Tony Benn 1925 – 2014

"Our society, as it is now structured, consists still of a few individual successes built upon a pedestal of statutory failure – economic failure, educational failure, or failure of some other sort. The whole competitive idea that a nation must have so many failures in order to produce one success is ludicrous yet it is the foundation of capitalist ideology. Why do we describe so many people as having failed? Why are we not able to recognize that in any society the richest resource is people? Why is it that people when they do have the free time now available to them do not have the facilities for discovering the potential that lies within them? Asking questions like this, you come to realize that at the deepest level socialism must mean liberation."

– Tony Benn, Parliament, People and Power: Agenda for a Free Society




Read Leo Panitch's tribute to the Benn in the Guardian.

Read Tony Benn's introduction to Gerrard Winstanley's A Common Treasury on our blog here.