Progress and the Proletariat: On the Dynamics of Social Revolution

Communism has been the ideology of the industrial proletariat. The industrial proletariat is technologically obsolete.

History and Historical Dialectic Our motto is the basic fact behind the travail of Eastern Europe today. The matrix comes straight out of Marx. In essence, it is the worldwide development from agrarian to manufacturing and most recently to technological economy. Marx himself witnessed only two of these three stages, but his analysis is applicable to all of them. Each stage contains within itself a dialectic of the primary and marginal components of the productive process. Within the agrarian stage, it is the dialectic of the tiller of the land and the land owner/ manager. In the manufacturing stage, it is the familiar dialectic of the industrial proletariat and the bourgeois administrator. In the technological stage, it is the dialectic of the technician on all skill levels, geared and oriented primarily to the technological productive process, and of the yet unnamed class of men whose basic orientation is humane and social rather than technological and productive.

Each class generates its characteristic ideology and life-st...