Progreso Nacional station
Metrobús · 3 Line 3
Neighbouring stations
- 3Line 3San José de la Escalera Progreso Nacional Tres Anegas
The story behind the icon
The station icon represents the silhouette of the Mexican Republic inside a gearwheel. The station takes its name from being located in the Progreso Nacional neighbourhood. The idea of progress is a concept indicating that there is a direction of improvement in the human condition.
From the crisis of the European conscience in the late seventeenth century and the Enlightenment of the eighteenth, it became a commonplace expressing the dominant ideology of capitalism and modern science. The second half of the nineteenth century is the optimistic moment of its triumph, with the technical advances of the Industrial Revolution and European imperialism extending its idea of civilisation to every corner of the world. Its clearest expression is the positivism of Auguste Comte, although forerunners can be found; not until after the First World War would the idea of progress truly be called into question, including the change of scientific paradigm, the avant-gardes in art and the wholesale rethinking of the economic, social and political order implied by the Soviet Revolution, the Crisis of 1929 and Fascism.
From a philosophical and sociological standpoint the concept of progress is open to different interpretations. Scholars of the period in which capitalism was developing progressively acknowledged progress and sought to give it a rational interpretation; scholars of the period of capitalism's crisis either confine the concept of progress within the limits of isolated cultures and civilisations, or do not admit the very possibility of studying progress in history. They attempt to explain regression through the action of purely subjective factors.
Politically, the idea of progress has been identified since the French Revolution with the left and with transformation, the defenders of the Ancien Régime being the right and reaction. The terms progressive and progressivism are likewise opposed to conservative and conservatism. The emergence of the organised labour movement from the mid-nineteenth century produces a shift in political position that turns the left into the right and the revolutionaries — the bourgeoisie, now holding social and political power — into conservatives.