Ash Sarkar Quotes

Ash Sarkar

Profession : Journalist

Birth : April 17, 1992

The idea of the NHS took root in the political imagination less as an example of social entitlement's victory over private provision, and more as the embodiment of brand Britain.

Ash Sarkar

When you're a second- or third-generation migrant, your ties to your heritage can feel a little precarious. You're a foreigner here, you're a tourist back in your ancestral land, and home is the magpie nest you construct of the bits of culture you're able to hold close.

Ash Sarkar

My great-great-aunt was a terrorist. I'm not talking about the sense in which the pacifist Mahatma Gandhi was branded a terrorist by the British parliament in 1932: Pritilata Waddedar was an active participant in armed struggle against the British state. She supplied explosives. She fired a gun. And I'm proud of it.

Ash Sarkar

Immigration has tremendously changed the fabric of this country. Immigration is what built our NHS, when Britain invited people from the Commonwealth, from nations it had formerly colonized, in order to rebuild this country after the ravages of the Second World War.

Ash Sarkar

Our modern understanding of cultural appropriation is highly individualised. It's all about what Halloween costume you wear, or who's cooking biryani. But the way in which the idea was first used was to describe a relationship of dominance and exploitation between a global ruling class and a globally subjugated one.

Ash Sarkar

It's important to recognise that opposing racism isn't just about presenting an alternative set of values; it's about looking at how the far right play on people's hardships in order to nurture a sense of enmity between white people and those racialised as migrants.

Ash Sarkar

I believe that nothing so arbitrary as money should be able to come between a person and the means of survival. And that's a really fancy way of saying that it doesn't matter if you're poor - you should have top-quality health care.

Ash Sarkar

As in health, so in crime - prevention is better than cure.

Ash Sarkar

My mum was an anti-racist activist in the 70s and 80s.

Ash Sarkar

Here's the problem with downplaying the radical nature of decommodification: when you empty something of political content, politicians are free to wield symbols as they please.

Ash Sarkar

Not all cultural borrowing is a form of social violence: some of it is just cringe.

Ash Sarkar

There is something deeply wrong with a political culture which only wants to talk about incarceration in the aftermath of a tragedy.

Ash Sarkar

As a long-termist, I acknowledge there are more pressing causes than the abolition of private property.

Ash Sarkar

I can't help but feel that trying to locate a universal femininity in either consumer culture or particular bodily functions serves as a way to opt out of dealing with the multiple processes that impede our full participation in society.

Ash Sarkar

You can't debunk memes with facts. It's like bringing tap-shoes to a gunfight.

Ash Sarkar

Lots of us have been plugging away, building a platform to talk about libertarian communism and post-scarcity economics.

Ash Sarkar

Britain's done a lot of changing in the past 50 years. The decline of manufacturing and heavy industry under Margaret Thatcher ripped the economic heart out of huge swathes of the country, and dramatically transformed class composition.

Ash Sarkar

International Women's Day, if it is to claim any kind of political relevance, has to reject ladies' Christmas consumerism and lowest-common-denominator universalism. Look beyond the pink beer and pyjamas; as feminists we need to be concerned with payslips and passports.

Ash Sarkar

Repressive measures taken by the British government to quell Indian nationalist agitation meant that expansions of the franchise regarding legislative councils were met by mistrust: Indian politicians in Bengal refused to participate in the 1920 elections, and formally adopted a policy of boycott and non-cooperation.

Ash Sarkar

Human labor cannot compete with fixed capital - that's just a fact.

Ash Sarkar