This is in response to the Daily Post of 12/28/16 prompt of the word Pillage.

The pillage of the social safety net and industrial core in America has come to fruition with the election of a right wing populist who has never worked a day in his life as a politician.

The pillage he is in turn promising under the auspices of the most reactionary Congress seen in generations is itself a sight to be seen.

However, I think that Trump frankly presents many more opportunities than problems. Lenin’s victory only came in the aftermath of a cataclysm, the First World War. His was ultimately a half-measure because the Russian revolution forever destroyed the tsarist regime but failed to totally eradicate imperial capitalism. It is clear in reading his final writings, particularly Better Fewer But Better and On Cooperation that he recognized the need for a total renovation of culture itself, a reformulation of how the people of the Soviet Union thought about their relations to the means of production and the workplace.

And so I find myself trying to see Trump’s election in the same way that Lenin saw the war and the revolution. I am currently working on an essay dealing with the idea of labor unions converting to worker-owned cooperatives that would allow them to take advantage of the massive tax breaks created to help big businesses. This has risks but it seems that it might also be the only option given the pillage they face.