NEITHER Marx nor Engels spent much time describing in any detail what a future, communist society might be like.  

Their efforts — like those of subsequent generations of Marxists — focused on analysing the workings of existing society and then trying to build a movement to end the exploitation, of people and of the planet, which is central to capitalism.  

Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific was written in answer to would-be socialists who spent their time painting what he and Marx saw as fanciful visions of some ideal society which would be achieved without struggle and needed “only to be discovered to conquer the entire world by virtue of their own power.”