(Image: Youth silhouette, blurred crowd via Shutterstock; Edited: JR/TO)
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"The danger is that a global, universally interrelated
civilization may produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing
millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are
the conditions of savages."
- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Following Hannah Arendt, a dark cloud of political and ethical ignorance has descended on the United States.
(1) Thoughtlessness
has become something that now occupies a privileged, if not celebrated,
place in the political landscape and the mainstream cultural
apparatuses. A new kind of infantilism now shapes daily life as adults
gleefully take on the role of unthinking children and children are
taught to be adults, stripped of their innocence and subject to a range
of disciplinary pressures designed to cripple their ability to be
imaginative.
(2)
To read more articles by Henry A. Giroux and other authors in the Public Intellectual Project, click here.
Under such circumstances, agency devolves into a kind of
anti-intellectual cretinism evident in the babble of banality produced
by Fox News, celebrity culture, schools modeled after prisons and
politicians who support creationism, argue against climate change and
denounce almost any form of reason. The citizen now becomes a consumer;
the politician, a slave to corporate money and power; and the burgeoning
army of anti-public intellectuals in the mainstream media present
themselves as unapologetic enemies of anything that suggests compassion,
a respect for the commons and democracy itself.
Education is no longer a public good but a private right, just as
critical thinking is no longer a fundamental necessity for creating an
engaged and socially responsible citizenship. Neoliberalism's disdain
for the social is no longer a quote made famous by Margaret Thatcher.
The public sphere is now replaced by private interests, and unbridled
individualism rails against any viable notion of solidarity that might
inform the vibrancy of struggle, change, and an expansion of an
enlightened and democratic body politic.
Listen to an interview with Henry A. Giroux on "Disposable Youth" at CBC Radio.
One outcome is that we live at a time in which institutions that were
designed to limit human suffering and indignity and protect the public
from the boom and bust cycles of capitalist markets have been either
weakened or abolished.
(3)
Free market policies, values and practices, with their now unrestrained
emphasis on the privatization of public wealth, the denigration of
social protections and the deregulation of economic activity, influence
practically every commanding political and economic institution in North
America. Finance capitalism now drives politics, governance and policy
in unprecedented ways and is more than willing to sacrifice the future
of young people for short-term political and economic gains, regardless
of the talk about the need to not burden future generations "with
hopelessly heavy tuition debt."
(4) It gets worse.
Nation-states organized by neoliberal priorities have implicitly declared war on their children.
Under market fundamentalism, there is a separation of market values,
behavior and practices from ethical considerations and social costs
giving rise to a growing theater of cruelty and abuse throughout North
America. Public spheres that once encouraged progressive ideas,
enlightened social policies, democratic values, critical dialogue and
exchange have been increasingly commercialized. Or, they have been
replaced by corporate settings whose ultimate fidelity is to increasing
profit margins and producing a vast commercial and celebrity culture
"that tends to function so as to erase everything that matters."
(5)
Since the 1980s, the scale of human suffering, immiseration and
hardship has intensified, accompanied by a theater of cruelty in which
violence, especially the daily spectacle of Black men being brutalized
or killed by the police, feeds the 24-hour news cycle. The tentacles of
barbarism appear to be reaching into every aspect of daily life.
Domestic terrorism has come home and it increasingly targets the young.
Given these conditions, an overwhelming catalogue of evidence has
come into view that indicates that nation-states organized by neoliberal
priorities have implicitly declared war on their children, offering a
disturbing index of societies in the midst of a deep moral and political
catastrophe.
(6)
Too many young people today live in an era of foreclosed hope, an era
in which it is difficult either to imagine a life beyond the dictates of
a market-driven society or to transcend the fear that any attempt to do
so can only result in a more dreadful nightmare.
As Jennifer Silva has pointed out, this generation of especially
"young working-class men and women ... are trying to figure out what it
means to be an adult in a world of disappearing jobs, soaring education
costs and shrinking social support networks.... They live at home
longer, spend more years in college, change jobs more frequently and
start families later."
(7)
Youth today are not only plagued by the fragility and uncertainty of
the present; they are "the first post war generation facing the prospect
of downward mobility [in which the] plight of the outcast stretches to
embrace a generation as a whole."
(8)
It is little wonder that "these youngsters are called Generation Zero: A
generation with Zero opportunities, Zero future" and Zero expectations.
