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Title: Throwing Stones at Progress
Author: Miguel Amorós
Date: October 16, 2011
Language: en
Topics: capitalism, industry, disaster, philosophy, technology
Source: Retrieved on 11th May 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/throwing-stones-progress-miguel-amor%C3%B3s
Notes: Completed on October 16, 2011 for the third issue of the journal, Raíces. Translated in December 2014 from a copy of the Spanish original text obtained from the author.

Miguel Amorós

Throwing Stones at Progress

“What we had set out to do was nothing less than to explain why

humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new

kind of barbarism.”

(Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment)

These days it is a commonplace for the ruling class and its complacent

servants to refer to progress to justify every act of social aggression

that ensues from an economic or political-economic operation. To the

degree that it favors the increasingly more aggressive interests of the

autonomous economy, society is for the latter the offspring of this

progress; to the degree, however, that interests that are opposed to

this aggression make themselves felt, society, or at least that part of

society that is represented by those interests, is contrary to progress,

and is implicated in the most grotesque folly, since everyone knows that

you cannot stand in the way of progress. We thus behold the paradoxical

fact that goals that were previously associated with the idea of

progress—such as individual autonomy or the humanization of Nature, for

example—now turn out to be viewed as contrary to progress; we are told,

with regard to the actions of our leaders, the ongoing destruction of

the environment, and the increasing social dependence and control that

are characteristic of each stage of progress, that is, concerning every

qualitative extension of the interests of the ruling class, that they

are the price that has to be paid by society for the alleged benefits

that accrue from progress. Progress, therefore, as it is now understood,

means nothing but the continuous advance of the processes of the

concentration of power of the class that makes the decisions about the

economy, the abundance of scientific, technological and economic means

that expand the economy, and the generalization of the social activities

that, like professional politics, wage labor and the industrial leisure

that disseminate and entrench the conformism and submission of

individuals to the dictates of the market.

Contrary to Voltaire’s view, the most educated mortals have not proven

to be less inhuman. Instead, civilization has revealed itself to be a

state of rationalized brutality. Material well being does not favor

moral elevation, nor is instrumental knowledge conducive to liberty. An

eternal present does not lead to a healthy state of mind; any

psychiatrist can confirm the fact that the loss of experience and memory

produce disturbances of identity. However much it is said that the

future of adaptation will be better than the uncontrolled past—that the

obscurantist before is inferior to the rational after—in view of the

results it can be said that this kind of progress does not educate, but

domesticates; it is not morally uplifting, but rather atrophies the

feelings; it does not make us healthy, but adapts us to the condition of

illness. There is no direct relation between civilization and personal

realization. Indeed, as the processes of conditioning progress,

consciousness recedes, and atomization gains ground. Science is

discovered to be a superstition, the faith in technological inventions

is revealed to be naive, public education proves to be the

institutionalization of ignorance. All of them are instruments in the

service of what exists. Society, instead of rising towards a greater

humanization, sinks into a barbarism of a new type that is still called

progress; it is devolving towards an ideal form of techno-economic rule.

Economic growth, which is real progress, has priority over every other

consideration, and its rising power corresponds with the disappearance

of liberties and the paralysis of all human faculties. Progress is

nothing but economic development, subjecting all of society to the laws

of the market, to the requirements of technology, and to the ordering of

urban planning; progress is destruction of the territory, scientific

fetishism, cultural degradation, unlimited growth of the administrative

and political bureaucracy, and the rule of economic and financial

corporations. The word progress in the sense that it is currently used

transcends the division between leaders and led, between oppressors and

oppressed, between managers and subordinates, between actors and

spectators, which corresponds to the prevailing social relation, in

order to conceal the fact that its tendency, proclaimed to be beneficial

for all, is not at all beneficial except for the members of the usurping

class. The language of science and technology—that of progress—is the

language of order. What is defined as modernization, well being and

freedom, is nothing but artificialization, consumerism and partocracy

[party-ocracy]. Progress is all this and much more. It is that car that

you have to climb into to go anywhere. It is the alibi of an unjust

order, a password that opens all doors, a slogan of the executives and

politicians, a myth of the dominant ideology obtained by degrading a key

concept of the bourgeoisie of the revolutionary period that was once

used against the religious and traditionalist arguments of the Ancien

Régime. It is an axiom of the status quo, a cornerstone of the

mystifying doctrine of power.

