Benjamin Britton > Recent Status Updates

‪“the only way to remain faithful to Marx today is to stop being a Marxist and to repeat instead Marx’s grounding gesture in a new way.”‬

‪Slavoj Zizek‬

“Precarious work is presented (and up to a point even effectively experienced) as a new form of freedom: I am no longer just a cog in a complex enterprise but an entrepreneur of the self, I am my own boss – someone who freely manages his or her employment, is free to choose from new options, to explore different aspects of his or her creative potential, to decide his or her priorities…”

“This new apartheid, this systematic explosion in the number of different forms of de facto slavery, is not a deplorable accident but a structural necessity of today’s global capitalism.”

“today’s late capitalism, with its ‘spontaneous’ ideology, endeavours to obliterate the class division itself, by way of proclaiming us all ‘selfentrepreneurs’,”

“Marx does not claim, in the usual ‘Marxist’ way of The German Ideology, that critical analysis should demonstrate how a commodity ... emerged out of the ‘ordinary’ real-life process; he claims, on the contrary, that the task of critical analysis is to unearth the ‘metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’ of what appears to be, at first sight, just an ordinary object.”

“After that we have many ideas and attempts to transform the Leninist vision of the party ... So we must invent not only the possibility of seizing power but the possibility of being organized outside power even if you are in power – and so to create organizations which are not confused with power, with the state, and will really represent the ideas of the movement.”

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“We can no longer content ourselves with people like Hillary Clinton, or with anything of the kind. We must create a return, if possible, towards a true contradiction”

“Materialism, in contrast, gives priority to mathematical antinomy, to the inherent inconsistency of the phenomenal domain: the ultimate outcome of mathematical antinomy is the domain of an 'inconsistent All', of a multitude which lacks the ontological consistency of'reality'.”

Lacan agrees with the German Idealist argument whereby any reference to 'external reality' falls short: our access to this 'reality' is always-already 'mediated' by the symbolic process.

“Malebrandie develops this parallel to its ultimate conclusion, to the horror of the Jesuits who organized his excommunication: just as the saintly person uses the suffering of others to bring about his own narcissistic satisfaction in helping those in distress, so God also ultimately loves only Himself and merely uses man to promulgate His own glory.”

“Malebrandie develops this parallel to its ultimate conclusion, to the horror of the Jesuits who organized his excommunication: just as the saintly person uses the suffering of others to bring about his own narcissistic satisfaction in helping those in distress, so God also ultimately loves only Himself and merely uses man to promulgate His own glory.”

“desire is, of course, metonymical; it shifts from one object to another, through all these displacements,however,desire nonetheless retains a minimum of formal consistency, a set of phantasmic features which, when they are encountered in a positive object, make us desire this object - objet petit a as the cause of desire is nothing other than this formal frame of consistency.”

“Again, all this works against the background of the phantasmic image of the Third World as Hell on Earth, as a place so utterly desolate that no political activity, only charity and compassion, can alleviate the suffering.”

“remains essential that mankind has an exact consciousness of the relationship between these tasks and its capacities ... If not, even in the ‘transparency’ of its new economic relations it will risk, as it has already discovered in the silences of the terror – and may do so again in the velleities of humanism – it will risk entering a future still charged with dangers and shades, with a virgin conscience.”

“One conclusion is already quite clear, however: it is an illusion to think that something about the nature of moderate growth or the laws of the market economy ensures that the inequality of wealth will decrease and harmonious stability will be achieved.”

“The fact that the return on capital is distinctly and persistently greater than the growth rate is a powerful force for a more unequal distribution of wealth.”

“Simply put, wage inequalities increased rapidly in the United States and Britain because US and British corporations became much more tolerant of extremely generous paid packages after 1970. Social norms evolved in a similar direction in European and Japanese firms, but the change came later (in the 1980s or 1990s) and has thus far not gone as far as in the United States.”

“They were a hundred miles away from being able to think it, since neither... had ever imagined that a ‘fact’ might be the existence of a relation of ‘combination’ ... determining as the law of its structure the entire economic reality, down to the visible detail of the empirical phenomena – while remaining invisible even in their blinding obviousness.”

“This shows that certain relations of production presuppose the existence of a legal-political and ideological superstructure as a condition of their peculiar existence, and why this superstructure is necessarily specific (since it is a function of the specific relations of production that call for it).”

“At the same time, social tables are remote in spirit from the sterile, atemporal statistical measures of inequality such as those employed by Gini and Pareto, which were all too commonly used in the twentieth century and tend to naturalize the distribution of wealth. The way one tries to measure inequality is never neutral.”

“To sum up: modern growth, which is based on the growth of productivity in the diffusion of knowledge, has made it possible to avoid the apocalypse predicted by Marx and to balance the process of capital accumulation. But it has not altered the deep structures of capital- or at any rate- has not truly reduced the macroeconomic importance of capital relative to labor.”

“But I have already shown enough to warn against such mindless optimism: capital has not disappeared for the simple reason that it is still useful- hardly less useful than in the era of Balzac and Austin, perhaps- and may well remain so in the future.”

“All told, if we take account of both higher stock prices and higher real estate prices, we can say that the rebound in assets account for one-quarter to one third of the increase in the ratio of national capital to national income in the rich countries between 1970 and 2010 (with large variations between countries).”

“There’s nothing small about what’s going on. We are watching a democracy turning on itself, trying to eat its own limbs. We’re watching incredulously as those limbs refuse to be eaten.”

“The people at the protest in Jantar Mantar that day were not even slum dogs, they were pavement dwellers. Who were they? Where had they come from...
They’re the millions who make up the chain gangs that are transported from city to city to build the New India. Is this what is known as ‘enjoying the fruits of modern development’?”

“Only by waging class struggle- the battle of annihilation- the new man will be created, the new man who will defy death and will be free from all thoughts of self-interest.”
Charu Mazumdar

“With the song, the greeting, the handshake and the clenched fist. Everyone greets everyone, murmuring Lalsalaam, mlalslaa mlalslaam...”

“They should all unite in accord with an enormous economic system, which rest upon the independence of work or masses, but support strict labor discipline... we will close together in concerted ranks, under our organizations’ red banners. With concerted, powerful efforts, we will conquer all obstacles that history has placed on our hard, laborers road”

“The sinister specter of hunger and ruin looms over us. At the same time, the black clouds of counterrevolution are approaching...

Meanwhile, economic devastation is getting worse and no measures are taken against it.

The war keeps going on, and no actual measure are taken to end it.

Famine is still imminent, and no actual measures are taken to prevent it.”

Joseph Stalin

“Comrade workers! They are shooting us down! Workers’ blood has been spilled on the streets of Petrograd! Hungry people rose to struggle, but the tsar made them eat lead.”
Petersburg Interdistrict Committee of the RSDRP
Feb 27, 1917