Marx rejected Enlightenment progressivism by treating bourgeois society as class exploitation

Evidence

Neither Marx or Nietzsche, however, shared the Enlightenment view of history as continuous progress. Marx of course saw bourgeois society, not as the actualization of reason, but as the latest version of class exploitation, distinguished chiefly by its technological dynamism and by its nurturing of the proletariat, the social force with the capacity to abolish class society itself (see section 2. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 262

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to how a Marxist critique needs to distinguish itself both from Enlightenment progressivism and from Nietzschean genealogy — useful for situating this book against Jameson’s own later engagements. — connects to: Kierkegaard and Marx rejected Hegel for opposite reasons, individual versus social. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 173; Kierkegaard’s moral universalism is class-bound bourgeois ideology, not genuine universality. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 178
• DEEPTHINKING: The compression of Marx’s whole project into this single sentence — bourgeois society as latest class exploitation, defined by technological dynamism and its own gravedigger — is a dense distillation worth sitting with.