(9) Or to use Guy Standing's term, "the precariat,"
(10)
which he defines as "a growing proportion of our total society" forced
to "accept a life of unstable labour and unstable living."
(11)
If youth were once the repository of society's dreams, that is no longer true.
Beyond exposing the moral depravity of a society that fails to
provide for its youth, the symbolic and real violence waged against many
young people suggests nothing less than a perverse collective death
wish - especially visible when youth protest their conditions. As Alain
Badiou argues, we live in an era in which there is near zero tolerance
for democratic protest and "infinite tolerance for the crimes of bankers
and government embezzlers which affect the lives of millions."
(12)
This is certainly true of the United States. How else to explain the
FBI's willingness to label as a "terrorist threat" youthful activists
speaking against corporate and government misdeeds, while at the same
time the Bureau refuses to press criminal charges against the banking
giant HSBC for laundering billions of dollars for Mexican drug cartels
and terrorist groups linked to al-Qaeda?
(13)
If youth were once the repository of society's dreams, that is no
longer true. Increasingly, young people are viewed as a public disorder,
a dream now turned into a nightmare. Many youth live in a post-9/11
social order that positions them as a prime target of its governing
through crime complex. This is made obvious by the many "get tough"
policies that now render young people as criminals, while depriving them
of basic health care, education and social services. Punishment and
fear have replaced compassion and social responsibility as the most
important modalities for mediating the relationship of youth to the
larger social order, all too evident by the upsurge of zero-tolerance
laws, along with the expanding reach of the punishing state in both the
United States and Canada.
(14)
When the criminalization of social problems becomes a mode of
governance and war its default strategy, youth are reduced to soldiers
or targets - not social investments. As anthropologist Alain Bertho
points out, "Youth is no longer considered the world's future, but as a
threat to its present."
(15)
Increasingly, the only political discourses available for many young
people are either a disciplinary one or one of "emotional
self-management."
(16)
Youth are now removed from any talk about democracy. Their absence is
symptomatic of a society that has turned against itself, punishes its
children and does so at the risk of crippling the entire body politic.
Too many youth now represent the absent present in any discourse about
the contemporary moment, the future and democracy itself, and
increasingly fall prey to what I call the war on youth, a war that can
be traced back to the 1970s.
(17)
The war on youth emerged when the social contract, however
compromised and feeble, came crashing to the ground around the time
Margaret Thatcher "married" Ronald Reagan. Both were hard-line advocates
of a market fundamentalism, and announced respectively that there was
no such thing as society and that government was the problem, not the
solution to citizens' woes. Within a short time, democracy and the
political process were hijacked by corporations and the call for
austerity policies became cheap copy for weakening the welfare state,
public values and public goods. The results of this emerging neoliberal
regime included a widening gap between the rich and the poor, a growing
culture of cruelty and the dismantling of social provisions. One result
has been that the promise of youth has given way to an age of
market-induced angst, and a view of many young people as a threat to
short-term investments, privatization, untrammeled self-interest and
quick profits.
Young people today are expected to inhabit a set of relations in which the only obligation is to live for oneself.
Under such circumstances, all bets are off regarding the future of
democracy. Besides a growing inability to translate private troubles
into social issues, what is also being lost in the current historical
conjuncture is the very idea of the public good, the notion of
connecting learning to social change and developing modes of civic
courage infused by the principles of social justice. Under the regime of
a ruthless economic Darwinism, we are witnessing the crumbling of
social bonds and the triumph of individual desires over social rights,
nowhere more exemplified than in the gated communities, gated
intellectuals and gated values that have become symptomatic of a society
that has lost all claims to democracy or for that matter any modestly
progressive vision for the future.
As one eminent sociologist points out, "Visions have nowadays fallen
into disrepute and we tend to be proud of what we should be ashamed of."
(18)
For instance, politicians such as former Vice President Dick Cheney not
only refuse to apologize for the immense suffering and displacement
they have imposed on the Iraqi people, but they seem to gloat in
defending such policies. Doublespeak takes on a new register as
President Obama employs the discourse of national security to sanction a
surveillance state, a kill list and the ongoing killing of young
children by drones. This expanding landscape of lies has not only
produced an illegal war and justified state torture; it also provided a
justification for the United States' slide into barbarism after the
tragic events of 9/11. Yet, such acts of state violence appear to be of
little concern to the shameless apostles of permanent war.
