Academics are mostly professionals, involved in their work and other concerns of their own, with no particular interest in the workings of the ideological system.

Like most terms of political discourse, socialism has more or less, lost its meaning. Socialism used to mean something. If you go back far enough it meant basically control of production by producers, elimination of wage labor, democratization of all spheres of life; production, commerce, education, media, workers control of factories, community control of communities, and so on. That was socialism once. But it hasn't meant that for a hundred years. Socialism meant something different.

I had two spinster aunts who were seamstresses, and of course unemployed in the 1930s, but the union gave them a life. They had a couple of weeks in the country for a union installation and they had educational programs and all sorts of things. There was a life, you know, a real community.

Every single one cabinet appointment: education, environment, labor - every single one is selected to undermine any aspect of government that's of any help to people, and that doesn't benefit the super-rich. And it's absolutely systematic. The interesting question will be how long Donald Trump's constituency can fall for the con game.

The reason academic disputes are so vicious is that so little is at stake.

Nothing is more inspiring to see how poor and suffering people, living under conditions incomparably worse than we endure, continue quietly and unpretentiously with courageous and committed struggle for justice and dignity.

Just recently, the administration of Barack Obama, which has broken all sorts of records in regards to deportation, picked up a Guatemalan man living here [in U.S]. I think he had been living here for twenty-five years, had a family, a business, and so on. He had fled from the Mayan region and they picked him up and deported him. To me, that's really sick.