p Marx made a deep study of the key trends in social thought and in 1843 criticised the utopianism of the French socialist and communist trends. In a letter to Arnold Ruge, he stressed: “For although no doubt exists on the question of ‘Whence’, all the greater confusion prevails on the question of ‘Whither’. Not only has a state of general anarchy set in among the reformers, but everyone will have to admit to himself that he has no exact idea what the future ought to be."  [115•39  The Utopians were aware of their point of departure, meaning that the advance was to be from capitalism on into the future, but they did not know how to advance into the future. Instead, they invented speculative schemes of a future social order.

p In contrast to these Utopian attempts, Marx presented a “new trend" in social thought, of which he says the following: “On the other hand, it is precisely the advantage of the new trend that we do not dogmatically anticipate the world, but only want to find the new world through criticism of the old one."  [115•40  To discover a new world through a critique of the old one means to discover in the old society the real forces which could remake it and to determine how a new social system could actually spring from the old society. The unsubstantiated contrast of speculative pictures of the new world and actual capitalism was, according to Marx, a dogmatic anticipation of the future. It amounted to a lifeless utopianism deprived of revolutionary energy. Any dogmatism and its attendant utopianism are profoundly alien to the dialectics of life, practical struggle and revolutionary theory. As soon as it emerged, Marxism declared war on dogmatism, utopianism and the doctrinaire approach.

p The Utopian socialists suggested the possibility of a social order under which each worked in accordance with his capacities and was paid in accordance with his work, but they intended to secure this arrangement under the bourgeois system, without any revolution. The Utopian communists called for revolution and a revolutionary dictatorship that were to usher in social equality and set up a society where each would receive in accordance with his needs. But their idea of revolution was utterly fantastic: it was to be a kind of miracle that was instantly to establish the ideals of complete equality, social justice and distribution in accordance to needs.

p When asked why the new social system had to replace the old one, the Utopian communists had one answer: because of its indisputable merits. They had no idea of the real forces that were to act in accordance with the laws of history to establish the new social system.

p In their fight against various political trends, Marx and Engels sided with the revolution and joined the revolutionary movement from the outset. As early as 1843, Marx stressed that the task then was to carry on “ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be".  [116•41  Thus, Marx insisted that this criticism had a political content and said that “the critic not only can but must deal with these political questions (which according to the extreme Socialists are altogether unworthy of attention)".  [116•42  That is why Marx and Engels resolutely opposed the stand taken by the Utopians, who preached abstinence from political struggle.

p Furthermore, Marx and Engels just as resolutely sided with communism, for they had no doubt at all that communism was the ultimate goal of the revolutionary struggle. But they began a profound critique of Utopian communism.

p As early as 1843, Marx declared that because the Utopian communism of Cabet, Dezamy and Weitling turned its attention only to some aspects of the future society it amounted to a dogmatic abstraction. This one-sided abstraction inevitably produced another abstraction—Utopian socialism, i.e. “a one-sided realisation of the socialist principle".  [116•43  Marx was not satisfied with the prospect of a one-sided implementation of the socialist principle, just as he was against the one-sided implementation of the communist principle.

p These ideas already suggested the need to overcome the one-sidedness both of Utopian socialism and of Utopian communism. Scientific communism alone was capable of doing this. The Utopian socialists put forward the idea of a possible social system under which each worked according to his abilities and received according to his work. They proclaimed that men would come to dominate nature for the common good, but they believed that all of this could be achieved without a revolutionary transformation of bourgeois society.

p The Utopian communists, like the followers of Blanqui, issued calls for revolution and the establishment of a revolutionary dictatorship which was to implement instant social equality by setting up a society in which each received according to his needs. But there arose this question: was society capable of satisfying all the needs of every one of its members the day after the socialist revolution? The Utopian communists countered by declaring that communism could start its way from a holy state of poverty. They ignored the question of the material incentives for work and did not consider at all the development of production and the 117 economy. In 1844, Marx was already saying that the “urge for levelling" and the establishment of an equal minimum for all prevailed in “crude communism".  [117•44  Indeed, this “crude communism" which Marx first criticised in 1843-1844 amounted to a whittling down of social requirements to a minimum and total levelling in society on the basis of that minimum. Marx saw this as a call for “the regression to the unnatural simplicity of the poor and crude man who has few needs and who has not only failed to go beyond private property, but has not yet even reached it".  [117•45 

p This criticism contains the embryo of the idea that communism is possible only on the basis of an abundance of material goods. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 we also find the embryo of the idea that the new society must develop and in its development pass through a number of stages until it reaches perfection.

