Owen and Fourier both called themselves socialists at some point, and are typically regarded as belonging to the utopian socialist movement. Thus, they were criticized by Karl Marx for, above all, failing to recognize the fundamental role of class conflict in history, while cooperatives as a social form had a mixed reputation in early Marxist circles. On one hand, Marx both praised the development of cooperatives as a victory for the working class in his public speeches and in theoretical works such as Capital analyzed cooperatives as prefiguring, within capitalism, what labor relations will become in communism. On the other hand, Marx insisted that the duty of cooperatives was to gain leverage for the working class to overthrow the capitalist system, thus he also worried that cooperatives might look out only for themselves instead of playing a role in the wider class struggle. As a result, Marx and the wider communist movement would increasingly turn away from bottom-up organization of workers' cooperatives to aim for communist capture of state power as the 19th century progressed; however, this was for what they thought was political expediency, not theoretical necessity. The wider cooperative movement, for its part, continued to be led by people with a variety of opinions on political economy, but were for the most part non- or even anti-Marxist.