Politics has become an extension of war, just as "systemic economic
insecurity and anxiety" and state-sponsored violence increasingly find
legitimation in the discourses of privatization and demonization, which
promote anxiety, moral panics and fear, and undermine any sense of
communal responsibility for the well-being of others. Too many young
people today learn quickly that their fate is solely a matter of
individual responsibility, irrespective of wider structural forces. This
is a much promoted hyper-competitive ideology, which includes a message
that surviving in a society demands reducing social relations to forms
of social combat. Young people today are expected to inhabit a set of
relations in which the only obligation is to live for oneself and to
reduce the responsibilities of citizenship to the demands of a consumer
culture. Yet, there is more at work here than a flight from social
responsibility, if not politics itself. Also lost is the importance of
those social bonds, modes of collective reasoning, public spheres and
cultural apparatuses crucial to the formation of a sustainable
democratic society.
The War Against Youth
In what follows, I want to address the intensifying assault on young
people through the related concepts of "soft war" and "hard war."
(19)
The idea of the soft war considers the changing conditions of youth
within the relentless expansion of a global market society. Partnered
with a massive advertising machinery, the soft war targets all children
and youth, devaluing them by treating them as yet another "market" to be
commodified and exploited, and conscripting them into the system
through relentless attempts to create a new generation of
hyper-consumers.
This low-intensity war is waged by a variety of corporate
institutions through the educational force of a culture that
commercializes every aspect of kids' lives, and now uses the internet
and various social networks, along with new media technologies such as
smart phones, to immerse young people in the world of mass consumption
in ways that are more direct and expansive than anything we have seen in
the past. Commercially carpet-bombed by an advertising industry that in
the United States spent $170 billion in 2012, the typical child is
exposed to about 40,000 ads a year and by the time they reach the fourth
grade have memorized 300 to 400 brands.
An entire generation is being drawn into a world of consumerism in
which commodities and brand loyalty become both the most important
markers of identity and the primary frameworks for mediating one's
relationship to the world. Increasingly, many young people, recast as
commodities, can only recognize themselves in terms preferred by the
market. As Zygmunt Bauman points out, youth are simultaneously
"promoters of commodities and the commodities they promote" - defined as
both brands and merchandise, on the one hand, and marketing agents on
the other.
(20)
The data-mining marketers make young people think they count when in fact "all they want to do is count them."
Corporations have hit gold with the new media and can inundate young
people directly with their market-driven values, desires and identities,
all of which fly under the radar, escaping the watchful eyes and
interventions of concerned parents and other adults. The data-mining
marketers make young people think they count when in fact "all they want
to do is count them."
(21)
The dominant culture's overbearing ecology of consumption now works to
selectively eliminate and reorder the possible modes of political,
social and ethical vocabularies made available to youth. Young people's
most private experiences are now colonized by a consumerist ethic that
deforms their sense of agency, desires, values and hopes. Trapped within
a spectacle of marketing, their capacity to be critically engaged and
socially responsible citizens is greatly diminished.
At the same time, the influence of the new screen and electronic
culture on young peoples' habits is disturbing. For instance, a 2010
study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that young people ages 8 to
18 now spend more than seven and a half hours a day with smart phones,
computers, televisions and other electronic devices.
(22)
When you add the additional time youth spend texting, talking on their
cellphones and doing multiple tasks at once, such as "watching TV while
updating Facebook - the number rises to 11 hours of total media content
each day."
(23) There
is a greater risk here to youth than what seems to be emerging as a new
form of depoliticization and thoughtlessness conveniently labeled as
attention deficit disorder. The risk is that young people's lives will
eventually be filled entirely by these distractions, and they will be
denied the time necessary for thoughtful analysis and the pedagogical
conditions necessary for them to read critically both the word and the
world.
What are the consequences of the soft war? Public spaces have been
transformed into neoliberal disimagination zones, which makes it more
difficult for young people to find public spheres where they can locate
themselves and translate metaphors of hope into meaningful action. The
dreamscapes that make up a society built on the promises of mass
consumption translate deftly into ad copy, insistently promoting and
normalizing a neoliberal order in which economic relations now provide
the master script for how young people define themselves, their
relations with others and the larger world.
Of course, some youth are doing their best to resist the commercial
onslaught and to stay ahead of the commodification and privatization of
new media technologies. These youth are using social and digital media
as creative tools to assert a range of oppositional practices and forms
of protest that constitute a new realm of political activity, one that
will increase in the future, and an important source of struggle and
resistance.
