Permission to Dream: The Marxist Ban on Imagining Utopia Reconsidered

Utopia is a strange concept.In one sense, it refers to the ideal society, to a way of living together that we long for and dream about; in another, utopia is used as an epithet to discredit "utopian" policy proposals or to ridicule "utopian" ambitions.What could be wrong with the ideal society?It is, after all, ideal.For Marxists, something seems to be very wrong with it."German communism is the most determined opponent of all utopianism," Karl Marx himself commands in February 1848 in the Deutsche Brüssler Zeitung , a publication of German exiles in Belgium (MECW 6, 538).Just a few days later-in the Communist Manifesto published in late February from London-Marx and Friedrich Engels double down on this opposition: A utopian socialism has "necessarily a reactionary character," it is "necessarily doomed to failure" (MECW 6, 514).Both stick to this anti-utopian sentiment throughout their lives and works: In 1873, Marx adds to the second edition of Capital that a review had reproached him for not "writing. . .recipes for the cookshops of the future" (MECW 35, 17)-"imagine this!" mocks Marx (ibid.).Little did this review understand that he had no interest in writing such recipes in the first place!Finally, in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific , written in 1880, Engels juxtaposes his and Marx's "scientific socialism" with "crude theories" that "discover a new and more perfect system of social order" (MECW 24, 290).Marxists have taken passages like these, found throughout Marx and Engels' works, and inferred from them that it is somehow un-Marxist to engage in some or even any kind of utopian thinking.There are first the Marxists of the Second International.Lenin, for example, emphasizes in The State and Revolution that We are not utopians, we do not "dream" of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination.These anarchist dreams, based upon incomprehension of the tasks of the proletarian dictatorship, are totally alien to Marxism.(Lenin 1918, 35; see also Saage 2000; Geoghegan 1989, 50-55) Lenin also chastises his fellow Russian socialist Alexander Bogdanov who wrote utopian novels about a communist society on Mars ( 1984 ): Bogdanov, says Lenin, should rather have written about "how the bandits of capitalism stole the land" (quoted in Saage 2000 , 168).Luxemburg similarly notes that it would be a mistake to think that the socialist transformation is something for which a ready-made formula lies completed in the pocket of the revolutionary party, which needs only to be carried out energetically in practice.(1922, 94) Indeed, Luxemburg accuses Lenin of having made this very mistake.According to both Lenin and Luxemburg, socialists should not develop detailed utopias.But the strongest pronouncement of the anti-utopian stance is found among German Marxists associated with the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory.Here is Adorno: "One may not cast a picture of utopia in a positive manner" (in Bloch and Adorno 1989 , 10; see also Horkheimer 1970 ;Adorno 2004 ).Adorno attributes this "commandment not to 'depict' utopia or the commandment not to conceive certain utopias in detail" to Marx (as well as to Hegel; ibid.) and so takes Marx to have put forward an "Materialism imageless," as Adorno entitles a section in his Negative Dialectics , a materialist philosophy without representations, including representations of