Yoshie quoted:
> Raymond Williams, in his entry on the term "progressive" in
> _Keywords_, says that "In its most general and improving sense it is
> an adjective applied, by themselves, to virtually all proposals of
> all parties. . . . It is certainly significant that nearly all
> political tendencies now wish to be described as *progressive* . . ."
> (245).
Right, and the corollary of this is that there are no longer any real conservatives, in the effective rather than affective sense: the grand alliance of conservatives and liberals which emerged as socialism started to take off, has resulted in a series of rival lib-con hybrids, with natural homes among various strata of the capitalist classes. (The likes of Pat Buchanan and Jean-Marie Le Pen may be exceptions to this, although I'm sure one could find an issue or issue on which they were "liberal".)
I think Ted Winslow has hit on something when he alluded to the positivist idealisation of "progress", resulting in a word which now has a tendentious usage. This is not the "progress" in the sense in which Marx used it, i.e. of an immanent, manifold and paradoxical change, encompassing entwined destructive and creative forces, e.g. "the progress of capitalist production". This aspect of Marx has been neglected, especially in the wake of neo-Marxist and post-modern critiques of Marx.
For example, the area that is now the nation state of Papua New Guinea (PNG), until just over a century ago, was a myriad series of cultures with hundreds of languages and intricate subsistence economies, based on perhaps the oldest surviving agricultural practices anywhere. Leftists of neo-Marxist, New Left and postmodern bents go to great lengths to stress and demonstrate the destruction of these previous societies by German, Australian and other colonialism/imperialism. The main agents of this destruction were the establishment of capitalist gold/copper mining, followed by coffee plantations, etc. It's not hard to demonstrate the chaos caused by modernity and the creation of a relative surplus population in PNG: e.g. a TV documentary screened here a few years ago showed a highland mining town, in which the only fast food outlet had a security setup which dwarfed even banks in most parts of the developed world: high walls with razor wire and security gates, armed guards, bulletproof windows for the cashier, etc. TNCs, whose annual turnover is thousands of % the size of PNGs GDP, get away with demonstrable crimes, the usual exploitation of workers and major environmental damage. At the level of the state, the history of PNG since formal independence in 1975 has been marred by secessionism, dependence on foreign aid, corrupt/mutinous state employees, electoral fraud, a constant churning of governments/leaders, none of whom seem any more effective than the last, etc.
And yet the empirical data on the fundamental indicators of human well-being: infant mortality, nutrition, life expectancy, etc also show significant improvement during the same time. Better to have an idea of "progress" which is dialectical and class-conscious --- i.e. multidimensional and encompassing paradox --- rather than discarding the idea of progress altogether, methinks.
regards,
Grant.