Marx was famously loath to provide “recipes to the cookshops of the future,” and Marxists after him have generally followed his counsel. Of course all Marxists would agree that under communism class divisions will be overcome and the historical materialist dynamic will have finally run its course. But beyond these very general implications of Marx's theory of history, the Marxist corpus has little to say about the nature of communist societies. However, caution in the face of an unpredictable future has not always prevented Marxists from depicting communism in ways that today seem blatantly utopian. Revealingly, these descriptions are usually cast negatively; thus we are told that communism is a society without commodity production, without alienation, and, of course, without a state. Marxists have suggested too that at the end of the historical materialist trajectory lies a society beyond scarcity and therefore beyond justice. Marxists have also proposed that communist societies are populated by men and women of a radically different kind from those found in class societies, genuinely “social” human beings. Some of these characterizations are exaggerated, others flawed. But even were they entirely on target, they would provide, at most, only vague intimations of what a communist society might be like. In any case, despite their vagueness, there are few today, including dedicated Marxists, who would not find them misleading. If nothing else, in their exuberant optimism, they are too much at odds with that skepticism about human perfectibility that has come to pervade our intellectual culture.