[lbo-talk] Progress? (Was . . . Re: Catholicism, )

[Carrol Cox]

Marx did not (when he was being conscious about it) believe in Progress,
and hence could not have believed that capitalism was Progress -- a
necessary stage in the onward march of humanity. He saw it as _creating
opportunitiesd_, that is all. Otherwise, in its direct effects, it was a
horribly destructive aberration in human history. (The data various
people piled up trying in support of Jim Blaut's Weberian view of
history, offered no support to his thesis, but did establish clearly
that there were other routes to technical advance than through
capitalism. That argument (like Weber's) is grounded in the assumption
that capitalism is merely private property plus markets, and that that
major advances in productivity, markets, etcv equals capitalism, which
is simply not true. Advanced, highly productive, non-capitalist market
non-capitalist can and have existed.

What is distinctive in capitalism is the equalizing of all human
activity to abstract time, meaningless in itself but only real inso far
as it forms a proportionate share of abstract labor as a whole. Culture
under  those conditions is only possible 'outside' the reach of
capitalist relations.

(If I'm able to complete reading Postgone with the clumsy technology
that makes his words visible to me I may be able to rewrite this more
lucidly.)

Carrol