Charles Brown wrote:
>
> CB; Don't you think he hated German nationalism for the wrong reason ? In
> that context , nationalism represents the rise of bourgeois democracy which
> is progressive relative to feudal aristocratic anti-democracy. N. is an
> anti-democrat, and probably hates the democratic element of nationalism. He
> isn't against German militarism and warmaking, imperialism. Those are things
> he seems to admire, as in Romans and other conquerors. He seems to attack
> German nationalism from the right.
>
No doubt off and on Marx & Engels themselves bought this Doctrine of Progress: that the history of humanity was a wandering but still ultimately straightforward line from "barbarism" to the ultimate goal of the Good Society. Chomsky buys into it implicitly in his statement often quoted by Doug about the U.S. being today incomparably more civilized than it was 50 years ago.
This is to apply to human history something like the _g_ that IQ adherents believed in -- that one can derive a single entity in terms of which one can compare all states of society to each other. Nonsense.
Capitalism raised the _possibility_ of socialism. That in itself (given the existence of capitalism) is a good thing. But possibility isn't even probability of course. And statements about whether socialism is or is not probable are purely speculative and do not contribute either to any understanding of history _or_ to the actual achievement of socialism. So the fact that capitalism raises this nebulous though attractive possibility is all very fine but it doesn't say anything about capitalism being progressive. The term "progressive" itself is pretty empty.
And this same superstition of Progress (with the upper case P) is behind the idiocy of Jim Blaut's opening paragraph to _Eight Eurocentric historians_: "I try to demonstrate that our understanding of the human past will be much improved after we have sifted out and discarded those arguments and theories that falsely attribute historical SUPERIORITY OR PRIORITY. . . ." After such an identification of superiority with priority there is not much that can be said of interest. Capitalism = Progress. Progress is Good. Those who create Capitalism first are therefore superior to those who didn't. (Yoshie and I tried to begin a discussion with Jim on the marxism list on this point, but though we didn't know it he was already seriously ill, so we will never know whether a further exploration would have brought about some modification of this.)
Capitalism brought about bourgeois democracy. That is Good. So both C & BD are good and progressive and naturally lead to socialism.
Well, after a couple centuries only a very small percentage of the human race enjoys even make-believe bourgeois democracy, while the nations that do enjoy it have been the nations that have been responsible directly or indirectly for the bulk of human misery over the last two centuries. It is perhaps the best of a very slimy collection of regimes, but it is pretty slimy and there is no strong evidence that it will lead on to more democracy. If anything the evidence currently is that it was a hothouse plant that can't endure much longer.
The Doctrine of Progress serves mostly to befuddle thinking about how we can deal with the general mess we are in.
Carrol