The Marxist View of Progress

Engels doesn't hold that in progress as uniform in all instances, but it was rather based on contradictions which are imminent to a given historical situation. Those who bend this theory of progress into an apology for colonialism or some sort of ideological justification for the conquest of pre-capitalist or pre-state societies are engaged in a flat mean of a complex history. But we can neither really be uncritical defenders of a deterministic progress in the abstract nor advocates to return to a time before capitalism and the development of the state.

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