Re: [xmca] If all hopes are lost for establishing a more workable social system , then please tell me where A.N.Leontyev has gone wrong with his definition of "Personal Meaning"

Martin,
   
   
  I was really suprised to read that you take the position that "progress is not something that "history posseses in itself. Progress is a story that we tell about history." Surprised for several reasons.
   
  First is the substitution of the word "progress" for "development." The two terms really have diffferent meanings. The development of an embryo, for example, wouldn't really be considered progress. An embryo's development is the unfolding of its own potential, its telos. Also "progress" is clearly something of an ideological term with its own "history", to which you allude when mentioning the "survivors". And I agree that the idea of progress shouldn't be applied to historical processes in any moral or ethical sense. But the Europocentric model of unilineal social evolution that contains this position (ie, as found in "German Ideology" and elsewhere) became problematic for Marx himself and he spent the last part of his life studying the available information on non-European societies. Why hadn't these societies (e.g., pre-Conquest empires such as the Inca in the Andes, South East-Asia, China, etc.) produce similar transitions as occurred in Europe - especially
 the movement from feudal to capitalist?
   
  In which discourse or set of related stories does capitalism represent "progress" over feudalism, or feudalism over slavery? Was capitalism historically inevitabole? That's not clear to me and I'm not sure whether Marx, in 1870, thought so either. American precious metals flowiing into Euope from the 16th century onward enabled the proliferation of money in a way unknown in other parts of the world and perhaps this (in combination with the institution of private property of land, triggered the transition to capitalism in Europe, a mode of production characterized by its dynamic process of expansion (result of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall?) that is often mistakenly called "progress" with non-ecoonomic connotations. But what can't be denied is that capitalism has come to dominate all other modes of production and it has generated social subjects that aim to transform it into a socialism; but it has never generated social subject that aim to transform
 it back into feudalism except maybe the Society for Creative Anachronism
   
  Second, it seems that your claim implies that their is no "story" that can develop a concept of the structure of history (I totally agree "progress" is not such a concept or even part of suh a concept. . This post-modern position seems somewhat at odds with my understanding of your paper. I imagine this is what you are developing in the second part.
   
  Third, when discussing different stages or epochs of human history, Marx distinguished "development" from "maturation" in "The Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy" contains such a clarification. In one passage , referring to the Inca Emprire, he clearly indicates that societies can achieve very high levels of development without transitioning to capitalism in the absence the generalized use of money to mediate exchanges. The generalization of commodity relations.
   
  I can't agree that "history" is simply a story that some social subject tells although it is the word that encompasses a the Aristotelian conception of time as applied to social existence; nevertheless there is simply too much archaelogical and other textual evidence drawn from societies thoughout the world at different times, that reveal the existence regular processes of increasing social differentiation to reduce those processes to "stories" that have no scientific conceptual content.
   
  Paul
   
   
   
   Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu> wrote:
  On 3/1/08 2:37 PM, "Mike Cole" wrote:

> If there
> is cultural evolution, or progress in history, how does one adopt a cultural
> historical, activity perspective that declares thinking to be functional
> systems that include the accumulated
> artifacts of the community without concluding that thinking in, say, a small
> agricultural village high in the Andes just to pick up on Paul's current
> environment, is less complex because
> the range of activities seems limited, the mediational means limited,
> etc.?

I think this is a central conundrum, and I'm trying to sort out my thoughts.

First, I keep having to remind myself that progress is not a characteristic
that history possesses in itself. Progress is a story we tell about history.
At best, it's told by the survivors. At worst, by the victors. There's a
wonderful, horrifying book that offers a people's history, documenting the
'rise' of American civilization on the backs of the indigenous and the
poor... (I've lost the title.)

Second, I think Marx's own account of history was complex and probably
contradictory. (I need to check Hayden White's Metahisory for his reading of
Marx's narratives.) For example, capitalism develops workers' capacities,
albieit in a lop-sided manner, while it exploits them. Capitalism leads to
socialism, indeed it's a necessary step. but in large part this is because
it generates the greatest misery for masses of people, who finally can take
no more. No simple progress here.

Third, it's interesting to compare the chapters in Ape, Primitive, Child
written by Vygotsy with those written by Luria. The former seem to me more
nuanced. Vygotsky writes very evocatively and sensitively about the
psychology of 'primitive' peoples. The richness of their vocabulary, for
example, is lost when their language becomes more abstract.

And according to the notes I was taking when reading this book, "Even in
Luria¹s writing about his expedition [to Uzbekistan] two voices can be
discerned, two distinct and competing conceptualizations of the changes he
observed. Let us begin there." My notes, sadly, stop there! And the book is
not here.

Third, when there are qualitative reognizations, judgments of progress are
no easy matter. Kuhn taught us that paradigms are 'incommensurate': there is
no common measure to judge them by, because each of the criteria is internal
to a paradigm.

I guess that just as physicists have become accustomed to the need to make
assessments such as 'faster' or 'slower' always relative to a frame of
reference, we have to do the same. History may have been progress judged
from the frame of some anglo-saxon white males, but... and the cognition of
a mountain villager may be assessed as embodying important forms of wisdom
from the perspective of people searching for a way to stop damaging the
planet.

Martin

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Received on Mon Mar 3 12:07 PST 2008