Barack Obama’s latest campaign video totes what many believe will be the 2012 slogan: Forward. Remember, another recent Obama video was entitled “The Road We’ve Traveled”. It is awfully similar to a classic progressive book entitled “The Road We Are Traveling”, written in 1942 by Stuart Chase who admired the “planned” economy of the Soviet Union and has been credited for coining the phrase“a new deal”. His book focused on the path that America was on while changing from a republic based on free enterprise and capitalism, to a communist society he called “Political System X”.
Politicizing the Osama Bin Laden killing aside, the real interesting things is the historical significance of the slogan. The gist of the Communist manifesto is that capitalism is just an in-between stage of feudalism and socialism. Workers have to abolish their own status as an exploited class in order to take society forward. Thus, the socialist revolution creates a class-less society giving way to Communism, the ultimate utopia.
The Key here is the term forward. The “Forward!” motto illustrates the idea of Marxism, and radical movements throughout history have used this phrase to symbolize the world moving forward past capitalism and into socialism and communism. Wikipedia explains that “it has been frequently used as a name for socialist, communist and other left-wing newspapers and publications.”
- Vorwaerts (German translation)–Friedrich Engels and Leon Trotsky’s Social Democratic Party of Germany’s newspaper.
- Vorwaerts–bi weekly paper for the Communist League from Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Mikhail Bakunin.
- Vpered (Russian translation)–Communist propaganda newspaper founded by Vladimir Lenin.
- The Great Leap Forward– Mao’s Five Year Plan, where around 40 to 45 million Chinese people were killed.
