Thursday, November 20, 2008
what would lenin say
Many people are very happy about Obama’s victory, saying that “change has come” to America. Lenin would disagree. He would state that real change is not possible without smashing the capitalist state that we are in. That is not possible to establish with one person or with the president; it can only be established by the socialist revolution, where the workers take control over the state (26-27). By destroying capitalism, a dictatorship by the workers, called socialism, would be put into place, followed by a withering away of that state. With this withering away, communism would come into play; the real change.
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Many people are very happy about Obama’s victory, saying that “change has come” to America. Lenin would disagree. He would state that real change is not possible without smashing the capitalist state that we are in. That is not possible to establish with one person or with the president; it can only be established by the socialist revolution, where the workers take control over the state (26-27). By destroying capitalism, a dictatorship by the workers, called socialism, would be put into place, followed by a withering away of that state. With this withering away, communism would come into play; the real change.
Moreover, Lenin would argue that it does not matter that Obama won because he is only a part of the many strings that are bounding the capitalists to the state (315). While he argues that no part has a big amount of power, I believe that there are different amounts of thickness in those many strings that unite the capitalists and the state. The thicker the string, the more power to influence the other strings and the more power it has to tip the equilibrium between the two, hence bringing about some kind of change. While I agree that Obama winning may not bring about a huge change, I am still afraid that the president is still a huge amount of power for someone with so little experience. Who is to say that Obama would not take advantage of the newly found power and bring about a negative change? Power can change people.
Lenin would also argue that though there was an illusion of two parties running against each other, in reality, it was one big party disguising as two. By doing so, the state maintains the utopian-like illusion of the freedom to choose with democracy. (22) This is why democracy is useful for capitalists; it hides the many strings that connect the capitalists to the state by giving that illusion that the people are in control, while the state is the one that is truly in control. I agree with this point. It would make sense if one party was pretending to be two because it gives people a sense of control, instead of a total dictatorship. With a total dictatorship, there is always a chance of a group of people revolting, trying to bring down the dictator. Maybe that is the reason that Obama was instated. It seems that so many people hate George Bush as the US president. By instating Obama, a man that is so well liked by so many people, the chance of a revolution happening could be oppressed. However, there seems to be one thing that the state could have overlooked- if Obama does not bring about a big change within a short period of time, the chance of a revolution could jump up, since a sense of betrayal could overpower the people. Also, people may realize that it would not have mattered who had won, because either way, nothing would have changed. The veil of democracy could be on the verge of being cast off.
Chisato, I truly appreciate the imagination that your brought to your discussion of the thousands of threads. Come to think of it, Neil once in lecture said that the thousand threads would be unplugged and then replugged when Obama takes presidential reigns. I thought Neil's image lacked a practical application since the threads seem much more sturdy and structural than merely symbolic.
So, reading your extension of Lenin's thousands of threads as actually having thickness reads as not only imaginative, but cleverly practical. I particularly like the dynamicism of the following account: "The thicker the string, the more power to influence the other strings ...". Here, it seems you are really thinking like a social theorist.
Your almost immediate discussion of Obama's power as potentially negative is also provocative. You may find a neoliberal critique potentially useful here. A bible of sorts, Democracy Now! already initiated this somewhat critical consideration: http://www.democracynow.org/2008/11/6/president_elect_obama_and_the_future
Here, filmmaker and investigative journalist John Pilger is noted as saying: "We had to endure this, and I mean endure it during the Clinton years, and I don’t think that we, in the rest of the world, ought to have to endure it now through the Obama years, so that we have a continuation, if you like, of liberalism as a divisive, almost war-making ideology, being used to destroy liberalism as a reality, because that has gone on under so-called liberal presidents, from Kennedy to Clinton, Democratic presidents. And President-elect Obama suggests to us, in his promises, that he is going to continue that, bombing Pakistan and Afghanistan."
It doesn't take many crumbs of analysis to begin to find the trail to the continuation of certain policies of "power" potentially kept in motion under Obama's administration, "negative change" that has already been exposed and articulated about the Bush administration by, for example, famed journalist Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine.
Thanks for posting!
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