[lbo-talk] Improvement, not Progress

Shane Mage shmage at pipeline.com
Sun May 9 09:43:40 PDT 2004


I think we should all agree that the USA has made, and is making, great progress--in the Hogarthian, not Bunyanian, sense.

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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