Benjamin Britton > Recent Status Updates

“In the papers you are about to read we have paid great attention to the concepts in which Marx thinks the general conditions of economic production and the concepts in which Marxist thought must think its theory of history”

•Louis Althusser

"Today's global corporations have no permanent home, recognize no national borders, salute no flag but their own corporate logo, and take their money to anywhere where they can make the most- and pay the least."

“It is not the word ‘real’ which needs to be interrogated in connection with the murder, but the word ‘object’; the difference of the concept of object must be produced to deliver it from the fraudulent unity of the word ‘object’.”

Louis Althusser

“If there is anything of a formidable progressive force left in our continent that is able to capitalise on a historical opportunity dawning upon us, it must stop shedding tears for the bureaucratic European Union monster that fades away, and help strike the final blow instead”

•Antonis Vradis

"Unless there is a drastic failure of the Mexican economy, the resident Communists, whether by bullet or ballot, would seem to have poor prospects in the foreseeable future."

“Why, finally, would anyone want to upgrade a second-class to a first-class ticket on a ship that is already slipping below the waterline?”

•John R. Gillingham

“The constructions have at last begun to crumble, and if their controlled explosion is not begun soon, they will collapse and kill off Europe.”
•Wolfgang Streeck

“All countries have seen the development of the crisis of legitimacy, of the return of nationalism, and of the tendency to project the social and cultural malaise onto an ‘enemy within’ targeted by xenophobic and Islamophobic parties.”

•Étienne Balibar
"The Brexit Crisis: A Verso Report.”

Guinea already had a popular hero in Sékou Touré, a member of the old clan known as the "Sword Nobility." His answer to French president De Gaulle was, "We prefer poverty in liberty to riches in slavery."

"Attributing a monetary value to the stock of human capital make sense only in societies where it is actually possible to own other individuals fully and entirely- societies that at first sight have definitively ceased to exist."

“The subheading read: ‘We must break free of the EU and take back control.’ There was little ambiguity. Taking back control was about keeping this particular group of people out.”
•Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi

“Politicians act shocked at the upsurge in racism, as though they never imagined that decades of using hatred to justify their policies could turn into an actual violent revolt against people racialised in the UK.”
•Wail Qasim
“The Brexit Crisis: A Verso Report.”

"Lumumba was handed over to Katanga tribesmen, who amused themselves by taking him apart slowly: an ear, a nose, a toe, one by one."

"By 1974 President Nixon had been warmly welcome in Cairo, and the private sector of the economy, which had narrowed under Nasser, was again being encouraged."

“whole of knowledge, both its peculiar object (the essence of the real object) and the distinction between the real object, to which its knowledge operation is applied, and this knowledge operation, a distinction which is the site itself of the operation of knowledge – we have just seen that the object as well as the operation of knowledge in its distinction from the real object."

Louis Althusser

"At times, a Bulgarian will joke about Russia. During the Chinese-Indian border dispute, both sides were using Russian arms, and it was said in Bulgaria that for this reason the war would go on forever, since nobody could win with Soviet weapons."

A popular joke had two Chinese engineers visiting and East German factory and expressing admiration for what was produced there. "Very good, comrades parts for elevators. We don't have them yet." Then, going too far, the Chinese ask, "what parts are they? "And receive the answer, "Signs reading 'Out of Order'."

"There were strange communist heroes in those days. Typical among these was young Pavlik Morozov. Evidently young Pavlik had an unresolved Oedipus complex, for he denounced his father for saving out a little grain from the collective. The father received ten years in Siberia, and his son a statue in Moscow's Krasnopresnensk children's park."

“To conceive Marx’s philosophy in its specificity is therefore to conceive the essence of the very movement with which the knowledge of it is produced, or to conceive knowledge as production.” Louis Althusser."Reading Capital: The Complete Edition.”

“I question those who now claim to stand shoulder to shoulder with me when they also maintain, without irony, that a focus on race and ‘identity politics’ fractures the left at a time of crisis and undermines class politics. I question those who now only seem to care about racism and xenophobia when Brexit has used their bodies as borders.”

“An unstated campaign strategy of the Leave campaign was to re-imagine Britain and Britishness (but really Englishness) as white in order to make particular kinds of claims to victimhood which would highlight economic inequality without challenging neoliberalism” •Akwugo Emejulu• "The Brexit Crisis: A Verso Report.” Verso.

“We need to recognize the white supremacist legacy of colonialism and how some of us continue to benefit from it.” •Lara Pawson• "The Brexit Crisis: A Verso Report.” Verso.

“Like any sort of will, the formation of a common or popular will is indeed ‘up to us’, and the chance is ours to take or lose. However, if we fail to act, the mere recording of a narrow majority vote is certainly no substitute for ‘the will of the people’ in any proper sense of this phrase” •Peter Hallward• "The Brexit Crisis: A Verso Report.” Verso.

“This brings us back to the political death-drive, the fascination with annihilation, the allure of comprehensive destruction... because we despise our own ideals, and the way in which they tyrannise us ... When we realize just how remote they are from our ‘real’ selves. Hence the desire to bring it all down, to watch the world burn." The Brexit Crisis: A Verso Report.

"So now it is urgent to defend love's subversive, heterogeneous relationship to the law. At the most minimal level, people in love put their trust in difference rather than being suspicious of it."

“It is this: what classical political economy does not see, is not what it does not see, it is what it sees; it is not what it lacks, on the contrary, it is what it does not lack; it is not what it misses, on the contrary, it is what it does not miss. The oversight, then, is not to see what one sees, the oversight no longer concerns the object, but the sight itself” Louis Althusser

"In particular, as I have already mentioned, conviction in love and politics, something one must never renounce. That was really the moment when, in between politics and love, my life found the musical chord that ensured its harmony."

"Ultimately, the decline of the capital/income ratio between 1913 and 1950 is the history of Europe's suicide, and in particular of the euthanasia of European capitalists."