To go back to its origins, the modern idea of progress is derived from

the secularization of a Christian concept of history, that of Saint

Augustine and Paulus Orosius. For, in effect, it is ecumenism, the idea

of linear and divisible time, the concept of the historical necessity of

its forward movement and its culmination, in accordance with a

pre-established plan, in a final state of beatitude, which comprise the

theoretical framework of the idea of progress. In language that was

emancipated from religion, Reason replaced divine providence, and

earthly happiness took the place of the salvation of souls. History was

no longer the stage for the confrontation between Good and Evil, but the

scene where the struggle between Reason and Unreason was fought. In any

event, the historical function that would be played by the idea of

progress and the forces that it would mobilize were very different

matters in the Augustinian world than in absolutist Europe. We can

therefore say that the advocacy of progress, well-nourished by the

Enlightenment, made its debut in the speech of Turgot at the Sorbonne on

December 11, 1750, the first formulation of the state of mind of an

enlightened oligarchy of Royal functionaries, which, having become the

nucleus of a rising class, the bourgeoisie, felt that it was fully

prepared to wield power in the name of all of society by sharing that

power with the Monarchy, or if the correlation of forces were to permit

it, by seizing it from the Monarchy. The most lucid minds of the era saw

in the French Revolution an unequivocal sign of progress. The idea of

the gradual and steady march of the human species from the lowest levels

of animality to a maximum state of humanization, thanks to scientific

development (Francis Bacon, William Godwin), and thanks to the wealth of

nations (the physiocrats, Adam Smith) and to universal education

(Condorcet), then constituted one of the pillars of modern thought. For

the Encyclopedist philosophers or their like-minded contemporaries,

humanity advanced by obligatory stages towards a greater perfection. As

time passed and liberation from the shackles of myth, custom and

religion allowed people to see the world with sober eyes, conditions

would get better. Knowledge and power were one and the same. The

perfectibility of human reason was infinite (Fontanelle). Each

successive generation approached closer to the higher level of replete

happiness, as knowledge, industrial means and capital accumulated.

Equality and freedom would be a necessary consequence of the progress of

Reason and prosperity, of the harmonious or revolutionary passage from

darkness to light and from poverty to abundance. The old, testimony to

the past, must yield to the new that, pregnant with the future, was

fighting to impose itself. Such was the power of its impulse that

freedom would come automatically, without hardly any resistance. The

past ceased to have a memorable and exemplary character. Some people

were even capable of thinking that the history of the human species

consisted in the execution of a secret plan laid down by Nature, whose

program for implementation was contained in the rights of citizens and

whose advance guard was the constitutional struggles of that time,

within which one could descry the supreme historical end, the

consolatory future in which men (and women) would freely develop all

their qualities and would fulfill their destiny, which was progress

itself.

History therefore underwent a process in which it came to be conceived

as an objective and ineluctable ascent of the human being towards

superior goals. By uncovering the telos of history, its rational

intention, paradise was brought down from heaven in order to inhabit the

real world, leaving the other world in the attic. A marked distinction

arose between those who came to be called savages and the civilized. The

primitive Golden Age was situated in the misty origins of a “lawless”

