Capitalism must be judged as both catastrophe and progress simultaneously

Evidence

The topic of the lesson is, of course, the historical development of capitalism itself and the deployment of a specific bourgeois culture. In a well-known passage Marx powerfully urges us to do the impossible, namely, to think this development positively and negatively all at once; to achieve, in other words, a type of thinking that would be capable of grasping the demonstrably baleful features of capitalism along with its extraordinary and liberating dynamism simultaneously within a single thought, and without attenuating any of the force of either judgment. We are somehow to lift our minds to a point at which it is possible to understand that capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst. The lapse from this austere dialectical imperative into the more comfortable stance of the taking of moral positions is inveterate and all too human: still, the urgency of the subject demands that we make at least some effort to think the cultural evolution of late capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 154

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the dialectical imperative that grounds the whole cultural-dominant thesis: thinking capitalism positively and negatively at once.
• XREF: Core to the reader’s goal of judging whether ‘cultural dominant’ is falsifiable — this is the methodological stance required. — connects to: Capitalism simultaneously destroys and expands human potential — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 639; Advanced capitalism needs two contradictory legitimating discourses at once — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 275; Unrestrained capitalist growth is a form of destructive creation requiring humility to balance — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 768