Benjamin Britton > Recent Status Updates

“In this way we should perhaps give the concept of contradiction, as Marx uses it in Part One of Capital, a purely indexical value... Marx is thinking something radically new, the concept of which he has not succeeded in formulating – the mode of action of the structure as a mode of action of the relations of production which govern it.”

“Thus the constitution of objects does not appertain to a subjectivity. What does appertain to a subjectivity is perception. Appearance (Schein) is determined by the gap between the conditions of constitution of the objects and the conditions of their perception.”

“For Marx, labour is represented in value, it takes on the form of the value of commodities."

“The APA report noted the low incidence of serious violence in schools and the harmful consequences, racially disproportionate impact, and disruptive nature of zero tolerance. While the report received significant news media coverage, there’s hardly been a rush by schools to turn down the volume on punishments.”

““As the box holding traditional students shrinks, one challenge facing public school educators is how best to serve all students—from high achievers to the most disruptive kids like Morris Gandy’s son. If the public sector abdicates its responsibility to educate all children, businessmen like Randle Richardson are ready to step in."

“Finance capital, concentrated in a few hands and exercising a virtual monopoly, exacts enormous and ever-increasing profits from the floating of companies, issue of stock, state loans, etc., strengthens the domination of the financial oligarchy and levies tribute upon the whole of society for the benefit of monopolists.”

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

“It is the nature of adolescents to defy authority, to be immature to an extent. Their brains are not fully matured and kids can make bad choices,” Soler says. “Defiance of authority is talking in class, talking back to teachers. It’s irritating behavior. You can’t have kids disrupting class all the time, but schools have abdicated responsibility for finding a middle ground.”

“We are breeding a generation of children who think they are criminals for the way they are being treated in school,” said Judith Browne-Dianis, co-director of the Advancement Project. “School used to be a refuge. Now it’s a lockdown environment. We are bringing the practices of criminal justice into the schools.”

“In a great irony of the Columbine tragedy, the school that is synonymous with school violence has opted not to turn itself into a fortress, rejecting metal detectors and an increased police presence”

How do we stop wealth and power from concentrating in the hands of the one-tenth of one percent? Piketty suggests a global wealth tax- in effect, an annual progressive tax on stocks and bonds, property, and other assets that usually aren't taxed until they are sold.

How do we stop wealth and power from concentrating in the hands of the one-tenth of one percent? Piketty suggests a global wealth tax- in effect, an annual progressive tax on stocks and bonds, property, and other assets that usually aren't taxed until they are sold.

“Thus, the twentieth century marks the turning-point from the old capitalism to the new, from the domination of capital in general to the domination of finance capital”

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“The new object discovered by the critique, political economy, appears to have been absorbed entirely by the critique. In reality it is this object which imposes the shattering of the critical model and the re-organization of the whole of Marx’s problematic.”

“Although there has been abundant theorizing about the problem of the relationship between Marx and Hegel, no one has thought about the relationship which is, perhaps, decisive in order to be able to understand the break between the critique of the young Marx and that of the mature Marx, the Kant/Marx relationship.”

“It is because the discourse of political economy is a mirror that discourse of political economy is a mirror that the reading of the economists can pass for an empirical analysis, and that it can be a critique of the contradictions in economic reality.”

“The Columbine scenario is terrifying, but the odds of it occurring in your hometown are about one in two million. Still, many people believe it can happen anytime, anywhere.”

“When prisons are built faster than new schools as a solution to social and economic problems, a penal approach to school violence of any magnitude appears as the logical fix even if there is little evidence that it works to make schools and students safer”

“The Reagan years laid the foundation for the Lockdown High model. But it was during the Clinton administration, ironically, that the bricks and mortar of the school-as-prison theory and practice were applied to the problems of discipline and safety.”

“The decade of the 1980s ushered in an entirely new era, as conservatism began its ascension to power in government and out. Ronald Reagan began his two-term presidency and initiated radical changes in social and economic policy”

Annette Fuentes

“In substance, however, the distribution of means of production is not at all “universal”, but private, i.e., it conforms to the interests of big capital, and primarily, of huge, monopoly capital, which operates under conditions in which the masses live in want."

Lenin

“But The Blackboard Jungle was accurate in reflecting the stereotypes and class biases of the time that fed white, middle-class America’s fears of urban youth and a growing youth culture, which would burst out of conformity in another decade."

•Annette Fuentes. "Lockdown High.” .

“I also highlight the entrenched interests—political and economic—that together have promoted and profited from the transformation of our schools into prisonlike institutions where children are treated like suspects.”

Annette Fuentes. “Lockdown High"

“What distinguishes scientific discourse from other forms of discourse? How do other discourses produce different effects (aesthetic effect, ideological effect, unconscious effect) from the knowledge effect which is produced by scientific discourse?”

Louis Althusser

“Monopoly! This is the last word in the “latest phase of capitalist development”. But we shall only have a very insufficient, incomplete, and poor notion of the real power and the significance of modern monopolies if we do not take into consideration the part played by the banks.”

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.” Marxists Internet Archive

“Applied to our question, these concepts ensure us a cheap solution on every occasion: they make a chain between an original knowledge effect and current knowledge effects – giving us the mere posing, or rather non-posing of the problem as its solution.”

Excerpt From: Althusser, Louis. “Reading Capital: The Complete Edition.” Verso. iBooks.
This material may be protected by copyright.

“Marx’s theoretical practice is the criterion of the ‘truth’ of the knowledges that Marx produced”

Excerpt From: Althusser, Louis. “Reading Capital: The Complete Edition.” Verso. iBooks.
This material may be protected by copyright.

“Imperialism is the eve of the social revolution of the proletariat. This has been confirmed since 1917 on a world-wide scale.
 
N. Lenin
July 6, 1920”

“Marx’s theoretical practice is the criterion of the ‘truth’ of the knowledges that Marx produced; and only because it was really a matter of knowledge, and not of chance hypotheses, have these knowledges given the famous results, of which the failures as well as the successes constitute pertinent ‘experiments’ for the theory’s reflection on itself and its internal development.”

“But this practice, and the mode of employment of ideological arguments adapted to this struggle, must be the object of a theory so that ideological struggle in the domain of ideology does not become a struggle governed by the laws and wishes of the opponent, so that it does not transform us purely into subjects of the ideology it is our aim to combat”

“In other words, the whole history of Western philosophy is dominated not by the ‘problem of knowledge’, but by the ideological solution, i.e., the solution imposed in advance by practical, religious, ethical and political ‘interests’ foreign to the reality of the knowledge, which this ‘problem’ had to receive”

Louis Althusser.