The university is one of various funding structures by which people who want to do theoretical work stay alive, the same way that people go to grad school, not because they think it's going to change the world but because there's no patron system anymore, and they need some scaffolding of support while they're trying to figure out how they can proceed in their lives. I think that's utterly legit. A lot of our better theorists and thinkers, that's what the university is for them.

When people are in a workplace where it's possible to organize and engage in labor actions, that's how they fight, and it can be very effective. When people are not in that situation, they fight in other ways. They fight in the marketplace. One need only notice that there's been a meaningful shift in where people are over the last thirty, or fifty years from traditional productive industries toward a kind of work that involves circulation of capital and products, and toward unemployment. People who are in that situation are unlikely to fight somewhere else.

My point is that the alienation of theory and practice, intellectual and manual labor, is a real issue, but it's the outcome of social domination; it's sort of a mistake to blame it on the subjects of that domination.

People often say, "Riots aren't revolutions." That's true. The vast majority of riots never become revolutionary. On the other hand, show me the revolution that started without a riot.

People who oppose violence often defend strikes, forgetting that strikes are historically every bit as violent as riots. They recast history so that strikes were always this ascetic refusal rather than open warfare with private or national military forces, where many, many people died so as to have some possibility of a decent work life, affordable housing, protections - the most practical goals we can imagine.

For a long time, early industrializing countries were absorptive. They were endlessly able to absorb new labor inputs to keep expanding. This was both an economics and a worldview. Here in the United States, we have the Statue of Liberty sitting in the harbor in New York, which says in huge letters, We stand for absorptive capital. A poetic version: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses." But what it means is, Come here, we'll absorb you. We absorb these inputs and add them to our growing economy, and we manage this with liberal democracy.

The most important quote about poetry and politics that I know is from a different situationist, Guy Debord. He was locked in a debate with the French Surrealists, many of whom by the 40s and 50s were part of the French communist party apparatus. Many Surrealists eventually argued for instrumentalizing art for political ends. Debord countered, "I don't want to put poetry in the service of revolution. I want to put revolution in the service of poetry".