Benjamin Britton > Recent Status Updates

“And there are many quotations from Marx and Engels to the effect that throughout human history “the superstructure” was at the service of the corresponding relations of property in a given society; that the state is “nothing else” but a tool to keep the existing relations of production intact; that the law cannot but be a weapon of class power.”
Leszek Kolakowski

“This determination of the labour process by these material conditions is at its own level a denial of every ‘humanist’ conception of human labour as pure creativity. As we know, this idealism has not remained in the state of a myth, but has reigned in political economy itself, and from there, in the economic utopias...”

“On the whole I regard Solzhenitsyn’s point of view is incorrect. Only in regard to a small number of those who died in the terror is he right... By no means do I praise such Chekists as Latsis or Peters, a position Solzhenitsyn ascribes to me in the statement by him quoted above”.
Roy Medvedev

“Let us leave this point in which we can see well enough that there can never be a given on the fore-stage of obviousnesses, except by means of a giving ideology which stays behind, with which we keep no accounts and which gives us what it wants.”

"To repeat Lenin is to repeat not what Lenin did but what he failed to do, his missed opportunities.”

“So Lenin the ultimate political strategist should in no way be separated from Lenin the ‘technocrat’ dreaming about scientific reorganization of production. The greatness of Lenin is that although he lacked the proper conceptual apparatus to think these two levels together, he was aware of the urgency of doing so- an impossible yet necessary task.”

“This is why - to take the extreme example - for Jews in today’s Israel, ‘Love thy neighbor!’ means ‘Love the Palestinians!’ or it means nothing at all.”

“Here, too, we can see the content of the ‘inversion’: this ‘change of terrain’ identical with the ‘change of terms’, and therefore the change in the theoretical basis from which the questions are formulated and the problems posed”

“This historicist humanism may, for example, serve as a theoretical warning to intellectuals of bourgeois or petty-bourgeois origin, who ask themselves, sometimes in genuinely tragic terms, whether they really have a right to be members of a history which is made, as they know or fear, outside them.”

“ The poverty of the poor peasants, the horrors of war, the horrors of hunger - all these are showing the masses more and more clearly the correctness of the proletariat path, the need to support the proletarian revolution.”
Lenin

“The example of France shows one thing, and one thing only, namely, that to render Russia capable of self defense, to obtain in Russia, too, “miracles” of mass heroism, all that is obsolete must be swept away with “Jacobin” ruthlessness, and Russia renovated and regenerated economically.”

“It is hardly likely that any revolutionary government whatever could do without applying the death penalty to the exploiters (i.e. the landowners and capitalists).”

It is hardly likely that any revolutionary government whatever could do without applying the death penalty to the exploiters i.e. the landowners and S

“That the palaces and rich apartments abandoned by the tsar and the aristocracy should not remain vacant, but provide shelter for the homeless and the destitute”
Lenin

“If this “Supervising Committee” remains a purely political-type parliamentary institution, a committee that will “put questions” to the Provisional Government and receive answers from it, then it will remain a plaything, will amount to nothing.”

“But the liberation of the proletariat from their influence has progressed with every month of the imperialist war, and the Russian revolution will inevitably immensely hasten this process.”
Lenin
March 1917