>>> Carrol Cox
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
^^^^ CB: We can be sure, the Marxist concept of progress is the bourgeois concept of progress, but _sublated_. That is, preserved and overcome, revolutionized, qualitatively different than the original. It overcomes what is anti-human in it , yet preserves positive contributions that the European bourgeois civilization has made to the development of the human species, our species being.
More substantially we can say for Marxism, progress is the abolition of private property in the basic means of production, the social revolution, following the working class taking state power, by any means necessary , by insurrection as in Russia or Cuba or by elections as in Venezuela or Chile. This progress is not certain , but in fierce contest ( witness the 20th Century). By "progress" , Marxism means _social_ progress, better life for the People as a Whole.
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