Progressivism and the History of Communist Thought

 Our 1776 Moment: Either a Liberal or Progressive America › American Greatness)   

. . ."The ideology of progressivism is now predominant in contemporary American left-wing politics. A symptom of our “1776 Moment” is that the Democrats, once stalwart liberals, have become progressives, which means, in fact, they have become socialists. Progressivism’s origins are found in the thought of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marx and Engels argued that as technology changed so too did the economic means of production. The means of production creates specific economic classes. In each epoch—slavery, feudalism, and capitalism—the classes were perpetually and dialectically opposed to one another. 

"Under capitalism, the bourgeoisie, or the middle class, owned the means of production and exploited the proletariat, the working class, by extracting surplus value from their labor. For Marx and Engels, the capitalists would always strive to maximize surplus value, which causes accumulation of capital and ever-greater exploitation of the working class, until ultimately the working class overthrows the capitalists. This would then result in the common ownership of the means of production, and thus class would disappear, resulting in communism, the abolition of private property, and the end of alienation. Under communism, the state would no longer be necessary and would wither away. 

"Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin argued that imperialism allowed the capitalists to extract surplus value from colonial peoples. This transfer of exploitation permitted modest improvements in the conditions of the working class in the developed states like Great Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, forestalling alienation and thus delaying the communist revolution. The responsibility of the international communist movement was to increase revolutionary consciousness among the working class and provoke revolution by seizing control of the state—that is revolution from above via the Communist Party versus a revolution from below driven by the working class as Marx and Engels envisioned. In order for the dictatorship of the proletariat to come to power, there must be a hard core of professional revolutionaries—a revolutionary elite—to advance communism through a centralized, organized, stable, and disciplined cadre, controlled by one man, or at most a small number of men, while providing leadership, instruction, and tutelage for the workers.". . .