism is divorced from history, failing to
alleviate the suffering of the proletariat due to its “dogmatic abstraction” from reality. This perception of utopian socialism is best caricatured by Engels within Socialism: Utopian and Scientific asserting that for the utopians: “Socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and justice, and has only to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue its own power. And as an absolute truth is independent of time, space and of the historical development of man, it is a mere accident when and where it is discovered.’ Engels mocks the utopians’ conception of a socialist futurity so divorced from the mechanics of present society that the advent of socialist society is rendered historically arbitrary, failing to understand that the conditions for socialism only appear at a particular stage in the historical development of humankind, in contrast to the ‘scientific’ argument that socialist revolution is a direct result of specific historical conditions. This sentiment is repeated in Marx’s ‘For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing’ in which “it is precisely the advantage of the new trend that we do not dogmatically anticipate the world, but only want to find the new world through criticism of the old one,” annexing the past from conceptions of the utopian. Thus, for Marx as for Engels, it is the “drawing [of] a great mental
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