andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> (Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
> mi retrovai per una selva oscura,
> che la diritta via era smarrita.)
Dante was on a _path_, with a beginning and an end (from birth to heaven or hell), a clearly laid-out path. Hence it made sense for him to contrast that path with a dark wood in which one could not tell one's way. In our terms, history had a definite logic, and by grasping that logic, a logic which dismisses contingency as trivial, or even non-existent, one can determine the one correct path to a known future.
This is the point I did not take up in my response to Marv Gandall, but argued my immediate concern in terms of his premises. But if feudalism does _not_ necessarily follow slave society, and if capitalism does _not_, necessarily follow feudalism; if it could just as easily been otherwise except for contingency, then we are, necessarily, in a selva obscura. We didn't lose our way. That is the human condition rather than an error. And after all, it is only because of a rather huge contingency that we are here at all instead of dinosaurs: that asteroid that crashed into the earth many millions of years ago.
What gives history a logic? I don't see it. And it seems to me that those who claim (explicitly or implicitly) that history has a logic to provide evidence for that odd state of affairs.
This at any rate is what I assume Marx had in mind when he affirmed we make our own history (who or what else can) but do not make it under conditions of our own choosing. Perhaps he did not ealize how deeply Condorcet's fanatasy had buried itself in the capitalist mind.
Carrol