Crafting Utopia: Notes on the tensions within Marxist-related conceptualizations

Abstract

In an era marked by the global hegemony of neoliberal capitalism and the far right’s increasing popularity, the language of utopia has returned to scholarly and political debate, sometimes in conversation with Marxist positions. Still, the discussion hinges on whether such language propels us beyond capitalist social relations or confines itself to limited liberal ambitions. To clarify this tension, the article first revisits Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s ambivalent stance on utopianism, underscoring both their principled skepticism toward speculative blueprints and their conviction that utopia, as a communist horizon, is indispensable to revolutionary praxis. It then interrogates three authors, influenced by Marxist frameworks, who have recently renewed the debate on utopia: Erik Olin Wright’s ‘real utopias’, formulated within analytic Marxism; Michael Albert’s ‘practical utopias’, grounded in libertarian-socialist currents; and Ana Cecilia Dinerstein’s ‘concrete utopias’, who borrows Ernst Bloch’s anticipatory consciousness with autonomist Marxism. Its final aim is to ascertain not only the differences among these three perspectives but, above all, the extent to which their respective frameworks converge with a Marxist conception of utopia as articulated in classical Marxism. We undertake this examination to argue that, despite their attempts to revalidate Marxist utopianism in the present, these perspectives may nonetheless fall short of articulating a horizon that truly transcends the proclaimed end-of-history , one commensurate with the Marxian aspiration to abolish class society and build communism.