Michael is mistaken in thinking that Marx did not write about the relationship between progress and working class consumption - it is pretty much the subject of Capital, especially the first volume.
Coal miners in early nineteenth century England were often worse off than their granparents who worked on farms, but their grandchildren were very much better off - and this much is largely anticipated in Marx's theory of capital accumulation
They were worse off, because, as Marx explains, early capitalist industrial development only knew how to exploit labour absolutely, by extending the working day, or intensifying labour. (You can only say that they were *often* worse off, because the peasant's life is punctuated by extreme disasters, like famines, population clearances and so on).
As Marx explains in Capital, once organised labour succeeding in imposing limits on the working day, capitalists were spurred on to enlarge their profits not by overworking their employees, but by making their labour more productive. In doing so, they made a greater sum of use values available to the working class (which nontheless embodied less exchange value).
The passages in the Grundrisse about the constant excitation of new wants and consequent cultural enlargement of the workers' existence do indeed suggest that the working class could improve its consumption under capital. The corresponding passages in Capital also explain how the worker can get more, but in doing so become yet more of a slave to capital (beating golden chains for himself, is Marx's metaphor).
Not only is this the ABC of Marxism, but is the obvious lesson of the actual course of capitalist development. You would have to be very unlucky to be worse off than your grandparents, given the enlargement in material goods available. There is nothing airy about material progress - we are communicating electronically thanks to it.
--- On Thu, 11/6/08, Michael Smith <mjs at smithbowen.net> wrote:
>
> Perhaps this is a matter of opinion. It's not
> entirely clear to me that coal miners in
> 19th-century England were definitely better
> off, as a group, than their smallholding or
> even tenant-farming great-grandfathers.
>
> Regardless of what either of us may think, though,
> I don't know of any statement by Marx that they
> *were* better off.
>
> Marx, as far as I know, doesn't address this
> question directly and doesn't seem to have been
> very interested in it. The whole thrust of the
> historical parts of the Manifesto, in particular,
> at least as I read it, is about something quite
> different -- namely, the way in which each social
> order hatches or incubates the forces that are
> destined to destroy it. This for me is perhaps
> the deepest and most powerful insight that Marx
> bequesthed us (among many others, of course).
>
> This vision of history seems to me much richer,
> more detailed, clearer-eyed, and dare I say
> more scientific, than what Carrol called the
> "ever-upward" narrative of "progress".
> More
> scientific in the sense that Marx actually shows
> us the *forces* that are at work. The Whig
> version -- the story of steady incremental
> improvement -- has no such dynamical component
> at all, other than a generous gaseous necessity,
> immanent in human nature or the cosmic order,
> for things to be getting better all the time,
> as the song says.
>