The promises of modernity regarding progress, freedom and hope have not been eliminated; they have been reconfigured, stripped of their emancipatory potential and relegated to the logic of a savage market instrumentality.

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.

University presidents should be loud and forceful in defending the university as a social good, essential to the democratic culture and economy of a nation. They should be criticizing the prioritizing of funds for military and prison expenditures over funds for higher education. And this argument should be made as a defense of education, as a crucial public good, and it should be taken seriously. But they aren't making these arguments.

Modernity has reneged on its promise to young people to provide social mobility, stability and collective security. Long-term planning and the institutional structures that support them are now relegated to the imperatives of privatization, deregulation, flexibility and short-term profits.

The issue of who gets to define the future, own the nation's wealth, shape the parameters of the social state, control the globe's resources, and create a formative culture for producing engaged and socially responsible citizens is no longer a rhetorical issue, but offers up new categories for defining how matters of representations, education, economic justice, and politics are to be defined and fought over. At stake here is the need for both a language of critique and possibility.

But we need more than a broader understanding of what is a good society or a moral and political critique of the existing market fundamentalism engulfing American society, we also need to create new forms of solidarity, new and broad based social movements that move beyond the isolated and fractured politics of the current historical moment.

Collective insurance policies and social protections have given way to the forces of economic deregulation, the transformation of the welfare state into punitive workfare programs, the privatization of public goods and an appeal to individual accountability as a substitute for social responsibility.