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.

There is the emergence of a militarized society that now organizes itself for the production of violence. A society in which the range of acceptable opinion inevitably shrinks.

I think people now live in an age in which the only thing - they don't think about getting ahead. They think about surviving.

When you begin to suggest that dissent, opposition, resistance, the only way to deal with it is not to listen to it and to engage in dialog with it, but basically to label it as anarchy and to repress it with the most violent, in the most violent means possible. I mean, that's essentially an element of neofascism. That's not about democracy.

The future doesn't have to mimic the worst parts of the present. There are new ways of sharing information, and as long as they don't give up on the importance of politics, the future is certainly open.

I think the other side of this is that while the contradictions matter, one of the things that you cannot lose sight of is that even with a guy like [George] Soros the thing that he doesn't question, which does unify that class, is that they don't want to get rid of the capitalist system, they don't see an alternative.

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.