The prevailing move in American society to a permanent war status does more than promote a set of unifying symbols that embrace a survival of the fittest ethic, promoting conformity over dissent, the strong over the weak, and fear over responsibility, it also gives rise to what David Graeber has called a "language of command" in which violence becomes the most important element of power and mediating force in shaping social relationships.

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.

Individual interests now trump any consideration of the good of society just as all problems are ultimately laid at the door of the solitary individual, whose fate is shaped by forces far beyond his or her capacity for personal responsibility.

In any totalitarian society, dissent is viewed as a threat, civic literacy is denounced, and those public spheres that produce engage citizens are dismantled or impoverished through the substitution of training for education.

Given that by age 23, almost a third of Americans are arrested for a crime, it becomes clear that in the new militarized state young people, especially poor minorities, are viewed as predators, a threat to corporate governance, and are treated as disposable populations.

Public problems collapse into the limited and depoliticized register of private issues.

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.