Somebody: No, progress, without quotes, is freedom from necessity.
The doctrine of Progress is false regardless of how "progaress" is defined. It is grounded in (a) the first flush of the French Revolution (Condorcet) and (b) apparent technological progress of the 19th-c _combined_ with the triumphfs of Brisish imperialism during that century. It is summed up in Kipling's wonderful and wonderfully vile poem, The White Man's Burden. And I want to emphasize that even technological progress is a pure illusion. Technology cannot be separataed from _all_ of its consequences both in the short and long run. That is crucial to recognize in order to dismiss the daydreams of those who believe the eventual appearance of an environmentally unharmful source of energy. It is not going to happen. Humanity at some point in the future will have to _reduce_ its uses of energy and cut down on its industrial resources. Those who think otherwise are simply repeatiang in disguised form the slogan attribauted to Louis XV, "After me the deluge."
Somebody is still partly right. We do have to make the political changes that will make it possible to make the needed decisions on the use of energy. Ian is right about the slipperiness of the concept of freedom, but some escape from the domination of the fuiture generated by capitalism is necessary for any rational decision procesds. Capitalist must operate like capitalists. Human activity must, under capitalism, be related to other human activity through the relation of things. We don't need Marx to see commodity fetishism in action.. Consider this thoguth experiment. You are in a department store, with X to spend on some luxury product or products. You pause before a counter on which there are two luxury widdgets, Widget A at $10 each (manufactured in Wichita) and Widget B at at $50 each (manufactured in New Delhi). The living activiaty of workers in Wichita is brought into relationship with the living activity of the workers in New Delhi! Your decision on spending your $50 will make the living activity, the very humanity, of one set of workers worthless, while giving worth to the other set. Intention is irrelevant. Morality is irrelevant. Psychooogy is irrelevant. Your free choice, a compupsory free choice, will give life to one set of workers, death to the other! And this remains the case whatever you think of Marx's theory of value. It remains the same whether capitalists or workers own the factories in New Delhi and Wichita. It remains the same whether the governments of India and the U.S. are democracies or despotisms. No one is free - and though we cannot define that term, we have to assume it as our goal. Just as though we cannot define socialism and do not know whether it is possible or not we still have to define it as our goal or nothing we do makes any sense.
Carrol
P.S. We don't nee Marx to see this only because Marx made it possible to see it without him.
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