ABSTRACT
Commentators on Karl Marx seem to have reached a broad consensus about something. A substantial number of writers have challenged the very idea that Marx was ‘anti-utopian’. Propaganda alone was deemed an ‘inadequate’ means of realising socialism and anyone who considered it adequate was ‘utopian’. The most striking feature of the arguments contained within the means/ends dichotomy consensus is that they imply a complete misunderstanding of the term ‘utopia’ on Marx’s part. Marx’s critique of ‘utopian socialism’ begins at the beginning — it begins, that is, by pointing out that the Utopians were in fact ‘utopian’. As a political phenomenon, utopianism found its source in ‘the first instinctive yearnings of the proletariat for a general reconstruction of society’. Marx was in no doubt that utopianism had once served a positive function: utopias had had ‘propaganda value as popular novels, which corresponded perfectly to the still undeveloped consciousness of the proletarians’.
