ABSTRACT
Karl Marx had to ground the future existence of communism in the movement of the present if he was to invoke the spirit of revolution in a manner consistent with the principles of proletarian self-emancipation and self-determination. One of the additional categories or explanatory concepts employed by Marx was teleology. Commentators are therefore more than justified in referring to the vision of communism presented in the Manuscripts as ‘utopian’ — utopian in the sense of conjured by the imagination. Marx’s discussion of the ontological need for labour had very little indeed to do with utopian speculation about the nature of the Good Life. Marx’s pragmatic concept of historical development gives rise to the conclusion that ‘capitalism as a social relation limits the enrichment of needs which are its own creation’. Marx’s utopianism, that is, was nothing more than an accidental by-product of his inability to get historical materialism to do the things that he wanted it to do.
