[lbo-talk] Trapped in The Present: Part 1 Note on Progress

[Carrol Cox]

The fatuity of the Idea of Progress is a vital part of my attack on
thinking from the perspective of the present. See "Globalization and
Internationalism: How Up-to-date is the Communist Manifesto?"  by
Michael Löwy

Monthly Review November 1998

http://www.monthlyreview.org/1198lowy.htm

A key excerpt


:"In reality, it was Rosa Luxemburg's 1915 "Junius Pamphlet" (The Crisis
of Social Democracy) which was, for the first time, clearly to pose the
alternative socialism or barbarism as the historic choice confronting
the working-class movement and the human species. It was only at that
specific moment that Marxism broke radically with any linear vision of
history and with any illusion of a "guaranteed" future. And it was only
in the writings of Walter Benjamin that would at last be found a
critique in depth, on the basis of historical materialism, of the
progressivist ideologies that disarmed the German and European
working-class movement by drugging it with the illusion that is could
get by merely through "swimming with the current" of history."