> 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).
This isn't what is in question in Gould's remark about Darwin's failure to exclude any notion of "progress" from his evolutionary theory. It's "materialism" in the sense I mentioned. Gould has an essay, "Darwin's Delay," in Ever Since Darwin that elaborates this point. The idea that "progress" is inevitable is a different idea. In the sense you seem to mean, you would have to bring in "determinism" of the kind I take it you endorse i.e. see history as the working of wholly deterministic laws that leave no logical space for self-determination.
What is the basis for the judgment that eventually the great majority will judge capitalism to be a bad system and kill it if reason can only be the slave of the passions and so can have nothing to say about what end ought to be achieved by our relations of production?
Ted