Miguel Afonso Caetano<p>"Rahel Jaeggi has convincingly argued that progress can only be understood as a form of social change. To my knowledge, that’s a unique and urgently needed position within the contemporary debate, because it is mostly fixated on the normative justification of progress. Even decolonial authors such as Amy Allen ‘focus […] on the idea of normative or moral-political progress’ (Allen 2016: 10). Thus, they tend to overlook that progress is a form of social change. But questions can also be addressed about how Jaeggi understands progress as social change. For Jaeggi, at the end of the day, progress seems to be measured by whether a form of life proves to be ‘open’ or ‘rational’ (135) in the face of problems. If we say that society just wasn’t open enough to make progress, then we seem to be assuming another – albeit highly abstract – idea of progress of history. From a Marxist perspective, this ignores that progress itself is socially conditioned. In The Poverty of Philosophy Marx writes: ‘[n]o antagonism, no progress. This is the law that civilisation has followed up to our days. Till now the productive forces have been developed by virtue of this system of class antagonisms.’ (Marx 2010a: 132) Materialistically, progress or regression result from shifting relations of domination. Therefore, the two categories indicate certain directions of social change. Accordingly, progress is made by those classes, groups (or forms of life) who enforce their position in society. Consequently, progress is never a generalised movement of history, but emerges from the always already contradictory development of social relations."</p><p><a href="https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/22197_progress-and-regression-by-rahel-jaeggi-reviewed-by-leon-switala/" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">marxandphilosophy.org.uk/revie</span><span class="invisible">ws/22197_progress-and-regression-by-rahel-jaeggi-reviewed-by-leon-switala/</span></a></p><p><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/CriticalTheory" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>CriticalTheory</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Philosophy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Philosophy</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Marxism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Marxism</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Marx" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Marx</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Progress" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Progress</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/SocialChange" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>SocialChange</span></a></p>