In the opening paragraphs of William Morris’s utopian science fiction novel News From Nowhere, readers are confronted with a scene that will be as painfully familiar to many socialists in 2026 as it no doubt was when the work was first published in 1890. After a night of “brisk conversational discussion, as to what would happen on the Morrow of the Revolution,” a man is walking home as his mind echoes with the many excellent arguments that would, no doubt, have floored his interlocutors if he had only been able to remember them earlier.

Fortunately, “this frame of mind he was so used to, that it didn’t last him long.” And so, after a short bout of “disgust with himself for having lost his temper (which he was also well used to),” his thoughts turn to the future socialist society that he and his comrades had just been debating. Unable to shake his post-argument blues, he stumbles toward home with a mounting feeling of desperation, muttering to himself: “If I could but see it! If I could but see it!”

Marxism has been notoriously inhospitable to this sort of wish, with speculation about the details of a future socialist society famously dismissed by Karl Marx as “writing recipes for the cookshops of the future.” But whatever their official views, few socialists will be able to honestly deny that they haven’t sometimes felt the force of the plea repeated by the protagonist of News From Nowhere. If we could but see it!

For those of us who chafe at traditional Marxist utopophobia, Jan Kandiyali’s new book, Flourishing Together: Karl Marx’s Vision of the Good Society represents a welcome break with this particular strand of Marxist orthodoxy, offering an unabashed and detailed exploration of just what Marx thought a good society would look like, and whether that vision is plausible.

At the heart of Kandiyali’s argument is a dispute with an alternative interpretation of Marx defended by G. A. Cohen and Jon Elster. On this view, Marx thought that a good society would promote human flourishing, where such flourishing consists in the realization of one’s talents and abilities. Where capitalist society condemns large numbers of people to working lives of forced, stultifying toil, communism will allow for all to develop their talents and abilities through meaningful work.

Crucial to Cohen’s and Elster’s accounts, however, is that individuals in communist society are fundamentally concerned with their own development and self-expression. They acknowledge that the Marxian vision of the good society stresses that this must take place in the context of community with others. But on the Cohen–Elster reading, communist community is in an important sense instrumental. Each individual values the flourishing of others only because it is a means to their own self-realization. (Kandiyali dubs this the “parallelist” interpretation.)

Now, as both Cohen and Elster argue, if the parallelist interpretation is right, then Marx’s vision of the good society is in trouble. For the parallelist interpretation of Marx does not look like a serious contender for a vision of the good society suitable to modern political philosophy.

For a start, it implies that the division of labour should be abolished, so as to allow individuals to fully develop all of their talents. This seems incompatible with a modern, technologically advanced economy, capable of producing efficiently enough to satisfy the needs of all.

Second, it implies that communism will only be possible in conditions of near-limitless productivity and abundance, so as to allow for each individual to work on developing their talents without having to worry about whether their work will produce enough to ensure that the needs of others are met. Particularly given environmental constraints, this looks unduly optimistic.

Finally, the parallelist interpretation also seems to imply a curiously individualistic picture of life under communism, in which individuals focus primarily on their own flourishing and mutual service plays little role.

Fortunately for Marx, Kandiyali argues that the parallelist interpretation is mistaken. Taking his cue from a brief but richly suggestive set of passages from Marx’s “Comments on James Mill,” Kandiyali argues persuasively that the parallelist reading exaggerates some of the more implausible currents of Marx’s thought and misses some of his more valuable suggestions. A more careful reading yields what Kandiyali calls the “mutualist” interpretation.

Like the parallelist view, the mutualist reading takes Marx to be committed to a vision of the good society in which self-realization through work plays a major role. But on the mutualist approach, self-realization isn’t simply a matter of developing one’s own talents and abilities. For Kandiyali’s Marx, the sort of work that contributes best to human flourishing involves meeting the needs of others by providing them with the goods or services they require for their flourishing.

This mutualist reading seems to help the Marxist view avoid the criticisms that defeat the parallelist view. First, Kandiyali argues that a mutualist approach needn’t be committed to an abolitionist stance on the division of labour. Though each member of society must have the opportunity to develop a wide range of talents and abilities, this is compatible with a considerable degree of specialization. Indeed, mutualist self-realization will require some division of labour, in order to organize and coordinate work so as to make sure that everyone’s needs are being met.

