What Marx finds in the present is a deadly clash of interests. But whereas a utopian thinker might exhort us to rise above these conflicts in the name of love and fellowship, Marx himself takes a very different line. He does indeed believe in love and fellowship, but he does not think they will be achieved by some phoney harmony. The exploited and dispossessed are not to abandon their interests, which is just what their masters want them to do, but to press them all the way through. Only then might a society beyond self-interest finally emerge. There is nothing in the least wrong with being self-interested, if the alternative is hugging your chains in some false spirit of self-sacrifice.