> Nothing, if with Julio you believe in the
> mytology of Progress; that ever upwards and
> onwards is structured into the nature of
> human hisoty, and that by endless small
> steps we we will endlessly improve.
Carrol says he's had many arguments with me. I wish. We've shared space on these lists for years. But, for the most part, the arguments he mentions happened in his head alone. I could count with my fingers the times Carrol made an effort to reply directly to or engage with one of my posts. This attitude predates the deterioration of his eyesight. So I'd like to ask him now to take the time to skim this post and then comment on it, at least on the point he deems most salient.
With regards to his words above, I can say in all honesty that this caricature of "progress" as a teleological force imposed on human history -- not even a sexy Hegelian Idea that unfolds into human history with some wicked leaps, twists, and turns, but a smooth, boring line "ever upwads and onwards" -- has absolutely *nothing* to do with my views. If Carrol or anybody finds one hint in all I've ever written on these lists to substantiate Carrol's attribution, then I will drop on my knees ipso facto and sheepishly convert to Carrolism.
Of course I believe in *human* progress, because human progress is an incontrovertible *fact*. But human progress is, well, *human*. There's nothing magical about it. It's not linear. And it is not a suprahistorical force predetermining human history. Instead, human progress is historically contingent -- contingent upon what humans do or don't do.
What I mean by human progress is that, built into that collective, purposeful, specifically-human activity we call labor, there is a drive or, in Marx's own words, a (Kantian) *categorical imperative* -- not to passively adapt to the existing environment but -- to transform it into something fitting to our designs. Forethought, the anticipation of outcome, design, consciousness are inherent to human labor.
The basic conditions for this drive resulted from our prior biological evolution. At the outset, it was perhaps simply the sublimated form that the reproductive impulse of all living beings took among our ancestors, but then properly human activities through our pre (written) history and (written) history pushed that drive to higher levels. And as of today, that impulse persists.
This human impulse traverses history. Viewed as a whole, human history has not been the history of passively conforming to existing conditions. Instead, it's been the history of struggling to remake those conditions according to our own designs. It's not been only the history of struggling with nature to extract more and better from it. But also the struggle among humans to reign on our own human-made social conditions. This drive is the heartbeat of history, and like all heartbeats, it has its systole and diastole.
The drive for the productive force of labor to expand has never been guarantee of anything good in history. So, in that sense, I agree with Carrol. Humans are not gods. Humans are only a super tiny subset of the universe, subject to the same physical laws as the rest of the universe. However, as it is the case with other forms of life, human life partially and temporarily reverses the second law of thermodynamics, even if at the cost of dumping a higher entropic output on the rest of the universe for as long as we can. At a cosmic scale, the fate of humans will perhaps turn out to be absolutely irrelevant. But human life operates at other scales as well.
So, human progress doesn't mean that humans are not in a position to self destroy suddenly (or decay gradually). Actually, it means that, if humans are in a position to self destroy, that is precisely because their labor (and that byproduct of human labor, specifically-human consciousness) has acquired a tremendous productive punch and, hence as well, a tremendously scary, *destructive* punch.
Humans have a chance (never the certainty) to avert self destruction and build a society that generalizes the best (critically sifted) conquests of civilization, science, and technology. Furthermore, of necessity (that is, not accidentally, but systematically), the existing conditions produce and foster elements that negate them. Among other things, the existing conditions tend to produce people who -- as a rule -- are better positioned, more interconnected, and more demanding -- less tolerant to the garbage in their lives. That's what labor and production do to people.
As to the size of the progressive steps, they will be small and large.
If Carrol presumes that small steps don't matter, that salvation comes from some accidental, unintended large step, and that nobody can really tell in advance how and why it'll take place, then I disagree. Actually, without small progressive steps, large steps become impossible. Large steps in the direction of human progress are very unlikely to happen spontaneously. They need forethought, preparation, hard work, adaptability, trial and error, small-scale pilot trials, all that. That's why small steps are indispensable.
I can push the argument further and claim that, in some reasonable sense (more tentative, less definitive), there is also progression in the nature of the social structures that humans have built in history.
It is true that these structures remain largely twisted, estranged, ossified, oppressive fruits of human activity. But it is also true that, under parameters that humans can convene through their collective experience, these social structures exhibit a sort of progression. But that would be as much as I'd claim in favor of the notion of historical progress. Again, nothing to do with what Carrol attributes to me.
Finally, with regards to my conceiving human thought as a "toolbox" and my viewing capitalist society as succeptible to human "manipulation" -- I guess could quibble with the terms Carrol uses, but let me not do it. I'll just say, "Guilty as charged!" Yes, I view human thought as instrumental. I mean, of course, at a point, it becomes an end in itself, but it is *ultimately* -- if you look at things from the broadest perspective -- an instrument. In the beginning, there was proto-human activity, basic proto-productive, hand-to-mouth proto-laboral practice, and with it the need to communicate more coherently, to reflect, to think symbolically arose. Consciousness, language, symbolic thought -- imperfect, but perfectable instruments -- emerged as a result of that struggle. That's the way I read the anthropological evidence.
Are the social structures in which humans produce and live susceptible to deliberate human engineering? Will humans ever succeed at engineering their own collective life? I don't know. I guess it depends. What I know for sure is that humans will try and keep trying. Many Carrols will bah-humbug their attempts, but people will keep trying. Less important to me is whether, at some point in the future, people will get things right once and for all.
Marxism, the intellectual fruit of what Marxists collectively produce, is without a hint of shame the theoretical *toolbox* for that deliberate engineering of our social life. It begins by our engineering our way out of the existing conditions, i.e. by engineering our political activity in the here and now. Carrol may not be aware of it, but his objections -- and dealing with them in practice -- are part and parcel of that process by which we are engineering our collective lives.