But this kind of technological progress is very different from capitalism’s unique imperatives, its unavoidable compulsion, as a condition of survival, to constantly improve the productivity of labor and to lower its costs, in order to compete and to maximize profit. Yet consequentialism requires us to elide this difference too. They need this elision not just to evade the issue of how capitalism came into being. They also need it to sustain the view that, whatever delays, diversions or setbacks there may be along the way, history is inexorably propelled by a universal and transhistorical drive for technological progress, which will inevitably culminate in socialism