Benjamin Britton > Recent Status Updates

"2008: The victory of Barack Obama marks the high-water mark of the centrist counterrevolution." Ted Rall

"What we did object to was the implication that chronic national problems could somehow be solved by the good works of a few churches. And we grew suspicious of candidates who soaked their speeches in religious rhetoric and who seemed to substitute personal piety for public works."

"Intelligent action, even public confrontation, is at bottom an attempt to engage and relate. Most activists fail to appreciate this... Our leaders study and practice it. Recognition is fundamental- the most basic sIgn of respect, the start of reciprocity, and the precondition for a working public relationship."

"How do you think new and better schools will be built? Because they are desperately needed? Because it's a good idea? Because the honchos at the Board of Education wake up in the morning and decide to do the right thing? Because the city is appalled by the chronic overcrowding? No, new and better schools will be built when you have the power to force them to build them."

"Done well, individual meetings allow people to break out of the kinds of relational ruts that limit us all…. We see more of the many facets of people who have come to think of themselves as invisible or voiceless not just because the powers that be fail to see them and hear them, but because those who claim to care about their concerns also failed to relate to them and with them."

"Loose groupings of interested individuals didn't have a prayer of addressing major crisises- housing, crime, schools, jobs and others. Each crisis was, at bottom, a power crisis. The power of the mob, the power of drug lords, the power of corrupt borough machines, and the inertia of the police bureaucracy could only be challenged by another, deeper institutional power."

"In the drug war, police have discretion regarding whom to target (which individuals), as well as where to target (which neighborhoods or communities)."

"In the drug war, police have discretion regarding whom to target (which individuals), as well as where to target (which neighborhoods or communities)."

"Capital is for everyone who works for a living in the shadow of a boss. It argues that capitalism is a world system based on wage-labor. The relevance of Marx's Capital grows as wage-labor extends into all corners of the earth."

"Verso is subsidized by Stalinist millionaires." –Ramsey Kanaan

"The products of our mind matter no more or less than the products of our hands. This insight has profound consequences for our understanding of taste. Nowhere do our mind and body overlap more completely than in our tastes." Charlie Bertsch

"I'm more inclined to see it the other way around. I generally believe that theory comes out of practice. You get drawn into these things because you feel as though you've got to do something because of your material circumstances… But I think that in this case, it seems pretty evident to me that action is proceeding theory." -Colin Robinson

"As long as IP[intellectual property] is bought and sold as a commodity, market rules will continue to apply." –Rick Prelinger

"The libertarians have tried to blame everything on the state for not deregulating enough, which I found very intriguing. That was the starting point for me. But if you look at the legacy of the Chicago School of Economis, that's always the response when things go awry." "In a certain way. Everybody wants to be a radical." –Tom Frank

"The powers that be do not sustain their legitimacy by convincing people that the current system is The Answer. That fiction would be too difficult to sustain in the face of so much evidence to the contrary. What they must do, and what they have done very effectively, is convince the mass of people that there is no alternative." –Stephen Duncombe

"Science fiction is a genre sometimes known for its utopian musings on what a more liberated society would look like. And reading about alien or unknown worlds can inspire fans to go beyond the realm of imagination and explore alternative realities and social arrangements in everyday life." –Annalee Newitz

"Feminism has done a lot to expose the phallogocentrism in our culture. We've begun to collectively unravel how homophobia protects traditional economic arrangements based on gender and sexuality, chief among them marriage. Now we need to take it to the next level. We need to expose the ways in which all gender stereotypes are reflections of the market." –Charles Anders

"A society cannot be reduced to it economic base or social structures. It includes superstructures as well. It requires not only institutions but also "values" and ideas, bodies of knowledge, ethics and (a)esthetics. These terms are not found in Marx and their meaning is perhaps not quite precise. They nonetheless convey the fact that for Marx every society is a totality." –Henri Lefebvre

"universal tolerance as the vision of multicultural justice doesn't hold out much hope for transforming the conditions making tolerance seem necessary in the first place." –Wendy Brown

"Returning to Marx's analysis of commodity fetishism, we can show how this henotheism plays itself out. The realm of commodities is otherworldly. People believe in the special powers of commodities, as surely as they once believed in the special powers of the gods." –Joel Schalit

"Determining the characteristics of what French sociologist Henri Lefebvre once called "the impossible- possible," a vision of a seemingly impossible future that we make possible through our actions now, needs to be a critical organizing principle for any progressive social movement seeking to actually effect change." –Scott Schaffer

"With networks of capital linked worldwide across increasingly porous borders, the downturn of the United States' economy was pulling the world down with it... The phenomenon of globalization has created a new economic geography as capital accumulates in new patterns of centralization that no longer fit state-based economic patterns." –Megan Shaw Prelinger

"The State has been returning to its roots as a coercive entity doing the work of capital… We're back to the model of primitive accumulation, in which the state does nothing but criminalize poverty and vagrancy, and privatize property." –Doug Henwood

"From The Zapatistas to the Intifada, the fight for justice for the women of Juarez in Mexico and the disappeared in South America to the struggles around immigration the world over, solidarity is both central and necessary. When we connect our struggles we can only become stronger and join together to build a new and more just world."

"When The Soviet Union fell, it was promised that a new era of peace would be ushered in. Instead we have more war than ever, from Iraq to the Balkans. Afghanistan, Somalia, Rwanda, Liberia, Chechnya, Palestine, Lebanon are all being torn apart, and the shadow of war darkens Iran, Syria, North Korea, Pakistan and huge areas of Africa."

"Women make up over half the worlds population and likely do 2/3 of the world's labor, yet are rarely paid equally to men, and are often treated like little more than slaves. Queer people and those that refuse the binaries of gender and sexuality in our world are often attacked and oppressed, but they are also some of the most powerful elements in the struggle for social justice and change."

"Our world's dependence on the automobile and its use of oil is increasingly unstable. There is a growing chorus of voices critiquing car culture and articulating alternatives."