Benjamin Britton > Recent Status Updates

“The very first act of a post-Corbyn Labour leader would be to address the ‘legitimate concerns of ordinary people about migration’, just as we are seeing the ghastly violence that results from years of pandering to such xenophobia.”

It is not God any longer, but the Party, and through the Party, its supreme leader. The expression "the cult of personality" sums up this kind of collective transfer of love to a political figure.

"The trip to Nicaragua was a profoundly emotional experience... During the trip I had an opportunity to meet with Daniel Ortega, the president of Nicaragua, as well as other government officials... Jane and I visited Cuba in 1989. I had hoped to meet with Castro, but that didn't work out. But I did meet with the mayor of Havana and other officials."

I remember a letter to the editor written by an older man that said; "I don't know anything about this socialism, but Sanders is doing a good job repaving the streets."

I think that when you begin to say "love one another", that can lead to a kind of ethics, but not to any kind of politics. Principally because there are people in politics one doesn't love… That's undeniable. Nobody can expect us to love them.

"To counter such a bleak future, mass mobilization is necessary – and any form of progressive mass mobilization has to recognize that class politics are always articulated through a politics of race. Reckoning with Britain’s racism and xenophobia across time, place, parties and social classes is the necessary first step in such mobilization.”

“In place of facts, we now live in a world of data. Instead of trusted measures and methodologies being used to produce numbers, a dizzying array of numbers is produced by default, to be mined, visualised, analysed and interpreted however we wish” Excerpt From: Balibar, Étienne. “The Brexit Crisis: A Verso Report.” Verso. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

But in the language of Marxist geographers, they have had no successful ‘spatial fix’ since the stagflation crisis of the 1970s. Thatcherism gutted them with pit-closures and monetarism, but generated no private sector jobs to fill the space. The entrepreneurial investment that neoliberals always believe is just around the corner never materialised.

But in the language of Marxist geographers, they have had no successful ‘spatial fix’ since the stagflation crisis of the 1970s. Thatcherism gutted them with pit-closures and monetarism, but generated no private sector jobs to fill the space. The entrepreneurial investment that neoliberals always believe is just around the corner never materialised.

"Lacan doesn't say that love is a disguise for sexual relationships; he says that sexual relationships don't exist, that love is what comes to replace that non-relationship. That's much more interesting."

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"Peaceful coexistence must be practiced between all states, independently of their size, of previous historical relations between them, and of the problems that may emerge between some of them, at a given moment."

"I got to know him on one of those chilly Mexican nights and I remember that our first argument revolved around international politics. By the small hours that night, by early morning, I had become one of the future expeditionaries."

"There is more value on a single page of Seeds of Change thinning year's worth of Rush Limbaugh screeds combined with a lifetime of Sarah Palin sneers at community organizers." Todd Gitlin

We were a coalition of ordinary people, none of whom had any real access to power in the conventional scheme of things, but we had contested an important election- and we had won. If an independent progressive movement could win in America's most rural state- and until recently, one of America's most Republican- then it might be possible for progressives to do likewise anywhere in the nation.