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Karl Marx’s rare comments on socialist society were made with the concern of guarding against the idealism of utopian socialism. Marx’s idea of emancipation initially derives from a critique of classical economic theory and an identification of the limitations of political liberalism. Mill does not fit with this twofold Marxist criticism. Although he adopts a radical stance on some of the conclusions of Ricardian economics and claimed that the relations of production of his time were provisional, he nonetheless remained cautious: he aimed at the abolition of the wage system through the gradual development of production cooperatives and he remained very mistrustful of revolutionary socialism, judging it to be “more a product of the Continent than of Great Britain”.