The Hard War
Turning now to the hard war, this is a more serious and dangerous
development for young people, especially those who are marginalized by
virtue of their ethnicity, race or class. The hard war refers to the
harshest elements of a growing youth crime-control complex that operates
through a logic of punishment, surveillance and control. The young
people targeted by its punitive measures are often poor youth of color
who are considered failed consumers and who can only afford to live on
the margins of a commercial culture that excludes anybody without money,
resources and leisure time to spare. Or they are youth considered
uneducable and unemployable, and therefore troublesome.
The imprint of the youth crime-control complex can be traced in the
increasingly popular practice of organizing schools through disciplinary
practices that subject students to constant surveillance through
high-tech security devices while imposing on them harsh and often
thoughtless zero-tolerance policies that closely resemble measures used
currently by the criminal justice system. In this instance, poor youth
and youth of color become objects of a new mode of governance based on
the crudest forms of disciplinary control. Punished if they don't show
up at school and punished even if they do attend school, many of these
students are funneled into what has been ominously called the
"school-to-prison pipeline." If middle- and upper-class kids are subject
to the seductions of market-driven public relations, working-class
youth are caught in the crosshairs between the arousal of commercial
desire and the harsh impositions of securitization, surveillance and
policing.
In the US today 500,000 young people are incarcerated and 2.5 million are arrested annually.
How else do we explain the fact that in the United States today
500,000 young people are incarcerated and 2.5 million are arrested
annually, and that by the age of 23, "almost a third of Americans have
been arrested for a crime"?
(24)
What kind of society allows 1.6 million children to be homeless at any
given time in a year? Or allows massive inequalities in wealth and
income to produce a politically and morally dysfunctional society in
which "45 percent of US residents live in households that struggle to
make ends meet"?
(25)
Current statistics paint a bleak picture for young people in the
United States: 1.5 million are unemployed, which marks a 17-year high;
12.5 million are without food; and in what amounts to a national
disgrace, one out of every five US children lives in poverty. Nearly
half of all US children and 90 percent of Black youngsters will be on
food stamps at some point during childhood.
(26)
What are we to make of a society in which there were more young people
killed on the streets of Chicago since 2001 then were US soldiers killed
in Afghanistan? To be more exact, 5,000 people were killed by gunfire
in Chicago, many of them children, while 2,000 troops were killed
between 2001 and 2012.
(27)
A type of mad violence appears to be at the heart of political and
everyday life in the United States. The National Rifle Association and
its political lackeys support a gun culture that calls for arming
students in schools. Since the passage in 1990 of the National Defense
Authorization Act, which allowed the US Department of Defense to
transfer surplus military equipment to local police forces, the police
now have access to armored troop carriers, night vision rifles, Humvees,
M16 automatic rifles, grenade launchers and other weapons designed for
military tactics.
(28)
As the war on terror comes home, public spaces have been transformed
into war zones, and the militarized police forces have taken on the role
of an occupying army, especially in poor neighborhoods of color. Acting
as a paramilitary force, the police have become a new symbol of
domestic terrorism, shaking down youth of color by criminalizing a
multitude of behaviors. This was especially true in the stop-and-frisk
policies so widespread under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg in New York
City. In Ferguson, Missouri, the entire population was criminalized in
what can only be described as a racist shakedown. As David Graeber puts
it,
The Department of Justice's investigation of the Ferguson Police
Department has scandalized the nation, and justly so. But the
department's institutional racism, while shocking, isn't the report's
most striking revelation. More damning is this: in a major American
city, the criminal justice system perceives a large part of that city's
population not as citizens to be protected, but as potential targets for
what can only be described as a shake-down operation designed to wring
money out of the poorest and most vulnerable by any means they could,
and that as a result, the overwhelming majority of Ferguson's citizens
had outstanding warrants. (29)
The rise of the punishing state and the war on terror has emboldened
police forces across the United States, and in doing so feeds their use
of racist violence against young people resulting in what has been
called an "epidemic of police brutality." Sadly, even young children of
color are not immune from such violence, as the killing of Tamir Rice on
November 22, 2014, by a White policeman has made clear. Even more
tragic is the fact that the City of Cleveland tried to blame the
12-year-old boy for his own death.
(30)
Rice was holding a BB gun when he was shot to death by a police officer
judged unfit for duty in 2012. The killing of Black men has taken on
the image of a cruel sport promoted by police forces that now hype the
lawlessness and extreme violence that has replaced any viable notion of
democratic idealism. Between January 2012 and December 2014, 38 unarmed
Black men have been killed by the police.
