Benjamin Britton > Recent Status Updates

“In the language of contradiction, the critique of culture is a unified critique, in that it dominates the whole of culture — its knowledge as well as its poetry — and in that it no longer separates itself from the critique of the social totality. This unified theoretical critique is on its way to meet a unified social practice.”

“The greatest piece of popular fiction ever produced.”
Damon Lindelof

“A work of ruthless psychological realism, it’s a landmark in the graphic novel medium.”
One of TIME Magazine’s 100 Best English-language Novels since 1923

“Watchmen is peerless.”
Rolling Stone

“Remarkable... The would-be heroes of Watchmen have staggeringly complex psychological profiles.”
NYTimes Book Review

“In all these areas the goal remains the same: to restructure society without community.”

“Behind the fashions that come and go on the frivolous surface of the spectacle of pseudocyclical time, the grand style of an era can always be found in what is governed by the secret yet obvious necessity for revolution.”

“Feudal society was born from the merging of “the organizational structures of the conquering armies that developed in the process of conquest” with “the productive forces found in the conquered regions” (The German Ideology), and the factors contributing to the organization of those productive forces included the religious language in which they were expressed.”

“Revolutionary theory is now the enemy of all revolutionary ideology, and it knows it.”

“It bears a revolution that cannot leave anything outside itself, a revolution embodying the permanent domination of the present over the past and a total critique of separation; and it must discover the appropriate forms of action to carry out this revolution.”

“The social democrats’ scientific ideology confidently affirmed that capitalism could not tolerate these economic reforms, but history repeatedly proved them wrong.”

“What produces society’s abstract power also produces its concrete lack of freedom.”

“Even where the material base is still absent, modern society has already used the spectacle to invade the social surface of every continent. It sets the stage for the formation of indigenous ruling classes and frames their agendas. Just as it presents pseudo-goods to be coveted, it offers false models of revolution to local revolutionaries.”

“Consciousness of desire and desire for consciousness are the same project, the project that in its negative form seeks the abolition of classes and thus the workers’ direct possession of every aspect of their activity. The opposite of this project is the society of the spectacle, where the commodity contemplates itself in a world of its own making.”

“The triumph of this separation-based economic system proletarianizes the whole world.”

“If communism is so often ridiculed as an archaic, dreary, obsolete alternative, it’s because its historical realization remained trapped in the straitjacket of tradition. We need to extricate it from that. Being trapped in it is not a destiny.”

“No one wants to create a little, isolated France, entrenched behind its borders, which would become impoverished in record time. Only the far right relishes this identitarian fantasy that would drive us into powerlessness. So the communist hypothesis must prove itself locally while at the same time taking over the world stage.”

“But I think your dialectic of cautiousness and audacity fails to take sufficient account of the fact that in any political situation there are enemies. Real, genuine enemies.”

Alain Badiou
.

“The Party attacked the Party: terror was logically involved in this process, so the psychological analyses that attempt to account for it (they mention Stalin’s paranoia, Mao’s megalomania, and so on) are pointless. No, it was a properly political mechanism that was set in motion.”

“Once again, communism and Nazism are totally different from each other. To equate them and to equate historical communism with any kind of totalizing religion strikes me as highly problematic and ultimately unjustified.”

What exactly did Calhoun so fear coming from “the American people collectively”? He feared, as it successors today do, a government that his band of like-minded properties supremacists could not control.

“When it came to the new revolutionary experiments, in the late 1960s and beyond, the PCF was, if anything, the enemy. A despised and very real enemy: the “official” militants wanted to hold on to their political monopoly in the factories.”

To narrate Haiti's history as good versus evil stunts our capacity for moral judgment. Past suffer­ing does not guarantee future virtue. Only a distorted history is morally pure.

Linebaugh and Rediker, contemporary cosmopolitans and champions of the newest victims of global exploitation, express regret at the failure of this "conspiracy for the human race": "What was left behind was national and partial: the English working class, the black Haitian, the Irish diaspora."

"The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the coming of the dusk." This often-cited statement from Hegel's lectures on The Phi­losophy of History (1822), which may well have had the journal Minerva in mind, in fact marks a retreat from the radical politics of The Phenomenology of Mind- just how much of one in regard to Hegel's posi­tion on the French Revolution has long been the subject of debate.

“Events in Saint-Domingue were central to contemporary attempts to make sense out of the reality of the French Revolution and its aftermath. We need to be aware of the facts from this perspective.”

“In conclusion, for a historian who cuts the story short in October 1917, it would be quite difficult to see the Bolshevik Party and Stalin as people who ignore moral reasoning; in fact, this would be more applicable to the other side of the conflict.”

“The thesis of Stalin’s anti-Semitism is revealed to be untenable in light of historical and conceptual reflection.”

“At least until 1945, there seemed to be no traces of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, in a country that appeared to Hitler to be, especially after Operation Barbarossa, “Jewry’s greatest servant”.

“One final consideration. During the 20th century, accusations of “genocides” and denunciations of “holocausts” have been dissipated in very different ways.”

“In the Gulag, it has been estimated that in the early 1930s, before the turn of the screw brought on by the murder of Kirov and the intensification of the dangers of war, the annual death rate “was about 4.8 percent of the total prisoner population”.

“Because of the coexistence of objective circumstances and subjective responsibilities, as with society as a whole, the Gulag too failed to overcome the state of emergency.”