humanity, the kingdom of the arbitrary and the animal, of crude

simplicity and coarse backwardness, of “unconscious freedom” (Kant) and

of the war of all against all (Hobbes), that would be abolished by a

contract that implied submission to a consensual legal power exercised

by a modern State. Under the protective umbrella of the latter the

civilized engaged in never ending efforts to subjugate Nature by means

of study and work. At first the happy and egalitarian society of the

savages was used as a weapon of Reason, demonstrating the natural rather

than divine origin of society and the State while at the same time

shedding light on the contrasts between a society corrupted by privilege

and religion and a society governed by natural law. These same

arguments, however, were subsequently employed by those who, from a

perspective informed by pessimism and mysticism, questioned the

blessings of progress, especially by the Romantics, the first critics of

bourgeois society, for whom the dreams of Reason had given birth to

monsters. In order to refute these challenges, German idealism arose,

which embraced ancient and modern, critics and apologists, in a single

philosophy of history, as moments of the development of the Spirit in

time, and likewise of freedom, which is its essence: “Universal History

exhibits the gradation in the development of that principle whose

substantial purport is the consciousness of Freedom” (Hegel), the

consciousness from which the “peoples without a history” are excluded,

that is, the peoples without a State, without modernity, without

capitalism. The philosophy of history did have the merit, however, of

addressing the bourgeois revolutionary movement and translating it into

concepts, only to be expressed in its ultimate conclusion, the

consecration of the present. In the words of Nietzsche, the great

vanquisher of modern progress: “… for Hegel the highest and final stage

of the world-process came together in his own Berlin existence.… he has

implanted in a generation leavened throughout by him the worship of the

‘power of History’, that practically turns every moment into a sheer

gaping at success, into an idolatry of the actual…. But the man who has

once learnt to crook the knee and bow the head before the power of

History, nods ‘yes’ at last, like a Chinese doll, to every power,

whether it be a government or a public opinion or a numerical

majority….” It was precisely for the purpose of eliminating the

contradiction implied by defining the failure of rationalism (and the

post-revolutionary wave of defeat and demoralization) as a moment of its

triumph that positivism arose, which laid claim to the leadership of the

scientists and “industrialists”. Comte, by dividing the history of

humanity into three stages (theological, metaphysical and positive or

scientific), inaugurated a custom that spread to every aspect of

culture, transforming the 19^(th) century into the era of models based

on stages. Bachofen, for example (hetaerism, matriarchy, patriarchy);

Hegel (despotism, democracy or aristocracy, monarchy); Morgan and Engels

(savagery, barbarism, civilization); and Marx (ancient, feudal and

capitalist modes of production). Finally, the Theory of Evolution, by

taking the concept of progress from history and inscribing it in Nature,

provided the solid foundations that the idea had previously lacked, and

made it possible for progress to become a popular catchphrase. For

Darwin, because man descended from “a lower creature”, one without the

ability to reason, it is undoubtedly also the case that the intellectual

and moral faculties of the civilized must be tremendously more developed

than those of “primitives”, since the latter had no laws, no leaders

and, worst of all, no God. Hegel, Comte and Darwin, each in his own way,

supplied rationalist thought with the crucial arguments that propelled

the idea of progress at the end of the 19^(th) century to the status of

an indisputable dogma of bourgeois society and transformed it into the

fetish of a new popular religion based on productivism and the

parliamentary forms of bourgeois government. The bourgeoisie celebrated

universal expositions and issued a constant stream of proclamations

regarding the advent of the age of steel, the age of oil, the age of

electricity, the atomic age … as progressive milestones of its absolute

rule.