(31)
Many people in the United States now live in a culture that is not
only being increasingly militarized, but also supports a growing
indifference to such cruelty, reinforced by a notion of exaggerated
self-reliance, rugged individualism and privatization, all of which
renders group solidarities repugnant and reinforces the idea that care
for the other is both a pathology and a liability. Hence, it should come
as no surprise that the United States currently has more police,
prisons, spies, weapons and soldiers than at any other time in its
history - this coupled with a growing "army" of the unemployed and
incarcerated.
In addition, the military-industrial complex now joins hands with the
entertainment industry in producing everything from children's toys to
video games that both construct a militarized form of masculinity and
serve as an enticement for recruitment. In fact, more than 10 million
people have downloaded "America's Army" and its various updates,
including the more recent, "America's Army: Proving Grounds," a
first-person shooter computer game the US Army uses as a recruitment
tool.
(32)
Such representations of masculinity and aggression mimic fascism's
militarization of the public sphere, through which violence becomes the
ultimate language, referent and currency. This machinery of
normalization makes it more difficult to understand how war becomes a
source of pride rather than alarm, just as violence becomes mythologized
and the war on terror is transformed into a war on society itself and
the political order. But this culture of militarized hardness is not
confined to the United States.
Young people inhabit a new and more unsettling scene of suffering, a dead zone of the imagination.
In Canada, one child in six lives in poverty, but for Aboriginal and
immigrant children that figure rises to 25 percent or more,
respectively. By all accounts, the rate of incarceration for Aboriginal
youth - already eight times higher than for non-Aboriginal youth - will
continue to skyrocket as a result of the Harper government's so-called
Safe Streets and Community Act, which emulates the failed policies of
the US system by, among other things, strengthening requirements to
detain and sentence more youth to custody in juvenile detention centers.
(33)
Surely one conclusion that can be drawn from the inquest into the
tragic suicide of 19-year-old Ashley Smith, who spent five years of her
life in and out of detention facilities, is that incarceration for young
people can be equivalent to a death sentence.
(34)
Against the idealistic rhetoric of governments that claim to venerate
young people lies the reality of societies that increasingly view youth
through the optic of law and order, societies that appear all too
willing to treat youth as criminals and when necessary make them
"disappear" into the farthest reaches of the carceral state. Under such
circumstances, the administration of schools and social services has
given way to modes of confinement that retain the purpose of ensuring
"custody and control."
(35)
As I have already suggested, many schools in the United States are
modeled after prisons with their high-tech surveillance cameras, the
presence of police and security guards and punitive zero-tolerance
policies. How else to explain children as young as 12 being subjected to
stun guns, handcuffed and removed from class for doodling on a desk, or
suspended from school for bringing in a toy GI gun. It gets worse. John
Whitehead, the president of the Rutherford Institute, has documented
young girls being suspended or expelled from school for having Midol or
Alka-Seltzer in their purse, and children being suspended for playing
cops and robbers. Instead of being sent to the principal's office for
even a minor infraction such as violating dress codes, many children are
handcuffed, taken from the classroom, put in a patrol car and driven to
a police station. And that is only the beginning of the nightmare for
these kids and their families.
The plight of poor youth of color today also extends beyond the
severity of material deprivations and violence they experience daily.
Many young people have been forced to view the world and redefine the
nature of their own youth within the borders of hopelessness, insecurity
and despair. There is little basis on which to imagine a better future
lying just beyond the highly restrictive spaces of commodification and
containment. Neoliberal austerity in social spending means an entire
generation of youth will not have access to decent jobs, the material
comforts, educational opportunities or the security available to
previous generations.
In Canada, there is a new generation of youth who have to think, act
and talk like adults, and worry about their families, which may be
headed by a single parent or two out of work and searching for a job. In
the United States, young people are further burdened by registers of
extreme poverty that pose the dire challenge of getting enough money to
buy food and facing the arduous task of determining how long it will
take to see a doctor in case of illness. These young people inhabit a
new and more unsettling scene of suffering, a dead zone of the
imagination, which constitutes a site of terminal exclusion - one that
reveals not only the vast and destabilizing inequalities in neoliberal
economic landscapes, but also portends a future that has no purchase on
the hope that characterizes a vibrant democracy.
