Though many of us contemporary Marxists, neo-Marxists, Marxians, and Marxoids don't like to admit it, Marx, being a creature of his age, did deeply adhere to certain progressivist and teleological beliefs common to intellectuals in his day (including the various and sundry social Darwinists and Spencerians on the right). Marx also had a keen sense of historical irony.
Even though the primary class contradiction in the feudal mode of production is between "tribute-taking overlords" (Eric Wolf's phrase) and peasants/serfs, the bourgeoisie represent the transcendence of this contradiction -- sort of an historical irony (unless one chooses to focus on "commercialising landlords" a la Brenner).
The primary class contradicition in the capitalist M of P is between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Yet if one contends that Marx believes that it is the rising OCC and the FROP which triggers capitalism's final crisis, the following observations seem to have some merit.
Capital produces and reproduces itself by means of the valorization of dominated living labor in the labor process. But the ultimate limit to capital is capital itself -- as successive rounds of accumulation proceed, capital increasingly transforms dominated living labor into objectified dead labor. Capital develops a huge mass of means of production, but is imprisoned by this mass' status as objectified dead labor. Like a emotionally immature child prodigy or a psychotic genius (sorry, can't think of more apt metaphors), capital's own deficiencies prevent it from realizing its highest possibilties. FROP-engendered crisis and social revolution is thus about realizing those abundant potentialities that capital itself can't realize. It seems that if one focuses on the FROP as the main theme in Marx's theory of crisis then one is bound to postulate that the main theme in Marx's philosophy of history is the progressive development of then productive forces and the social mastery of nature. Even though it is capital's domination of living labor which establishes the barrier to capital's ceaseless self-development, this theme of workers' exploitation takes a back seat to the theme of "a huge mass of means of production which cannot be successfully deployed," if one's theory of crisis revolves on the FROP. The "riddle of history solved" is a proletarian uprising which makes possible the rational advance of the productive forces -- this huge mass of science and technology (so clearly revealed by phrases such as the TCC) bottled up by capital's own barriers can now be released. The historical irony is that it is the proletariat's mission not so much to liberate itself but to liberate dead labor.
I have long been skeptical of Frankfurtian-type claims that Marx's discourse is riddled w/instrumental-rationalism or Prometheanism, or that there is some fundamental break between an early humanist Marx and a late "economistic" Marx. _Capital_ seems to me to be Hegel stood on his head as much as the _Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts_ or _The German Ideology_. But it does seem to me that to the extent that one highlights the FROP dimension of Marx's theory of crisis, one also highlights the telelogical undercurrents in his philosophy of history, as well as his sense of irony.