p The lesser lights of Utopian socialism, whom Marx fought, considered the transition to the new society not as a single dialectical process of development in which the new and higher stage naturally followed upon the preceding one, but as a disintegration of society into separate cells. Whenever they suggested a breakup of social relations it was only in the sense that many social ties, characteristic of the epoch of capitalism, were destroyed, with centralisation giving way to total decentralisation, and self-sufficient commune associations substituting for the intricate system of capitalist relations between men, peoples and countries.

p Bdkunin and Proudhon held that with the abolition of exploitation, men’s joint activity would also be abolished, for they believed that the emancipation of labour implied independent activity by individuals or small groups.

p Some Utopian socialists were quite wrong when they said that the emergence of the new society would start with the organisation of more or less isolated associations. Indeed, Proudhon based his “associations”, in contrast to other Utopian socialists, on an equivalent exchange of goods and services, and not on social property. He suggested that the future society would break up into separate collectives, so that the bourgeois state would not give way to a dictatorship of the proletariat but to anarchy.

p In 1847, Marx exposed Proudnon’s “poverty of philosophy" and drew the following conclusion: “He wants to soar as the man of science above the bourgeois and the proletarians; he is merely the petty bourgeois, 118 continually tossed back and forth between capital and labour, political economy and communism."  [118•46  In the 1850s, Marx continued his criticism of Proudhonism and showed the flimsiness of the theory which held that artisans and peasants were to receive credit and land, and engage in a direct exchange of the products of their labour in order allegedly to bring about fundamental social changes in society. These were the Utopian aspirations not of the proletariat, but of the petty bourgeoisie, which was being hemmed in by big capital through credit and competition. All of this amounted to an attempt, Marx said, to invent something that would forcibly stem the growth of capital and the progressive development of society.

p In his sociological writings, Proudhon came fairly close to Comte’s positivism and agnosticism and held that ontology as a science of substances and causes was impossible and that all that was accessible to man’s observation was the relation between things. Proudhon borrowed his “law of the three stages" governing the progress of society from Comte, or directly from Saint-Simon; he designated these as religion, philosophy and science. That was the sum and substance of his inadequate idealistic theory of progress.

p M. A. Bakunin also to some extent started his theoretical exercises from Proudhon. Engels wrote that “Bakunin has a peculiar theory of his own, a medley of Proudhonism and communism. The chief point concerning the former is that he does not regard capital, i.e., the class antagonism between capitalists and wage workers which has arisen through social development, but the state as the main evil to be abolished".  [118•47  Subsequent anarchist theories variously start from Bakunin’s ideas, all being characterised by this amalgam of Proudhonism and communism, and all being hostile not only to the bourgeois state, but also to the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat, without which it is absolutely impossible to carry out any deep social changes or to prepare the construction of a new society and to establish its first phase. For all their loud revolutionary talk and the display of Leftism, Bakuninism and other anarchist trends were harmful to the cause of the revolution.

p Bakunin and his followers attacked Marxism from the positions of reactionary utopianism, declaring Marxism to be a state-communistic programme. In contrast to the idea of the proletarian dictatorship, Bakunin developed his anarchist theory of a riot by the whole people and the free organisation of masses of workers. He held that following a riot by the whole people, upon the overthrow of capitalism, a social system was at once to emerge under which there would be full satisfaction of all 119 material requirements through collective labour, compulsory and equal for all. Here Bakunin reiterated the ideas of Utopian communism.

p Bakunin imagined the new social system to be some emancipation of mankind from the operation of the laws of social development. Following the riot of the whole people the development of the social forms would cease, and society, broken up into its initial cells—-associations—would subsequently not undergo any qualitative changes, so that its development would amount only to quantitative growth. That was a definite step back in the history of social thought.

For the first time in the history of social thought, Marx and Engels, who relied on materialist dialectics and carried on a struggle against petty-bourgeois views, showed the most harmful role of voluntarism in revolutionary action. The will was the basis of Bakunin’s whole revolutionary theory, and that is what Marx emphasised in exposing the Bakuninists. Engels had criticised the Blanquists for their voluntarism. Marx and Engels laid the basis for all the subsequent criticism of petty-bourgeois “Leftism” and showed how harmful and untenable this kind of theory and practice were.