In any totalitarian society, dissent is viewed as a threat, civic literacy is denounced, and those public spheres that produce engage citizens are dismantled or impoverished through the substitution of training for education.

As a mode of public pedagogy, a state of permanent war needs willing subjects to abide by its values, ideology, and narratives of fear and violence. Such legitimation is largely provided through a market-driven culture addicted to the production of consumerism, militarism and organized violence, largely circulated through various registers of popular culture that extend from high fashion and Hollywood movies to the creation of violent video games and music concerts sponsored by the Pentagon.

Violence now becomes the only tool by which we can actually mediate social problems that should be dealt with in very different ways.

When we talk about total war, and we talk about war zones, and we talk about the breakdown of the cities, when you exclude questions of race from that discourse, something disappears that's really central to the forms of repression that we're talking about.

Occupy did something fabulous. What Occupy made clear was that there is an inequality at the heart of American democracy that undermines it, if not ruins it. That served a purpose. It suggested that we need a new language and we need a new way of understanding exactly how politics leaves people out, particularly young people.

You live in a country that's marked by celebrity culture, you know, that basically infantilizes people, paralyzes them, eliminates all notions of civic literacy, turns the school into bastions of ignorance. They completely kill the radical imagination in any fundamental way.

Youth are no longer the place where society reveals its dreams.