Abstract

The Marxian visions of the post-capitalist future evolved with significant changes over three decades. From the outset Marx and Engels divided the future into stages, economically and philosophically, a final communist or socialist stage, and a transitional stage or stages preceding it. The final stage remained largely constant throughout, the actualization of the ideal of Feuerbach's anthropological philosophy, supplemented by Fourier's ideas for the abolition of the division of labor and its transformation into pleasurable activity. The original institutional conception was pastoral, adopted from Owen's communal plans and materialistic determinism, with socialized means of production and comprehensive communal control of social and economic life. They substituted for Owen's equal labor-time exchange principle Cabet's principle of from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs, and estimated the duration of the transition at one to two years. Interpreting history according to Hegel's dialectic they conceived this future as the inevitable result of a revolution dialectically effecting the complete rehumanization of a totally dehumanized proletariat, whose consciousness accomplishes the revolution and recovers its theretofore alienated nature. ;With the subsequent formulation of the theory of historical materialism and its conception of all history as class conflict their published descriptions of the final stage became brief and vague and it was relegated to an increasingly remote future, based on varying material and social requirements which would transform human nature sometime during these increasingly lengthy transitional stages. To preserve the material accomplishments of capitalism they substituted state centralization for Owen's communalism, but began to misrepresent this for tactical political reasons, defining the state and classes solely in terms of property, state expropriation thereby abolishing the state. Retaining Cabet's principle for the final stage, they formulated a succession of contradictory principles of production and distribution within a varying number of transitional stages. These principles ranged from the equal exchange of labor time, through unequal distribution for equal labor time based on results, and finally to equal distribution for unequal labor time and results. The most egalitarian plans were the most widely publicized, the least egalitarian restricted in circulation