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
^^^^ CB: Yes, Engels even put his life on the frontline of the revolutionary war for progress to German bourgeois nationalist democracy in 1848. His notion of progress was not just like anybody's, but like Fredrick Douglass' idea of progress when he said there is no progress without struggle, moral or physical , but struggle. Without a notion of progress, Marx and Engels wouldn't have known which side to support in the U.S. Civil War. Their concept of progress through the bourgeois mode of production was not uncritical, but they did adopt an optimistic approach that the progressive aspects of capitalism would prevail over the backward aspects, the actual is rational , and all that , Hegelian evolutionism. Sure they knew socialism is not actually inevitable, just a tendency and possibility, but it would be impossible without humans being enthusiastically optimistic about achieving socialism. Marxian optimism is a critical component of effective practical critical activity. Progress must be cheered to happen, and declaring that it "shall be" is a way to raise the revolutionary élan without which it will _not_ happen. Hey just say that this is Marx and Engels demonstrating "will to power" for the working class.
Arise Ye Children of Starvation, Arise Ye Wretched of the Earth, For Justice thunders condemnation ( slave moralizing!) There's a better world in birth ( progress !)
Bourgeois progress has turned out to be one step forward, two steps backward. But what was the position of the German Social Democratic Labor Party or the International at the time N. opposed German nationalism ? Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe N. opposed German nationalism for progressive, uhh, excuse me, philosophically royal reasons.
Misanthropy, melancholy, permeate Carrol's comment and Nietzsche's spirit. Marx and Engels choose "nothing human is alien to me", knowing full well the dangerous potential of the human future in competition with it's really human potential.