Politics and power are now on the side of lawlessness as is obvious
in the state's endless violations of civil liberties, freedom of speech
and most constitutional rights, mostly done in the name of national
security. Lawlessness now wraps itself in government dictates. In
Canada, it is evident in Prime Minister Stephen Harper's support for
Bill C-51, an anti-terrorist bill that further limits civil rights
through a pedagogy of fear and racist demonization. It is also apparent
in the United Sates in such policies as the Patriot Act, the National
Defense Authorization Act, the Military Commissions Act and a host of
other legal illegalities. These would include the right of the president
"to order the assassination of any citizen whom he considers allied
with terrorists,"
(36)
to use secret evidence to detain individuals indefinitely, to develop a
massive surveillance apparatus to monitor every audio and electronic
communication used by citizens who have not committed a crime, to employ
state torture against those considered enemy combatants and to block
the courts from prosecuting those officials who commit such heinous
crimes.
(37) The
ruling corporate elites have made terror rational and fear the modus
operandi of politics. Neoliberal capital is based on a Hobbesian mantra
of a war against all and a survival of the fittest ethic, and one
consequence is an aggressive politics of disposability and
disappearance.
Young people aligning with others can be a vibrant source of creativity, possibility and political struggle.
Educators, individuals, artists, intellectuals and various social
movements need to make visible both the workings of market
fundamentalism "in all of its forms of exploitation whether personal,
political, or economic," and they "need to reconstruct a platform" and
set of strategies to oppose it. Clearly, any political formation that
matters must challenge the savage social costs casino capitalism has
enacted and work to undo the forms of social, political and economic
violence that young people are experiencing on a daily level. This will
demand more than one-day demonstrations. What is needed is a resurgence
of public memory, civic literacy and civic courage - that is, a
willingness to both "effectively analyze the structures and mechanisms
of capitalist power [in order] to formulate a sophisticated political
response" and the willingness to build longstanding oppositional
movements.
(38) Traces of such movements are beginning to emerge all over the globe, especially in countries such as Spain and Greece.
In North America, we have seen important, though inconclusive,
attempts on the part of young people to break the hold of power. This
was evident in the Occupy movement, the Quebec student movement, the
Idle No More opposition and the recent "Black Lives Matter" protests.
What all of these movements have made clear is that young people
aligning with others can be a vibrant source of creativity, possibility
and political struggle. Moreover, these movements in their various
contemporary manifestations point to a crucial political project in
which young people have raised new questions about anti-democratic
forces in the United States and Canada that are threatening the
collective survival of vast numbers of people.
Evident in the legacy of these political movements, however slow
their progression or setbacks, is a cry of collective indignation over
economic and social injustices that pose a threat to humankind. They
also make clear how young people and others can use new technologies,
develop democratic social formations, and enact forms of critical
pedagogy and civil disobedience necessary for addressing the
anti-democratic forces that have been corrupting North American
political culture since the 1970s. Young people have shown that
austerity policies can be defeated; state violence can be held
accountable; collective struggles are worthwhile; and specific and
isolated protests can be transformed into broad social movements that
pose a fundamental challenge to neoliberal ideologies and modes of
governance.
(39)
Current protests among young people in the United States, Canada and
elsewhere in the world make clear that demonstrations are not - indeed,
cannot be
- only a short-term project for reform. Young people need to enlist all
generations to develop a truly global political movement that is
accompanied by the reclaiming of public spaces, the progressive use of
digital technologies, the development of new public spheres, the
production of new modes of education and the safeguarding of places
where democratic expression, new civic values, democratic public
spheres, new modes of identification and collective hope can be nurtured
and developed. A formative culture must be put in place pedagogically
and institutionally in a variety of spheres extending from churches and
public and higher education to all those cultural apparatuses engaged in
the production of collective knowledge, desire, identities and
democratic values.
The struggles here are myriad and urgent and point to the call for a
living wage, food security, accessible education, jobs programs
(especially for the young), the democratization of power, economic
equality and a massive shift in funds away from the machinery of war and
big banks. Any collective struggle that matters has to embrace
education as the center of politics and the source of an embryonic
vision of the good life outside of the imperatives of unfettered
"free-market" capitalism. In addition, too many progressives and people
on the left are stuck in the discourse of foreclosure and cynicism and
need to develop what Stuart Hall calls a "sense of politics being
educative, of politics changing the way people see things."
