ABSTRACT
Americans live at a time in which the destruction and violence waged by neoliberal capitalism is unapologetic and without pause. One consequence is that it has become more difficult to defend a system that punishes its children, destroys the lives of workers, derides public servants, plunders the planet, and abolishes public goods. Americans live in a new age of disposability in which the endless throwing away of goods is matched by a system that views an increasing number of people—poor Black and Brown youth, immigrants, Muslims, unemployed workers, and those unable to participate in the formal economy—as excess and banishes them to zones of social and economic abandonment. As Gayatri Spivak rightly observes, “When human beings are valued as less than human, violence begins to emerge as the only response.” 1 At stake here is not just the crushing of the human spirit, mind, and body, but the abolition of democratic politics itself. Violence wages war against hope, obliterates the imagination, and cripples any sense of critical agency and collective struggle.
