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.

Young black men are not only being arrested and channeled into the criminal justice system in record numbers, they are also being targeted by the police, harassed by security forces, and in some instances killed because they are black and assumed to be dangerous.

Historical and public memory is not merely on the side of domination.

Think of the question of mass incarceration. Think of the coding that the Republican Party has used for years, whether they're talking about Obama or blacks or Willie Horton.

I think, at some level, we see young people all over the country mobilizing around different issues, in which they're doing something that I haven't seen for a long time. And that is, they're linking issues together. You can't talk about police violence without talking about the militarization of society in general. You can't talk about the assault on public education unless you talk about the way in which capitalism defunds all public goods. You can't talk about the prison system without talking about widespread racism. You can't do that. They're making those connections.

As the pleasure principle is unconstrained by a moral compass based on a respect for others, it is increasingly shaped by the need for intense excitement and a never-ending flood of heightened sensations.

We're talking about the Communist Party, the Socialist worker's movement, those movements basically have been underlined. We have other movements, but they're not as powerful as the movements that we had then.