Subject: Re: Choas/marx From: Paul Cockshott <wpc-AT-clyder.gn.apc.org> Date: Fri, 31 Mar 95 21:03:32 GMT Ron makes the point that ------------------------ The point I wanted to make was that the notion of "PROGRESS" ( which is so often linked with the passage of time) is questionable. For example are we better then the apes? Is it a reasonable question? Yes we are more complex and powerful but we are also more cruel and irrational. We have great potential but time and time again fail to realise it. We will probably be the only species that knowingly destroys the very environment that allows us to exist. ---------------------- I think Ron is right to point out that progress is in certain senses not a 'good thing', certainly not for those subjected to it. Capitalist industrialisation, can be both progressive and a life of misery for those caught up in it. Similarly in the USSR the elimination of the Kulaks may have been progressive but it must have been pretty grim if you were a Kulak. But for those on the wining side of history, progress is its own criterion of morality. Progress does not have to be judged, it is the the judgement. Ones attitude to progress depends upon whether you think that you are on the winning side. If you think that the working-class is now on the losing side, that capitalism can not be beat, then progress may begin to look a bad idea. I prefer to think that we are just in a short term period of retreat, and that in the end progress is with the side of the poor and oppressed. This may contain a streak of wishfull thinking, but it seems a necessary optimism if one is to built any sort of movement. --- from list marxism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- ------------------
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