So much for Shane's thesis, defended ably by Allen Wood and explicitly advocated by Marx -- to my mind inconsistently, that transhistorical judgments are not possible. Historical materialism is implicitly committed to a transhistorical evaluation history as the progress of freedom.
The consistency with relativization of values to a mode of production can be saved to some extent if we understand the evaluation as being made from within a given epoch under the constraints and influences of its MOP. So we see capitalism as an advance, in terms of freedom, on feudalism or slavery, but wouldn't necessarily expect this judgment to be shared by people (at least ruling class people) in feudal times. But of course we have to judge matters by our own lights. We should judge them by someone else's?
I have an intricate argument that we can make a case that ruling class members of our and previous epochs _ought_ by _their own lights_ acknowledge that MOP in which there is more freedom and less domination are superior. It is based on the historical materialist premise that history does in fact have a direction toiwards increasing freedom in the long run. And of course I accept that historical materailism tells us that the ruling class will NOT agree, even though they should. However, this argument enables us to avoid relativism without abandoining materialism. That si why it is an important argument, if I may say so myself.
Marx's belief in progress does not commit him to the view that progress is inevitable or irreversible, it's just a tendency, think of it on analogy of thye tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Do not confuse the idea that history is (tends to be) progressive with the idea that progress is inevrable.
I realize, of course, that you disagree with Marx's idea that it's good to have increasing material wealth and corresponding opportunities to satisfy more and expanding needs and to enhance freedom by freeing us as much as possible from scarcity and necessary labor. But you should not confuse your own bleak pessimism, based perhaps partly on justify environmental concerns and partly on a strange hatred for modernity, with Marx's promethean optimism. (Which I myself do not fully share.)
--- On Sun, 12/14/08, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Progress? (Was . . . Re: Catholicism, )
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Sunday, December 14, 2008, 9:20 AM
> 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
>
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