Second, Kandiyali points out that the mutualist view also undermines the case for thinking that communism will only be possible in conditions of implausibly spectacular abundance. For the mutualist, giving people the goods and services they need is an important part of the way people want to work. This pro-social motivation allows for people to work as they want to and yet still work in such a way as to ensure that everyone’s needs will be met (even in conditions short of limitless productivity).

And finally, Kandiyali argues that the mutualist view imbues communist society with a solidaristic ethos that is in itself more attractive than the individualistic mindset envisaged by the parallelist approach. A superabundant future where there is no need to work to help one another isn’t just unfeasible — it’s undesirable. Taking account of the needs of others and working to meet them is an important part of what it is to live a good life, not something that we should wish we could do without.

Kandiyali’s book contains a number of valuable insights. The Marx exegesis is careful and compelling, as is the case in favor of the mutualist vision of the good society. Moreover, it has the rare virtue of stating its claims in simple, clear prose without shying away from areas of philosophical difficulty. There will be much here to interest both seasoned philosophers and those without much background in philosophy and Marxology.

The book is also impressive for the way it uses its ideas to shine light on important practical debates in contemporary socialist theory, with Kandiyali arguing against both “postwork” politics and universal basic income proposals as insufficiently attentive to the necessity and desirability of working to meet one another’s needs. Similarly, the final chapter — which argues that Rawlsian principles of justice are preferable to Marx’s own contribution principle for the lower stage of communism — will be of particular interest to those following recent debates about the relationship between socialism and liberalism.

As the summary above suggests, much of the book is engaged in an extended polemic with Cohen and Elster, two of the major figures of analytical Marxism. However, though Kandiyali disputes the substance of Cohen and Elster’s views, he does not reject their methodology. Indeed, Kandiyali often appeals to that methodology in order to undermine their substantive claims.

Kandiyali’s book thus serves as a powerful challenge to the popular view that analytical Marxism ran out of steam precisely because Marxism and the methods of modern analytic philosophy are a poor fit for one another. Versions of this argument are popular among both analytic political philosophers hostile to Marx and Marxist theorists hostile to analytic philosophy. This book is as clear a refutation of those arguments as one could wish for.

Moreover, Kandiyali exhibits the best virtues of the first generation of analytical Marxists whilst avoiding some of their vices. Readers won’t want for clarity, rigor, or openness to cutting-edge modern philosophy. But this is refreshingly joined with a genuine willingness to engage with work from other traditions and to extend the analysis to more practical discussions. The book thus stands (alongside recent contributions such as Nicholas Vrousalis’s Exploitation as Domination: What Makes Capitalism Unjust) as a welcome contribution to the contemporary reinvigoration of analytical Marxism.

The substantive case in favor of Marx’s vision is at its most vulnerable when it connects with some difficult problems in contemporary philosophy. For example, though Kandiyali rejects the overly individualistic picture of the parallelist interpretation, he also stresses that the mutualist view should not be read in an “overly socialized manner.”

Appealing to Marx’s claim that communism is not the “love-imbued opposite of selfishness,” he distinguishes between an account on which individuals would forsake their own interests in order to serve others and his own view, which instead involves individuals realizing their interests “through others — by helping those others satisfy their needs.”

As Kandiyali notes, this attempt to chart a course between altruism and self-interest aligns well with a particular critique of modern moral theories as operating with a simplistically dualistic conception of moral motivation — a critique often associated with Aristotelian conceptions of morality, ethics, and politics.

This critique certainly has a lot of power. But it is also notoriously difficult to pin down, and attempts to specify a fully-developed positive approach based on it have had mixed results. The ultimate success of Kandiyali’s attempt to vindicate Marx’s vision of the good society is therefore tied up with some thorny questions in modern philosophy. (Something similar might be said for the relationship between the mutualist view and perfectionism, as well as the distinction between the just and the good.)

The philosophical waters run deep here, and so it’s hard to say just how serious these problems might prove to be for the mutualist view. But Kandiyali presents a very powerful case for spending more time exploring them. And for those of us who are prone to wondering about the character of a better world (perhaps on walks home after evenings of “brisk conversational discussion, as to what would happen on the Morrow of the Revolution”), he has taken an invaluable step toward a clearer picture of just what it is we are fighting for.