Carrol Cox <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Pen-l] The fatuity of the Idea of Progress is a vital part of my attack on thinking from the perspective of the present.
See: Michael L?wy, "Globalization and Internationalism: How Up-to-date is the Communist Manifesto?" 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 it could get by merely through "swimming with the current" of history." Carrol ^^^^ CB: Lowy also says in that article: It would be wrong to conclude from all these critical remarks that the Manifesto fails to go beyond the bounds of the "progressivist" philosophy of history inherited from the Enlightenment thinkers and from Hegel. Even while hailing the bourgeoisie as a class that has revolutionized production and society and which has "accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals,"7 Marx and Engels reject any linear vision of history. They continually emphasize that the spectacular progression of the productive forces—more impressive and colossal in bourgeois society than in all past civilizations—is bought at the cost of the degradation of the social condition of the direct producers. This is especially the case with those analyses that take account of the decline—in terms of the quality of life and of labor—which characterizes the condition of the modern worker compared to that of the artisan and even, in certain respects, of the feudal serf: "The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune ... The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class."8 Likewise, in the capitalist system of mechanized industry, the labor process itself becomes "repugnant"—a concept borrowed by the Manifesto from Fourier—it loses all autonomy "and, consequently, all charm for the workman."9 Here we glimpse the outline of an eminently dialectical conception of the historical process, in which certain types of progress—in terms of technology, of industry, of productivity—are accompanied by retrogression in other fields: in terms of social, cultural and ethical life. In this respect as well there is importance in the remark that the bourgeoisie "has resolved personal worth into exchange value" and has left no other bond among human beings "than naked self-interest, than callous `cash payment' (die gefühllose `bahre Zahlung')."10 _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