(40)
There is a need for educators, young people, artists and other
cultural workers to develop languages of both critique and hope along
with an educative politics in which people can address the historical,
structural and ideological conditions at the core of the violence being
waged by the corporate and repressive state, and to make clear that
government increasingly subsumed by global market sovereignty is no
longer responsive to the most basic needs of young people. All the
issues that matter in a substantive democratic society are under siege
by the forces of neoliberalism and any viable challenge requires
movement building that is a long-term project. Young people need more
than demonstrations and demolition squads; they need to take on the
future by merging the power of the imagination and a politics of
educated hope with long-term strategies, durable organizations and new
political formations.
The issue of who gets to define the future, share in the nation's
wealth, shape the parameters of the social state, steward and protect
the globe's resources and create a formative culture for producing
engaged and socially responsible citizens is no longer a rhetorical
issue. This challenge offers up new categories for defining how matters
of representation, education, economic justice and politics are to be
defined and fought over. This is a difficult task, but what we are
seeing in cities such as Chicago, Athens, Quebec, Paris, Madrid and
other sites of massive inequality throughout the world is the beginning
of a long struggle for the institutions, values and infrastructures that
make communities the center of a robust, radical democracy. I realize
this sounds a bit utopian, but we have few choices if we are going to
struggle for a future that does a great deal more than endlessly repeat
the present. We may live in dark times, but as Slavoj Žižek rightly
insists, "The only realist option is to do what appears impossible
within this system. This is how the impossible becomes possible."
(41)
Footnotes:
1. Hannah Arendt,
The Origins of Totalitarianism, (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York: 2001).
2. See, for instance, Andre Spicer, "Adults with colouring books, kids with CVs - it's a world turned upside down,"
The Guardian (April 8, 2015). Online:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/08/adults-colouring-books-kids-cvs-lego-children
3. This theme is taken up powerfully by a number of theorists. See C. Wright Mills,
The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Richard Sennett,
The Fall of Public Man (New York: Norton, 1974); Zygmunt Bauman,
In Search of Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); and Henry A. Giroux,
Public Spaces, Private Lives (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001).
4. Noam Chomsky, "The Death of American Universities,"
Jacobin (March 3, 2015). Online:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/03/the-death-of-american-universities/
5. Angela Y. Davis,
Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture, (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), p. 91.
6. J.F. Conway, "Quebec: Making War on Our Children,"
Socialist Project, E-Bulletin No. 651, (June 10, 2012). Online:
http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/651.php
7. Jennifer M. Silva, "Young and Isolated,"
International New York Times (June 22, 2013). Online:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/22/young-and-isolated/?_r=0
8. Zygmunt Bauman,
On Education, (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012), p. 46.
9. Zygmunt Bauman,
This Is Not A Diary, (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012), p. 64
10. Guy Standing,
The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, (London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2011).
11. Sara Mojtehedzadeh, "Q&A with precarious work expert Guy Standing,"
The Toronto Star, (April 09, 2015). Online:
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/04/09/qa-with-precarious-work-expert-guy-standing.html
12. Alain Badiou,
The Rebirth of History, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2012), pp. 18-19
13. Matt Taibbi, "After Laundering $800 Million in Drug Money, How Did HSBC Executives Avoid Jail?"
Democracy Now! (December 13, 2012). Online:
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/12/13/matt_taibbi_after_laundering_800_million
14. See, for example, David Garland,
The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Jonathan Simon,
Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Henry A. Giroux,
The Violence of Organized Forgetting (San Francisco: City Lights, 2014); Brad Evans and Henry A. Giroux,
Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of the Spectacle (San Francisco: City Lights, 2015).
15. Quoted in Jean-Marie Durand, "For Youth: A Disciplinary Discourse Only,"
Truthout (November 15, 2009), trans. Leslie Thatcher. Online:
http://www.truthout.org/11190911
16. Jennifer M. Silva,
Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty, (Oxford Press, New York, NY, 2013). 10
17. Jean and John Comaroff, "Reflections of Youth, from the Past to the Postcolony,"
Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on The New Economy, ed. Melissa S. Fisher and Greg Downey, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006) p. 267.
18. Zygmunt Bauman, "Introduction and in Search of Public Space,"
In Search of Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 8.
19. Quoted in Jean-Marie Durand, "For Youth: A Disciplinary Discourse Only,"
Truthout (November 15, 2009), trans. Leslie Thatcher. Online:
http://www.truthout.org/11190911
20. Zygmunt Bauman,
Consuming Life (London: (London: Polity, 2007), p. 6.
21. Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyons,
Liquid Surveillance, (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013), pp. 54.
