All societies are based on a sort of minimum level of communism. Otherwise, you couldn't have any social relations at all.

If you imagine that everything is an exchange, then we're supposed to just transact and walk away. If we haven't walked away and we still have a relationship, it's because there's a debt.

Communism is the basis of all sociality and it's the basis of cooperation.

Neoliberalism isn't an economic program - it's a political program designed to produce hopelessness and kill any future alternatives.

But in the years since the neoliberal project really has been stripped down to what was always its essence: not an economic project at all, but a political project, designed to devastate the imagination, and willing - with it's cumbersome securitization and insane military projects - to destroy the capitalist order itself if that's what it took to make it seem inevitable.

Student loans are destroying the imagination of youth. If there’s a way of a society committing mass suicide, what better way than to take all the youngest, most energetic, creative, joyous people in your society and saddle them with, like $50,000 of debt so they have to be slaves? There goes your music. There goes your culture. There goes everything new that would pop out. And in a way, this is what’s happened to our society. We’re a society that has lost any ability to incorporate the interesting, creative and eccentric people.

I would like, then, to end by putting in a good word for the non-industrious poor. At least they aren’t hurting anyone. Insofar as the time they are taking time off from work is being spent with friends and family, enjoying and caring for those they love, they’re probably improving the world more than we acknowledge.