We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt.

You can't have cutthroat competition when there's no one stopping you from actually cutting each other's throats. In order to build up trust we also have to think about each other's needs and it creates an entirely different dynamic.

The working poor are the people suffering out subprime mortgages and fatal loans and more and more of our money - you know, capitalism is operated by extracting money, not so much directly being paid.

I came to the conclusion that most people in America would really like to be able to get a job where they think they're doing something noble and nice and good and it isn't just for the money. But the reason they hate what they call the cultural elite is that they see it as a class that's grabbed all the jobs where you can get paid to do something that isn't just for the money - if it's art, if it's charity, if it's intellectual, if it's political, whatever it might be.

I think we need to think of capitalism as a very bad way of organizing communism. Much of what we do is already communism, so just expand it.

Capitalism is like this fractal thing where anything that contains an element of capitalism anywhere inside it is just something that turns into capitalism. It is an incredibly defeatist attitude. If you choose to look at reality that way, I suppose you can, but you have to do enormous violence to reality to do so consistently.

What we're already doing is communism. The first step we have to make is to realize that we're already closer to it than we think.