Work organization, scientific socialism and Utopian socialism

Abstract

If the socialist current founded by Marx and Engels claimed, from the beginning, the quality of  scientific, it was mainly with the purpose of becoming distinct from the previous socialisms, which it qualified as utopian. The marxist socialism intended to surpass all those socialisms by means of an historical and definitive ascending to the statute of science. Neverthless, and unlike the prophecy of Marx and Engels, the «utopian socialism» - pointed out by Marx, Engels and their disciples as a mere development of capitalism and its polarization of classes or as a consequence from the brightness of doctrinal superiority achieved by the «scientific socialism». The «utopian socialism» - pointed out by Marx, Engels and their disciples as a mere reflex from the embryonic stage of the proletariat and the primary phase of capitalist contradictions in the beginning of the last century - has indeed survived to all the death certificates that, after the Manifest of the Communist Party, have been granted to it. lts survival shows that a large part of what Marx and Engels intended to embrace under the label of «utopian socialism» was, in the end, far from only «reflecting» the embryonic character of capitalist reality in the beginning of the nineteenth century. And it is in this way that the «utopian socialism», permanently revived and refreshed, has allowed itself to submit, modernly, the «scientific socialism» and those societies that claim today to be its achievement to a persistent, corrosive and, not seldom, well-aimed critique. It is what happens namely in the field of work organization and the tools of production themselves, a field studied in this article and where the present «utopian socialism» remarks the ambiguities and the contradictions of the «scientific socialism» and reveals a strong power of imagination and a remarkable theoretical flexibility.