(En)Visioning Socialism IV: Raising the Future in Our Imaginations Before Raising It in Reality

Abstract

We pre-suppose labor in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. — Marx, Capital, Vol. I, ch. 7, sec. 1