Over the last few decades, I've grown more skeptical about a few things in which I used to have more faith. I believe as much in the necessity of, and the possibility of, revolution as I ever did. At the same time, I've grown more skeptical about poetry's role in it or art's contribution to it, and I've grown more skeptical about the university. Universities are big companies, and they're disciplinary in the way that any big institution is. I've found that the political militancy that the professoriate has mostly been fairly repressive of what I take to be necessary politics.

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.

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.

Even as I've become more reticent about the political possibilities of the academic space, I want to note that students have played significant roles in insurrectionary activity across the globe for decades and centuries, and I don't think that we've crossed some threshold where that's never going to happen again. We still need to take the university space quite seriously.

People do make considered choices about whether they want to fight, and how, and they do so from disparate circumstances. But I think there are two important frameworks in which those choices get made. One, their degree of immiseration. The greatest predictor of who will engage in criminal activity is poverty, which tells us that the decisions people make about how unlawful they're willing to be are decisively based in their own experience of immiseration. The second framework is that when people choose to act, they inevitably act where they are.

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.