I think the other side of this is in this balance between the social state and the punishing state, remember, the social state has been decimated. And the question becomes, how is finance capital, how does the 1 percent now resort to governing? And they govern basically through a form of lawlessness and what I call the punishing state, in which we've had a punishment creep, and now it moves from the prison to almost every institution in society, from airports to schools to social services.

The historical legacies of resistance to racism, militarism, privatization and panoptical surveillance have long been forgotten and made invisible in the current assumption that Americans now live in a democratic, post-racial society.

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.

The present generation has been born into a throwaway society of consumers in which both goods and young people are increasingly objectified and disposable.

You have a situation in which the U.S. is fighting three unjust wars and wasting trillions of dollars in public funds, all the while draining money from important social services and public and higher education.

There is a need for subjects who find intense pleasure in commodification of violence and a culture of cruelty.

Problems become privatized and removed from larger social issues. This is one task, connecting the personal problems to larger social issues that progressive leftist intellectuals have failed to take on as a major political and educational project.