>>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.
Ulhas wrote:
>True progress requires a Marxist Leninist vanguard. No vanguard, no
>progress. :-)
Presumably, olde-time Communists thought of themselves -- and the faction of the masses whom they championed -- as "the vanguard" in part because they, too, were wedded to the ideology of progress. Otherwise, the term "vanguard" doesn't make much sense, does it? In _After Liberalism_, Immanuel Wallerstein posits the period 1789-1989 as the period of the triumph and collapse of what he calls "liberalism as the global ideology" whose ethos governed all currents of political thought -- not just self-identified liberals but also supposedly illiberal conservatives and socialists including Marxists. His book may be better titled _After Progressivism_, though, because it marks not so much the demise of liberalism as the waning of faith in progress. Today, faith in progress, be it of capitalist or socialist varieties, is an object of nostalgia, well captured in such films as _O Brother, Where Are Thou?_ (2000) and _Goodbye, Lenin_ (2003).
Grant wrote:
>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".
The word "progress" can be certainly used in a value-neutral sense, in the sense of "a discoverable sequence" as Raymond Williams puts it (_Keywords_, p. 244), but that's not the sense of the word that Carrol and I are questioning here.
As Travis mentioned at <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20040503/010094.html>, what's in question, first of all, is the value-laden idea (as opposed to value-neutral description) of progress "as a law of history" (_Keywords_, p. 245), "in close association with the ideas of CIVILIZATION and IMPROVEMENT" (_Keywords_, p. 244), dependent upon the denial of what Johannes Fabian calls "coeval time": the ideology of progress uses time as one of the "ideologically constructed instruments of power," representing "the relations between the West and its Other . . . not only as difference, but as distance in space _and_ Time" (Johannes Fabian, _Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object_, pp.144-47).
What should be also questioned is the idea that, given time, things get better, inevitably and automatically, as the result of dialectic of history. Walter Benjamin thought that it was disastrous for workers and intellectuals on the left to believe in such an idea, which disarmed them subjectively, especially in a time of grave danger. Benjamin's cautionary tale: "The experience of our generation: capitalism will not die a natural death" (_The Arcades Project_ [X 11a, 3], p. 667). -- Yoshie
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