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.

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.

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.

I don't want to overvalue Donald Trump as some historical rupture, and to admit that I do think Trump is an indication of a fairly profound change. But the change started a while ago, and it has taken a while to appear. Global capital, particularly western capital, has been in decline since the late 60s and early 70s. The softness appeared in the 60s, the profit rate fell off the table in 1972 - 73, and there have been very uneven recoveries. This has been an ongoing weakening of the productive economy of accumulation at a global scale, of capital's capacity to expand.

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.

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.

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.