ABSTRACT
The two principal ‘material conditions’ in question are the ever-growing fury of the masses and the simultaneous development of the means of production. Utopianism in the era of materialistically critical socialism, said Karl Marx in his letter to Sorge, can only be silly, stale and reactionary from the roots up. Scientific socialism, in other words, was a phrase specifically coined in order to contrast Marx’s conception of socialism to that of the Utopians. The revolutionaries required heroic Roman ‘phrases’ in order to conceal from themselves the unheroic nature of the revolution’s ‘content’. For the question is how the proletariat becomes aware of the structural contradiction between the forces and relations of production. Progress is thus defined in terms of a series of radical transitions, from one mode of production to another. In The German Ideology, for example, the four modes of production are merely described and no attempt is made to explain the transitions between them.