22. Tamar Lewin, "If Your Kids Are Awake, They're Probably Online,"
The New York Times (January 20, 2010), p. A1.
23. C. Christine, "
Kaiser Study: Kids 8 to 18 Spend More Than Seven Hours a Day with Media,"
Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning: MacArthur Foundation (January 21, 2010).
24. Erica Goode, "Many in US Are Arrested by Age 23, Study Finds,"
The New York Times (December 19, 2011). Online:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/us/nearly-a-third-of-americans-are-arrested-by-23-study-says.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print
25. Reuters, "45% Struggle in US to Make Ends Meet,"
MSNBC: Business Stocks and Economy (November 22, 2011). Online:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45407937/ns/business-stocks_and_economy/#.T3SxhDEgd8E
26. Lindsey Tanner, "Food Stamps Will Feed Half of US Kids, Study Says,"
The Huffington Post (November 2, 2009). Online:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/02/food-stamps-will-feed-hal_n_342834.html
27. Daily Mail Reporter, "These kids don't expect
to lead a full life': Fears for Chicago teens as fatal shootings in city
outnumber US troops killed in Afghanistan,"
Mail Online, UK (June 19, 2012). Online:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2161690/Chicago-crime-More-people-shot-dead-Chicago-killed-duty-Afghanistan.html
28. Taylor Wofford, "How America's Police Became an Army: The 1033 Program,"
Newsweek (August 13, 2014). Online:
http://www.newsweek.com/how-americas-police-became-army-1033-program-264537
29. David Graeber, "Ferguson and the Criminalization of American Life,"
Gawker (March 19, 2015). Online:
http://gawker.com/ferguson-and-the-criminalization-of-american-life-1692392051
30. Oliver Laughland, "Tamir Rice 'directly and proximately' responsible for own police shooting death, says city,"
The Guardian (March 1, 2015). Online:
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/01/tamir-rice-directly-proximately-responsible-police-shooting-death-city
31. Rich Juzwiak and Aleksander Chan, "Unarmed People of Color Killed by Police, 1999-2014,"
Gawker (December 8, 2014). Online:
http://gawker.com/unarmed-people-of-color-killed-by-police-1999-2014-1666672349
32. Corey Mead,
War Play: Video Games and the Future of Armed Conflict (New York; Houghton Mifflin, 20013). Also see, Clive Thompson, "The Making of an X Box Warrior,"
New York Times Magazine, August 22, 2004, 34-37; Jeremy Hsu, "For the US Military, Video Games Get Serious,"
LiveScience (August 19, 2010). Online:
http://www.livescience.com/10022-military-video-games.html
33. Department of Justice Canada,
A One-Day Snapshot of Aboriginal Youth in Custody Across Canada: Phase II. Online:
http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/pi/rs/rep-rap/2004/yj2-jj2/p3.html
34. Colin Perket, "Ashley Smith Inquest Slated to Finally Start in Early 2013,"
CTV News (December 27, 2012). Online:
http://toronto.ctvnews.ca/local-news/ashley-smith-inquest-slated-to-finally-start-in-early-2013-1.1092580
35. Zygmunt Bauman,
Wasted Lives, (London: Polity Press, 2004), p.82.
36. Jonathan Turley, "10 reasons the US is no longer the land of the free,"
The Washington Post, (January 13, 2012). Online:
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-01-13/opinions/35440628_1_individual-rights-indefinite-detention-citizens
37. For a clear expose of the emerging surveillance state, see Glenn Greenwald,
No Place to Hide (New York: Signal, 2014); Julia Angwin,
Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance (New York: Times Books, 2014); Heidi Boghosian,
Spying on Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate Power, and Public Resistance (City Lights Books, 2013).
38. Chris Hedges, "Tariq Ali: The Time Is Right for a Palace Revolution,"
Truthdig (March 1, 2015). Online:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/tariq_ali_the_time_is_right_for_a_palace_revolution_20150301
39. Ingar Solty, "Canada's 'Maple Spring': From the Quebec Student Strike to the Movement Against Neoliberalism,"
Socialist Project (December 31, 2012). Online:
http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/752.php
40. Zoe Williams, "The Saturday Interview: Stuart Hall,"
The Guardian (February 11, 2012)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2012/feb/11/saturday-interview-stuart-hall
41. Slavoj Žižek,
Demanding the Impossible, ed. Yong-June Park. (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013), p. 144.
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