[lbo-talk] Improvement, not Progress

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Sun May 9 09:20:11 PDT 2004


Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:


>What should be also questioned is the idea that, given time, things
>get better, inevitably and automatically, as the result of dialectic
>of history.

And who, exactly, believes that? Not me, not Chomsky, and probably very few members of this list. "Progress" - in the sense of things moving towards the kind of society most of us aspire to - happens because of social movements. That task, as any Marxist schoolchild knows, is aided by the social and material developments that come with capitalism. But it doesn't happen spontaneously - people like us have to make it happen. And our predecessors have. Stuff like women's suffrage and the weekend, you know?

But I suppose you & Carrol are busy with that great educational campaign that Carrol announced to another list a couple of years ago, a campaign that looks more like contrariness than enlightenment.

Doug



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