The new illiteracy is about more than not knowing how to read the book or the word; it is about not knowing how to read the world.

It is precisely through the indeterminate nature of history that resistance becomes possible and politics refuses any guarantees and remains open.

The cheerleaders for neoliberalism work hard to normalize dominant institutions and relations of power through a vocabulary and public pedagogy that create market-driven subjects, modes of consciousness, and ways of understanding the world that promote accommodation, quietism and passivity.

Trump, like that canary in the coalmine, makes clear what elements of fascism are really like. Let's be honest. The racism, the ignorance, the stupidity, the baiting, the great-man affect, this notion that he exists in a circle of certainty that can't be doubted, this kind of perverse hatred of the other. We've seen this before. This legacy is not new. What we have to recognize is the different form that it takes at a different moment in history.

Capitalism, in my estimation, is not about democracy. I think we're beginning to see an understanding of this. We see it in the Black Lives Matter movement. We see it among black youth who are now struggling and trying to make connections internationally with other groups and trying to figure out what's going on in the world and the ways things like police violence and systemic violence all come together under neoliberalism.

The pessimism of the intellect is the starting point for struggle. It's not the end point, it's the starting point. You have to make something critical to make it meaningful, to make it transformative.

You had workers' movements. You had left organizations, the Communist Party, that were mobilizing in profoundly powerful ways to basically address the great injustices of capitalism.