Does history move toward the better?
On the axis: Tradition and transformation · the course of history
Progressivism assumes change tends toward the better, but does history have a direction, or is "progress" sometimes another name for a loss?
Justification
Marx calls not for gradual reform but for a revolutionary overturning of the social order: the proletariat must overthrow the bourgeois state and abolish existing relations of production: a radical , hostile to any conservation of the established order.
The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848
Manifesto of the Communist Party, conclusion · Theses on Feuerbach, XI (changing the world)
Justification
If one seeks the engine of history, it is neither Providence nor the march of ideas that must be questioned but a contradiction internal to societies: the productive forces that men develop eventually clash with the inherited relations of production, and this collision, lived as class struggle, carries one mode of production over into the next. Marx draws from this a from feudalism through capitalism to communism, guaranteed by no design but extracted from the analysis of material conditions, which sets him apart both from 's theodicy of history and from providential narratives: hence a strongly directional reading, with no transcendent teleology.
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848
Manifesto of the Communist Party, ch. 1 · Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)
Anchors: Condorcet · Marx
leads to: The meaning of history