Ideology and City Planning: Marx and Engels’s Reconciliation of Town and Country

Abstract

Scholars have given immense attention to Marx and Engels’s supposed disdain for rural living, but their treatment of the relationship between rurality and urbanity was far more complicated than merely an antirural bias. Marx and Engels believed that the ideal communism would reconcile town and country and create a society resembling an Owenite agroindustrial town rather than the forms of urbanity that contemporary Marxists celebrate. Understanding the significance that Marx and Engels gave to the division between town and country is critical to pointing out major defects within urban-planning ideas inspired by their thought as, within the Soviet Union, aspirations to enact their ideas of universal industrial villages created significant planning problems. In today’s predominantly urbanized world, Marxian scholars and activists must therefore reassess Marx and Engels’s assertion that the goal of communism is to eventually reconcile the division between town and county.