THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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power have been maintained without the surpassing goal­image of socialism, without the subjective factor in the highly organized, disciplined, conscious form of the
Party? Marxism is instruction for action; but if it becomes both subjectless and alienated from its goal, then a fatalistic anti­Marxism arises, that degenerates into the
justification for not having acted because the process was already under way of its own accord. Such automatism therefore becomes a cookbook of missed
opportunities, a commentary on wasted chances, vacated positions. But Marxism is only an instruction for action when its grasp is simultaneously a grasp ahead: the
concretely anticipated goal governs the concrete path. Hence, even more decisive than the will for change is the pathos of the basic goal, which is usually so instructive
for the status of the old utopians and for the significance which is still due to them today, and indeed makes them into allies against so­called social democracy, for
which since Bernstein the movement means everything but the goal means nothing. Regardless of the fact that the goal­pathos of the utopians, being all too direct, is
questionable in a different way because it replaced the path, it skipped over it abstractly. It operated above all as a static pathos, as one of the mere exposure of
existing cathedrals; it posited good order as readily available, a ready alternative. In this respect there is very often no genuine, historically new future at all in the goal of
utopians, but a false, non­new future; bad utopians like Proudhon even imagined a mere transfigured petit bourgeois into the Idée générale de la révolution. And even
great utopians decorated, indeed overfilled their constructions with false ideals, i.e. with those which in terms of content (essentially) were exactly known and complete,
only not yet realized so to speak. But if instead of such ideals (they all stem from a static theory of two worlds) Marx teaches the work of the next step and determines
little in advance about the ‘realm of freedom’, this does not mean, as we know, that these goal­substances were missing in his work. On the contrary, they move within
the entire dialectical tendency as its ultimately inspiring purpose, they establish the spirit of the entire revolutionary work. Marx likewise uses ideals as a measure of
criticism and direction, only not transcendentally introduced and fixed ideals, but those to be found in history and thus unfinished ideals, i.e. those of concrete
anticipation. This was clearly distinguished above as the warm stream of Marxism (cf. Vol. I, p. 210f.), as the ‘theory­practice of reaching home or of departure from
inappropriate objectification’. If Marxism did not have its dialectical materialist humanism, in historically dawning, and also inheriting anticipation: then we could never
speak of capitalist ‘alienation’, ‘dehumanization’;