Benjamin Britton > Recent Status Updates

“Though his optimism faded, Orwell refused to give up on socialist democracy.”

“The men themselves ascribe their misery to foreign immigration... who take their places at lower wages.”
Jack London

“They do not recognize the true cause of their wretchedness, so they attribute it to all sorts of small causes.”
Friedrich Engels

“The whole western world is going up in roar.’ Unless, that is, the ‘reverberations of future wars’ provoke a reaction against this ‘great death-wish of the modern world.’”

“Polina Molotovtia.
You died last October 23rd. I have a written order from Stalin setting the date of your execution.
The only reason you’re still around to see the light of day through these bars is thanks to me: Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria.”

Inscription by the artist: “Failed equilibrists, or ‘gave attention to transport, [but] fucked up the plows.’ “

“Caricatures regarding economics, while simplistic, clearly demonstrate that the Bolshevik leaders ultimately failed to master efficient management. After relinquishing, in the early 1930s, market mechanisms, they relied on administrative pressure and non-economic incentives.”

“A number of sketches of unknown authorship are also included. The editors identified the political issues, events, and discussions that inspired the drawings, and they provide biographical information about the people who drew and were drawn. The book opens a rare window on Stalin’s inner circle, allowing us access to the powerful man who, despite living in a grim epoch, developed a special humor of their own.”

“The cartoons in this album capture the black-and-white world that surrounded these artists. This should be understood both literally and figuratively: most of the drawings were made in one color on white paper; they are also characterized by their extreme bluntness.”

“First Consul, father of all soldiers, upright judge, defender of innocence, pronounce my destiny.”

“This reply shows the injustice of imputing to me the assassinations that were committed, because, it is said, as chief, I could have prevented them; but am I responsible for the evil that was done in my absence and without my knowledge?”

“I was one of your soldiers, and the first servant of the Republic in Saint Domingue; but now I am wretched, ruined, dishonored, a victim of my own services; let your sensibilities be moved in my position.”

“Since the revolution, I have done all that depended upon me to return happiness to my country and to ensure liberty for my fellow citizens.”

“The perfect harmony, tranquility and union that rein among us portend happy success in our future endeavors, and I can only believe that with the help of God we shall soon purge the French territory of the tyrannical hordes that infested the colony for too long, and that soon we will form a single, unified family of friends and brothers.”

“Should you nonetheless have a small disagreements, you should not fight against them, because the Republic, which is the mother of us all, does not wish us to fight our brothers. Moreover, it is always the poor people suffer the most.”

It is not overstating to suggest that across the globe the Haitian revolutionaries with their magnificent victory had, to paraphrase Martinican writer Frantz Fanon, ‘set afoot’ a new black woman, man, child... most everyone everywhere- enslaved and enslaver alike- recognized that the countdown to slavery’s end have been set ticking by the Haitian Toussaint L’Ouverture, and his triumphant army of ex-slaves.”

“Where formely it was an attack on the body that represented the political project, represented the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which called for heroism in the face of profanation, now it is an attack on the body that represents a humanism outside of politics which presupposes this resort to heroism.”

“Revolutionary terror is not terrorism. To make a moral equivalence between the revolutions year II and September 2001 is historical and philosophical nonsense.”

“Revolutionary pity does not wish to make poverty disappear, to exclude it from the community, but on the contrary to give it a place that makes insensitivity towards it impossible....
What is imperative here is to maintain that political power does not lie on the side of wealth, but rather on the side of a generalized emancipation- in other words, an emancipation of the poor.”

“Revolutionary equality does not concealed within it egalitarianism. Equality is rather the classical expression of a democratic upsurge, the principle that authorizes the demos to take power over the aristocrats and the rich.”

“Cultural configurations of sex and gender might then proliferate or, rather, their present proliferation might then become articulable within the discourses that establish intelligible cultural life, confounding the very binarism of sex, and exposing its fundamental unnaturalness.”

“Genders can be neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent, neither original nor derived. As credible bearers of those attributes, however, genders can also be rendered thoroughly and radically incredible.”

“And what kind of gender performance will enact and reveal the performativity of gender itself in a way that destabilizes the naturalized categories of identity and desire.”

In a sense, Discipline and Punish can be read as Foucault’s effort to rewrite Nietzsche’s doctrine of internalization in On the Genealogy of Morals on the model of inscription.

“In a sense, Discipline and Punish can be read as Foucault’s effort to rewrite Nietzsche’s doctrine of internalization in On the Genealogy of Morals on the model of inscription.”

“Note as well that the category of sex and the naturalized institution of heterosexuality are constructs, socially instituted and socially regulated fantasies or “fetishes,” not natural categories, but political ones (categories that prove that recourse to the “natural” in such contexts is always political).”

“Cuban public policy has always included a commitment to supporting universal public education, compulsory through ninth grade. Education is seen as essential to build in the new socialist man and woman.”

“Education: a weapon against the enemy.”

“Finally, there is the theme of Che and exporting revolution. Ernesto “Che” Guevara was an asthmatic Argentinian doctor who met Fidel Castro in 1954, participated in the Cuban revolution, served as head of various government agencies, and never give up his dream of world revolution... public and private display of his portrait in Cuba is ubiquitous.”

“To practice sports is to grow healthy.”


“I would rather play for ten million people than ten million dollars.”
Oscar Linares, Cuban baseball pitcher, 1996.

This purification of homosexuality, a kind of lesbian modernism, is currently contested by numerous lesbian and gay discourses that understand lesbian and gay culture as embedded in the larger structures of heterosexuality even as they are positioned in subversive or resignificatory relationships to heterosexual cultural configurations.