Marxismo e utopia. Differenziazioni su una categoria critica

This essay analyses the conceptual status of utopia in the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and in those of some 20th-century authors who refer to them (Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, Fredric Jameson). The attempt defines the role of utopia as a critical category that combines a principle of struggle oriented towards emancipation with reference to a historically determined social force. In this sense, utopia has been (and perhaps still could be) the index of an effort at categorisation that simultaneously has the urgency of understanding the mechanisms of domination, both present and past, and of seizing the opportunities that, in different circumstances, are offered to the revolutionary subject to force the established order.