Embodied in factories, progress not only multiplied the powers of

material production but also, by destroying all the rules that had

previously held sway over the world of labor, gave rise to unprecedented

forms of exploitation and misery, becoming an agent of a revolution that

was as much social as industrial. This progress produced not only

commodities, but also the workers movement itself. The first

manifestations of the proletariat were therefore certainly not in favor

of progress, since the incomplete liquidation of the Ancien Régime by

the industrial and landowning bourgeoisie, by establishing a new system

of property and manufacturing production that altered traditional forms

of life and generated extreme misery, was fought against with arson,

sabotage and the destruction of machines; they were often led by skilled

workers, and were repressed with great thoroughness. The exploited

classes never willingly accepted the new technical innovations, since

they knew that “every development in the means of new productive forces

is at the same time a weapon against the workers” (Marx), but when they

came to believe that the problem was not caused so much by the machines

as by their private ownership, they concluded that the solution depended

on a general expropriation of the means of production, in such a way as

to use them for the benefit of all. This solution implied an industrial

communism in which machines would serve society, rather than the other

way around. Today we can say that it is not that easy and that the

nature of machinery and production are not neutral, and that the

domination of Nature, even if it is carried out collectively, engenders

even worse imbalances and miseries. When the first working class

socialist and anarchist theories were formulated, however, the project

of creating a new world by means of the appropriation and administration

of the means of production was the most realistic option. If a mistake

was made, it was rather that of believing that the bourgeoisie had

become an obstacle to the development of the forces of production, that

is, to progress, which was now represented by the greatest productive

force, the proletariat. The workers movement fell under the spell of the

ideology of progress, even more than the bourgeoisie, and became largely

reformist, as more and more of its members became convinced that, given

scientific and technological advances, exploitation might be reduced in

intensity and, in the political framework of bourgeois democracy, the

workers organizations might be able to establish, gradually and without

revolutionary disorders, a socialist order, which would have been

nothing but a State-, trade union-, or party-capitalism. The

revolutionary option could not have led to any other conclusion.

“Against this enterprise of planned desolation whose explicit program is

the production of an unusable world, revolutionaries find themselves in

the novel situation of having to fight in defense of the present in

order to keep all the other possibilities of changing it open—beginning

of course with the very possibility of safeguarding the minimal

conditions for the survival of the species—which are the same

possibilities that the dominant society is endeavoring to obstruct by

means of its attempt to irrevocably reduce history to the extended

reproduction of the past and by trying to reduce the future to the

management of the wastes of the present.”

(Encyclopédie des Nuisances, “Preliminary Discourse”)

The two world wars, the totalitarian and genocidal regimes, the failure

of the Russian and Spanish Revolutions, the arms race, the concentration

of power, and the rise of mass culture, by transforming barbarism into a

fact of everyday life, shattered the foundations of the theory of

progress. Once all the obstacles and disorders had been cleared away,

and once the horror caused by the massacres had dissipated, however, one

could once again speak of well being and democracy as if they had

prevailed all along. Capitalism, thanks to technology, developed the

productive forces to inconceivable extremes, corrupting and destroying

the workers milieu in the process, since the increase in the capacity

for production did not create the conditions for a more just and

egalitarian world, but simply augmented the power of the

political-economic apparatus and institutionalized the mediations

against which the proletarians were literally impotent. The gap between

those who make the decisions and those who obey them has multiplied

twenty-fold, widening with the expanding pace of global commerce, which

is the only ecumene. Reason, by dominating Nature, that is, by serving

capital, is transmuted into Unreason, the domain of the owning class.

