I wasn't commenting on your belief or Chomsky's belief, though. If you actually read my posts (in response to Carrol, Ted, and Grant) in the thread, you'd notice I didn't mention you or Chomsky anywhere. I'm talking about the idea of progress in modern culture in general, of which left-wing culture is a part.
Doug wrote:
>a certain brand of left political temperament requires than
>everything, especially within these borders, be seen as getting
>unambiguously worse.
That is a Marxist variant of the ideology of progress, which goes like this: "As the development of capitalism progresses, it will inevitably come up against its immanent barriers and face a systemic crisis -- the crisis that opens the way for socialist revolution." Much fewer Marxists than before subscribe to it -- perhaps, it's even a minority view among all who draw upon the Marxist tradition today -- but it still has currency, especially in small sects.
Walter Benjamin's thoughts serve as useful criticism of both liberal modernization and Marxist crisis theories: e.g., "Overcoming the concept of 'progress' and overcoming the concept of 'period of decline' are two sides of one and the same thing" (_The Arcades Project_, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 460).
Doug wrote:
>the rest of the entry in Keywords acknowledges the origin of and
>long identification the term "progressive" with left and socialist
>politics).
The point of _Keywords_ and projects like it is to trace the transformation of meanings. In the case of Williams' work in particular, he is interested in mapping out residual, dominant, and emergent meanings of the term "progress" and other keywords of modern ideology. Anyhow, at its origin, the term "progressives" was most strongly associated with liberals, as opposed to conservatives: "From the 1880s the Progressives were a generally Liberal group within municipal politics: 'there were Progressives who were not Liberals but . . . no Liberals who are not Progressives' (Rosebery, 1898)" (_Keywords_, p. 244). The ideology of progress was and remains a perfect match with liberal politics, to which nominally conservative political parties today (of which neo-conservatives are a perfect example) also subscribe, especially when it comes to all-important matters of economic and foreign policies.
As for the term "progress," here's what Williams has to say: "Though based in C18, the full development of the idea of *Progress*, as a law of history ('you can't stop progress'), belongs to the political and industrial revolutions of lC18 and C19. It is interesting that because of the mixed character of these changes *Progress* came to be questioned or opposed not only from conservative or metaphysical positions but also by those who saw different or contradictory movements in history, which made the abstraction of *Progress* as a universal social or historical law merely IDEALIST (q.v.). In C20 *progress* has retained its primary sense of improvement but has an important (as well as an ironic) sense which takes it simply as change: the working out of some tendency, in evident stages, as in the older sense. Any particular *progress* may then be approved or disapproved, on quite different criteria" (_Keywords_. p. 245).
Liza wrote:
>1) Pointing to our triumphs encourages more people to join us. I
>doubt I'd be doing what I now do if I hadn't studied the history of
>social movements and become convinced that they'd accomplished
>something.
Provided one makes clear whose struggles made such gains possible, yes. Let's say we want to claim that gains in decreasing infant mortality, improving nutrition, lengthening life expectancy, etc. are our triumphs. In that case, we can't simply chalk up the gains to progress of time or progress of capitalism as a mode of production, reducing people to passive beneficiaries. We have to _explain_ in what ways class and other struggles in the past led to such improvements. We can't just assert that they are. -- 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/>