Progress toward increased production is itself a bourgeois prejudice

Evidence

Le Bon also made the point that the ideas and culture of a nation were developed not among the mass of a nation but largely among its elite. Between the masses in a country such as Egypt therefore, and those in parts of Europe, the difference in the level of development might not be very great. ‘What most differentiates Europeans from Orientals is that only the former possess an élite of superior men’, he explained. This small phalanx of eminent men found among a highly civilised people ‘constitutes the true incarnation of the forces of a race. To it is due the progress realised in the sciences, the arts, in industry, in a word in all the branches of civilisation.’ As so much of the ethnographic writing of this period was demonstrating, individuals in less civilised communities displayed a great degree of equality among themselves. From this there followed an important conclusion, which helps explain the popularity of Le Bon among writers of a certain class in Egypt. Modern progress must be understood as a movement towards increasing inequality. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 398 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Under existing conditions the gifts of fortune themselves become elements of misfortune. Their quantity, in default of a social subject, operated during the internal economic crises of times past as so-called “surplus production”; today, because of the enthronement of power-groups as that social subject, it produces the international threat of Fascism: progress becomes regression. That the hygienic shop-floor and everything that goes with it, the people’s car or the sportsdrome, leads to an insensitive liquidation of metaphysics, would be irrelevant; but that in the social whole they themselves become a metaphysics, an ideological curtain behind which the real evil is concentrated, is not irrelevant. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 25 (#expands, via linked claim)

I would say that the question of understanding Marx first begins where this curious refraction re-emerges. It is however evident that behind the Marxian concept of productivity, there is a notion which does in fact go far beyond the concept of mere material production. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1327 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Progress was defined as increasing inequality produced by elite minorities — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 398; Progress under capitalism turns into regression and fascism — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 25; Western progress is not self-evidently the best standard for all peoples (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Progress was defined as increasing inequality produced by elite minorities #corroborates (0.85) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 398
• Progress under capitalism turns into regression and fascism #expands (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 25
• Marx’s productivity concept exceeds mere material production. #qualifies (0.78) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1327
• Western progress is not self-evidently the best standard for all peoples #corroborates (0.75)