The seeds of the regression that lay dormant from the beginning were

manifested everywhere: irrationality ruled the world. History did not

reflect any pre-established plan, nor did freedom flourish within it in

order to achieve ever greater heights. Nothing that took place,

beginning with History itself, was necessary, but merely possible, among

many other possible, and most likely better outcomes. History occurred

without a subject and, as a corollary, revolutions were no longer

unavoidable even when favorable conditions beckoned, and furthermore,

compared to the number of disasters, such favorable conditions were few

and far between. Reflecting upon the historical process as an

accumulation of catastrophes, the past is cut off from the more

effectively equipped technological present, but not enough to assure the

future, which is becoming increasingly more uncertain with the

decrepitude and the horror that lies just around the corner. The present

is the wreckage of the past destroyed, and the future is the present

that is to be destroyed. Science reaffirmed the prevailing state of

affairs and its conformist language was that of the experts and

mercenaries in the pay of power. Every new discovery and every new

invention, applied in accordance with the acquisition of private profits

and the needs of hierarchical and centralized domination, by no means

represented a step towards happiness, but implied a higher degree of

submission. The perfectibility of the species was cast into doubt in the

face of the calamitous results of the technological invasion of life and

the massive spread of instrumentalized teaching; nothing seemed to

suggest that the human being was better than before, since instead of

possessing a more highly developed moral consciousness, he is still

morally degraded, with neither dignity nor memory. He might experience

equality with his dehumanized fellow men but only in isolation: his

relations, rather than having been liquidated, have been vaporized. The

meaning of his activity escaped his understanding, producing what

Günther Anders called “a disjunction between man as a being who produces

and the man who tries to understand his productive activity”. He lives

in an objectively depraved world, which provides him with a kind of

excuse, as it were, for not feeling partially responsible for its

depravity; he has become so accustomed to it that he has ceased to even

notice it and participates in it with indifference, if not with

enthusiasm. In this portrait of desolation the lie has become the world,

which is why it is no longer necessary to lie because words always

express something different from their original meaning. They are no

longer bearers of meaning, but pure signs lacking their own meaning that

forge empty and repetitive stereotypes. With a handful of such

stereotypes—well being, social rights, citizenship, development,

sustainability—the idea of progress was rehabilitated.

In the second half of the 20^(th) century so-called progress arrived at

the culmination of its destructive career that began with the demolition

of individuality and the massacres of the world wars, by destroying the

material environment upon which social existence is based. The

subjection of needs and desires to capitalist imperatives promoted

economic growth—progress—to the role of the main arbiter of State policy

and it therefore became the general normative standard for social life.

The toxic consequences of developmentalism were only really clearly felt

when the principal productive force, the technocracy, by merging with

politics and finance, became the principal destructive force. From that

point on, the technological domination of Nature, including human

nature, was transformed into planned extermination. The destruction of

arable land, coastlines, rivers and mountains, the increasing production

of solid waste, the wasteful use of energy, social anomie and wars, the

population explosion and famines, pollution and the depletion of

resources, are making the planet an ever less habitable place, and are

revealing progress to be a barbarous tailspin towards annihilation. We

are making more progress today than ever before, our leaders tell us,

and yet the prospect of the end has never before been so near, or

dehumanization so present. Every leap forward is an act of war against

the territory and its inhabitants, and all that remains to be seen is

how far we are from reaching a point where the catastrophe will be

irreversible, the moment when contemporary society will begin to

collapse. The rebels against the progressive project of planned

destruction find themselves obliged to not only recover the not yet

forgotten knowledge of the past, but also to defend what is left of the

present that can be used for their benefit, with the goal of

guaranteeing from the start certain real possibilities of survival,

keeping the door open for the option of change in the direction of a

deindustrialized, demotorized and deurbanized society, a society in

perfect symbiosis with Nature. We have to finally break with the idea of

progress: human beings are neither the central goal of “creation” nor

the apex of evolution. We are a form of life that must rediscover our

lost harmony with other forms of life, and integrate ourselves totally

into their environment. No cultural formation is superior to or less

“primitive” than any other. Civilized society was only the product of

chance, which might very well not have followed the course that it did,

as was the case outside of Europe, thus allowing traditional society,

the kind of society that modern people call barbarous, to offer better

conditions for freedom than the conditions inflicted upon us today. We

must not, however, renounce the intelligence, the knowledge and the art

that have been bequeathed to us by preceding generations, insofar as

these products of immense human efforts are also our heritage, which we

can use to understand and beautify the world. We are part of a whole

that must be preserved, but by using Reason, not the Reason of the

markets, but the Reason that comes from an open-hearted Reason that is

born within a free and well balanced society, and which transforms the

social question into the natural question. We already have enough

irrationality and primitivism. History still exists, a history that is

nothing but the history of oppression; the history that is to come, when

this one comes to an end, if it does come to an end, will be the history

of the peoples without history, that is, without class distinctions and

without a State.