ABSTRACT
The utopias written before 1848 were concerned with the "captains of industry"; first they depicted a rural republic whose citizens are proprietors or beneficiaries of goods sufficient to ensure their leisure and happiness. Next utopians searched for the means to run the great enterprises by men of exceptional ability. Utopians were moved to examine the condition of the proletariat, but almost solely from a philanthropic point of view. Schaffle noted the doubts on the strength of the doctrine of Capital and that in 1877 there appeared in Vorwarts an article in which it was asserted that "socialism neither seeks nor sees in the Marxist theory of value any measure of distribution." Karl Marx observed that "the distinction between skilled and unskilled labor rests in part on pure illusion or, to say the least, on distinctions that have long ceased to be real and that survive only by virtue of traditional convention."
