Benjamin Britton > Recent Status Updates

“It begins to strike me how precarious it all is, this business of not being on fire”

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“When you have gone as badly off course as we have, moderate actions don’t lead to moderate outcomes. They lead to dangerously radical ones.”

“The very idea that we, as atomized individuals, could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet’s climate is objectively nuts.”

“Most of these scientists were just quietly doing their work measuring ice cores, running global climate models, and studying ocean acidification, only to discover that they “were unwittingly destabilizing the political and social order.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to change our behavior—to reduce our use of fossil fuels—before we begin fiddling with the planet’s basic life-support systems?”

"Although Google Earth clearly has enormous potential as an aid to activism and critique, it is easy to forget that such new, GPS-enabled activism relies fundamentally on ‘dual-use’ devices that can function only because of military rocket launches... And they are inevitably mediated through imperial networks of militarised ground stations and data centres,"

“Other than a curt “very important” penciled in the margins of another passage from “On the Materialist Dialectic,” these are the only annotations Che Guevara made in his copy of Por Marx in October 1966... By contrast, we can only speculate what he would have thought of Reading Capital, which was not available in Spanish until after Che met his untimely death in October 1967 in Bolivia.”

“If Subcomandante Marcos started out as an Althusserian student of the ideological state apparatus of the Mexican school system through an analysis of its official textbooks, we should not be surprised to see how conversely the Althusserian Fernanda Navarro after her trip to Paris has become a fervent and loyal supporter of the Zapatistas in Chiapas.”

“Tronti, undoubtedly, is very fond of the Marxian analogy... between the class struggle and a “protracted civil war”: since it is the civil war which reveals the ultimate political character of the “economic” struggle, making it impossible to “govern” or to “police” the class struggle in the manner in which other social conflicts can become handled by a ruling class or an elite.”

“Engels dissolves individual wills into a micropolitical field of infinite and indefinite determinations that aggregate into an unintelligible, volitional unconscious, a “force without a subject,” or “nobody’s force”.
Emily Apter

“Althusser’s own concept of language is faithfully Stalinist—“Science can no more be ranged within the category ‘superstructure’ than can language, which as Stalin showed escapes it” (RCC 283)—his concept of translation is less literal than Marx’s.”
-Robert JC Young