> But one of the barriers to _achieving_ that hinted possibility is the
> bourgeois doctrine of Progress. (Gould points out in his last book that
> Darwin clearly did not believe that "evolution" was "progressive," but being
> a Victorian gentleman "progressive scraps seep into his writing ever so
> often. We must remember that Marx too was a Victorian Gentleman.) And that
> belief in Progress as the structure of history was just as much a product of
> capitalism as the productive forces you cite.
The ontological and philosophical anthropological ideas constitutive of "the dialectic of negativity" in terms of which Marx's "materialsit conception of history" construes "Progress" aren't Victorian unless you identify Victorian with Hegelian.
They are inconsistent with those constitutive of the "materialism" underpinning the Darwinian idea of evolution, but this isn't sufficient to demonstrate the superiority of this materialism over Marx's.
Marx's premises do, however, underpin the distinction between "scientific" and "utopian" socialism, i.e. the difference between "the mere critical analysis of actual facts" and "writing receipts ... for the cook-shops of the future." They make it "the business of science" to bring, by means of such "mere critical analysis," the work of "reason" which is in the thing - in this case "capitalism" - to consciousness as "the rose in the cross of the present."
The role that an analysis of capitalism in terms of "the dialectic of negativity" - "scientific socialism" - was supposed to play in facilitating the transition to socialism was spelled out by Engels in Anti-Duhring. So, if by characterizing the idea of "Progress" as a barrier to achieving socialism you mean that it necessarily implies fatalism, this criticism doesn't apply to Marx's historical materialist conception of it. It's the materialism underpinning Darwin that has this implication since it has no logical space for self-determination and final causation.
"The possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialised production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day by day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties — this possibility is now for the first time here, but it is here. *
"With the seizing of the means of production by society production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organisation. The struggle for individual existence disappears. Then for the first time man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature because he has now become master of his own social organisation. The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face to face with man as laws of nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him. Man’s own social organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history — only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is humanity's leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.
"To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific socialism." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch24.htm
Ted