Michael Smith wrote:
>
>
> > --- On Wed, 11/5/08, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > >
> > > Don't you think Marx believed in progress in some
> > > sense?
>
> The "some sense" is an important qualification. He doesn't
> seem to have believed in the kind of Whig idea of linear
> progress -- each stage an "improvement" on the last --
> that most of our contemporary Pwogwessives continue
> to hold.
This is the core. Marx was born in the 19th-c, and he was a mere homo-sapiens, not the Son of God. Hence one can find in his works passages to accept the 195h-c religion of Ever Upward. But it is antipathetic to the whole thrust of his thought. Ditto, incidentally, DArwin. Believers in the Religion of Progress should really read Gould's Structure of Evolutionary Thought, in which he treats this quite thoughtfully, establishing that Darwin's Theory (a) was NOT based on or call for a doctrine of progress and (b) Darwin often slipped.
Aside from the constant (and for the most part destructive) revolutionizing of production endemic to capitalism, the growth in science and technology (intertwined with but not identical with capitalism) from the 16th century on of course contributed to the apparent reality of Progress.
Carrol