Rakesh Bhandari wrote:
> But it seems clear to me that Marx understood capitalism to be progressive
> by some measure (complexification, productive power) over the modes of
> production that had preceded it. And it is also seems clear to me that he
> understood it for some time to be a gift that colonial powers were imposing
> on their subjects. For Marx capitalism was indeed higher on the
> evolutionary scale, however discredited such a metaphor may be today. I
> would love my claim to be disputed or at least nuanced.
Unfortunately, I don't think your claim can be denied but perhaps it can be nuanced, as Jim Craven recently did in reference to some sexist and homophobic passages in Marx. There is a very special sense in which "we" (anyone alive) cannot not see "capitalism" (=simple history of last few hundred years) as progressive: if it weren't for capitalism we wouldn't exist. Engels is a bit better on this than Marx, as when he declard bluntly, "No ancient slavery, no modern socialism." That is of course empirically true. But (again as Engels shows in his obvious personal preference for Clytemnestra over Agamemnon) that unavoidable sense that oneself has a right to live carries no theoretical force. Engels saw Agamemnon (one might say) as "objectively progressive" -- i.e., no Agamemnon, no Frederick Engels. But he didn't like him and didn't pretend that in any concrete sense Agamemnon (or what he represented) wasn't an awful lot worse for people than was Clytemnestra (or what she represented).
I can't really feel bad that I'm sitting here and have a pentium computer in front of me. And certainly that wouldn't be the case except for capitalism. And that subjective feeling (along with the ideological pressure of bourgeois "stagism" or "Progress") constantly pulls out of Marx comments that can only be regarded as implying a providential Progress at work. But, Rakesh, as you recognize, the whole of Marx's work has freed *us* from that illusion, has provided us with the understanding to fight against bourgeois Progress.
I wish Marx had not said such silly things as that the hand mill gave us feudalism, the waterwheel capitalism. But those are aberrations and momentary surrenders to lines of thought his whole work contradicts. (Actually, in a limited fashion, the water wheel *did* give us not capitalism but feudalism. Early feudal lords sent their gangs of thugs household to household destroying hand mills to make the peasants dependent on having their grain ground at the lord's mill -- technical "progress" resulting in a loss of human freedom and comfort.)
Carrol