Excerpt below is from the communist manifesto as translated to english.
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/61/pg61.html
My Comments are in Blue
The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.
But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to Communism.
We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling as to win the battle of democracy.
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.
Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production;
by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.
do we have any economically insufficient and untenable measures?
These measures will of course be different in different countries.
Nevertheless in the most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
Obama supports raising taxes on upper class.
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
Obama supports the Estate Tax aka Death Tax
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
Currently this is limited to the war on Drugs but expansion into war on piracy is coming
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
The Federal Reserve
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
multiple attempts have been made to regulate the internet.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.
This is being done by both the Republicans and Democrats
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c., &c.
Department of Education
When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.
This is where the Russians went astray the proletariat swept aside the bourgeoisie only to have it replaced with the politburo.
In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
I would say the reason that Obama can not be classified as a socialist or a communist or a capitalist is because he does not fit any of them. He adopts measures of all schools of thought in order to gain support. This being said he is best described as a populist.
Populist: pits a virtuous and homogeneous people against a set of elites and dangerous ‘others’ who were together depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity, and voice
