THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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does not picture a paradise on earth, it reveals the secret of profiteering and the almost more complicated secret of profit distribution. Marx applies Ricardo's law of
value to labour as a product, he discovers the dialectics of the product by means of exchange value and within it, he discovers profit as extorted surplus value and the
strange average rate of profit as the basis of the class solidarity of capitalists. In this way he first lays the material foundations of the dialectics of history which leads to
tensions, utopias, and revolutions. He substantiates and amends the anticipations of utopia by means of economics, by means of the immanent radical changes in the
mode of production and exchange, and he thereby cancels out the reified dualism between what is and what ought to be, between empirical experience and utopia. He
thus fights against both clinging empiricism and skimming utopianism. What counts instead is actively conscious participation in the historically immanent process of the
revolutionary re­organization of society. All this as realism full of future, in the most thorough investigations, with breath­taking sharpness and breadth, for the purpose
of real revolution, as both its general staff office and arsenal. And just as, from the standpoint of attained realism, there was no longer any justification for the novelistic
goal­images of the old utopias, so there was still no cause at that time to specify the construction of socialism already in a concrete­processive way. The humane
conditions behind the nationalization of the means of production are still barely indicated, for all the comprehensiveness of the mode of investigation. Engels speaks in
general terms of the realm of freedom, Marx posits little more than the sparse concept of the classless society, even though it is powerfully differentiated from what has
gone before. Actual descriptions of the future are deliberately missing, as noted above, and they are deliberately missing precisely because Marx's whole work serves
the future, and can only be comprehended and implemented at all in the horizon of the future, yet one which is not pictured in a utopian­abstract way. But a future which
is illuminated in historical­materialist terms in and by the past and present, and hence by the tendencies which operate and continue to operate, in order to be at last a
knowing future capable of being shaped. Nothing was more necessary than this emphatic contrast to the imagined phalanstères or New Harmonies; than the rejection of
all fantasies of the so­called State of the future; than the omission of the field to come, together with the restrained style which is in keeping with it. But in fact this
omission occurred solely for the sake of the future, a comprehended future into which it was finally possible to travel with a map and compass; the omission certainly
did not occur