Gordon Fitch wrote:
> Mikalac Norman S NSSC:
> > [snip]
> > if eventually socialism overcomes capitalism, it will simply incorporate GM
> > food into its paradigm. no way will socialism turn back the technological
> > clocks.
>
> Is technology clock-like, that is, does it accumulate in a
> purely linear, monotonic manner, like mechanically measured
> time? I doubt it.
One of the hardest perceptions not only for left liberals but for all too many marxists to achieve is the recognition of the utter falsity of the 19th-century bourgeois Idea of Progress -- the assumption, rooted in the early 'amazing' successes of capitalism and supported by puerile versions of Darwinism -- that Progress is certain and that all change is for the better. Most changes are destructive. And it will only be our great-great grandchildren (if capitalism doesn't destroy humanity first) who will have any real grasp of which technological changes were in reality progress and which were merely part of the destructive development of capitalism.
The Idea of Progress was killed intellectually in the Communist Manifesto ("mutual ruin of the contending parties") -- and for the naive even it should have died with the Guns of August.
Carrol