ABSTRACT
Time and time again over years people have been told that if Marxism’s moribund body is to drag itself into the new millennium then it will have to capture the spirit and harness the energies of the utopian imagination. Karl Marx would, indeed, have been mortified to have found himself being discussed as a part of the utopian tradition. Indeed, even commentators with little sympathy for Marxism have recognised the symbolic potency of Marx’s utopia. The utopian escapes ‘the constraints of empirical reality’ and describes a state or society that is both incongruous with and removed from the world as it presently stands. Utopian imagination, so misused, becomes a weapon against the utopian imagination of others and kills their promise of happiness’. The suggestion is that any critique of, say, exploitation will implicitly assume the idea of a non-exploitative society. Most writers thankfully avoid the suggestion that utopianism is a precondition for social critique.
