Marxism

Abstract

The relationship between utopia and utopianism (considered both in terms of broader "social imagining" and of literary production) and Marxism (considered as an ensemble of theoretical propositions, subjective convictions and political practices) is both complex and historically dynamic: at times antagonistic, at other synergistic, converging and divergent at once. This chapter provides an overview of the nuances, tensions and evolutionary dynamics of this relationship by  considering the “classical” period of Marx and Engels’s own writings, roughly from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 until The Civil War in France in 1871; the cross-pollination of classical Marxism and certain elements of anarchist or quasi-anarchist thought after the Paris Commune, with particular focus on Paul Lafargue and William Morris; and twentieth-century Marxist re-visions of the meaning of “utopia” from a Marxist standpoint (with particular focus on Ernst Bloch, Louis Marin, Fredric Jameson and Henri Lefebvre). It concludes with some brief reflections on the resurgence of literary utopianism within Science Fiction and strains within New Left and Post-Marxist thought after 1968.