THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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dreams, these deserve to be remembered with special emphasis. Remembered all the more fondly as the progress of socialism from utopia towards science has long
been a decided one. Sentimental and abstract world­improvement is played out; disciplined work in and with actual tendencies has taken its place. Existing misery is
not lamented and left at that, but it appears, when it becomes aware of itself and of its causes, as the revolutionary power to cancel itself out causally. Marx likewise
never allowed his subjective indignation to pose as an objective factor and thus to deceive itself about the actually existing revolutionary factors. He never taught, like
Owen and Proudhon, and also like Rodbertus and especially Lassalle, that because workers receive unfair wages in capitalist society a new society must therefore be
created, with fair wages for instance. But the Must discovered by Marx is quite different from that of the introduced moral demand. It lies within the economically
immanent manifestations of capitalist society itself and causes the latter to collapse only in immanent­dialectical terms. The subjective factor of its destruction lies in the
proletariat, which is simultaneously produced by capitalist society as its contradiction and becomes aware of itself as a contradiction. The objective factor of its
destruction lies in the accumulation and concentration of capital, in monopolization, in the crisis of affluence which stems from the contradiction between the attained
collective mode of production and the retained private form of acquisition. Such are the new rudiments of an immanent economic critique; they are almost entirely
lacking in the older utopias, they are characteristic of Marx. Marx's critique displays no recesses of the heart, as Hegel would say, but it displays all the more sharply
the recesses, fissures, cracks, and contrasts incorporated in the objectively existing economy. For this very reason, as far as the so­called State of the future is
concerned, there is also no detailed specification privately introduced from outside, ante rem, of an abstract­anticipatory kind, as in the old utopias. The abstract
utopias had devoted nine tenths of their space to a portrayal of the State of the future and only one tenth to the critical, often merely negative consideration of the
present. This kept the goal colourful and vivid of course, but the path towards it, in so far as it could lie in given circumstances, remained hidden. Marx devoted more
than nine tenths of his writings to the critical analysis of the present, and he granted relatively little space to descriptions of the future. Hence, as has justly been
remarked, Marx called his work ‘Capital’ and not ‘Appeal for Socialism’ for instance. It contains an overall view of economic life, for the first time since Quesnay's
‘Economic Tableau’, and on a much higher level. It