Shane Mage
"To be Greek, one must have no clothes.
To be Medieval, one must have no body.
To be Modern, one must have no soul" (Oscar Wilde)
>Grant wrote:
>
>>>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
>
>* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
>* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/>
>* Calendars of Events in Columbus:
><http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>,
><http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/>
>* Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/>
>* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/>
>* Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio>
>* Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>
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