the economy and the loss of homes for millions of Americans.”29 Students, in particular, now find themselves in a world in which heightened expectations have been replaced by dashed hopes. The promises of higher education and previously enviable credentials have turned into their opposite: “For the first time in living memory, the whole class of graduates faces a future of crushing debt, and a high probability, almost the certainty, of ad hoc, temporary, insecure and part-time work and unpaid ‘trainee’ pseudo-jobs deceitfully rebranded as ‘practices’—all considerably below the skills they have acquired and eons below the level of their expectations.”30
What has changed for an entire generation of young people includes not only neoliberal society’s disinvestment in youth and the lasting fate of downward mobility, but also the fact that youth live in a commercially saturated and commodified environment that is unlike anything previously imposed. Nothing has prepared this generation for the inhospitable and savage new world of commodification, privatization, joblessness, frustrated hopes, and stillborn projects.31 Advertising provides the primary imagery for their dreams, relations to others, identities, and sense of agency. There appears to be no space outside the panopticon of commercial debasement and casino capitalism. The present generation has been born into a throwaway world of consumption and control in which both goods and people are increasingly viewed as entirely disposable. Young people now reside in a world in which there remain few public spheres or social spaces beyond the controlling influence of the market, the warfare state, debtfare, and sprawling tentacles of the NSA and its national surveillance apparatus.
The structures of neoliberal modernity do more than disinvest from young people: they also transform the protected space of childhood into a zone of disciplinary exclusion and cruelty, especially for those families who are marginalized by race, class, and residency status and who are forced to occupy a social landscape in which they are increasingly disparaged as flawed consumers or pathologized others. With no adequate role to play as owners and consumers, many youth are now considered disposable, forced to inhabit “zones of social abandonment” extending from homeless shelters and impoverished schools to bulging detention centers and prisons. 32 In the midst of the rise of the punishing state, the circuits of state repression, surveillance, and disposability “link the fate of blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, poor whites, and Asian Americans” who are caught in a governing-through-crime youth complex that essentially serves as a default solution to major social problems.33 As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri point out, young people live in a society in which every institution becomes an “inspection regime”—recording, watching, gathering information and storing data.34 Complementing these regimes is the shadow of the prison which is no longer separated from society as an institution of total surveillance. Instead, “total surveillance is increasingly the general condition of society as a whole. “The prison,” Michel Foucault notes, “begins well before its doors. It begins as soon as you leave your house—and even before.”35
Everyone Is Now a Potential Terrorist
Today young people all over the world are building movements against a variety of grievances ranging from economic injustice and massive inequality to drastic cuts in education and public services. These social networks have and currently are being met with state-sanctioned violence and an almost pathological refusal to respond to the articulation of social needs and demands. In the United States, the state monopoly on the use of violence has intensified since the 1980s, and in the process has been increasingly directed against youth, low-income populations, communities of color, people with disputed residency status, and women. As the welfare state is hollowed out, a culture of compassion is replaced by a culture of violence and cruelty. Collective insurance policies and social protections have given way to the forces of corporate predation, the transformation of the welfare state into punitive workfare programs, the privatization of public goods, and an appeal to individual competition and ambition as a substitute for civic agency and community engagement.
Under the notion that unregulated market-driven values and relations should shape every domain of human life, the business model of governance has eviscerated any viable notion of social responsibility while furthering the criminalization of social problems and cutbacks in basic social services, especially for young people, the elderly, people of color, and the impoverished.36 At this historical juncture there is a merging of violence and governance along with the systemic disinvestment in and breakdown of institutions and public spheres that have provided the minimal conditions for democracy. This becomes obvious in the emergence of a surveillance state in which social media not only become new platforms for the invasion of privacy but further legitimate a culture in which monitoring functions are viewed as both necessary and benign. Meanwhile, the state-sponsored society of hyper-fear increasingly regards each and every person as a potential terrorist suspect.
The war on terrorism has increasingly morphed into a war on dissent. As Kate Epstein argues, one “very real purpose of the surveillance programs—and perhaps the entire war on terror—is to target and repress political dissent. ‘Terrorism’ is the new ‘Communism,’ and the war on terror and all its shiny new surveillance technology is the new Cold War and McCarthyism.”37 Everyone, especially people in communities of color, now adjusts to a panoptical existence in which “living under constant surveillance means living as criminals.”38 As young people make diverse claims on the promise of a renewed democracy, articulating what a fair and just world might be, they are increasingly met with forms of physical, ideological, and structural violence. Abandoned by the existing political system, young people in Oakland, New York City, Montreal, and numerous other cities throughout the globe have placed their bodies on the line, protesting peacefully while trying to develop new organizations for democracy, to imagine long-term institutions, and to support notions of “community that manifest the values of equality and mutual respect that they see missing in a world that is structured by neoliberal principles.”39 In Quebec, despite police violence and threats, thousands of students demonstrated for months against a former right-wing government that wanted to raise tuition and cut social protections. Such demonstrations against the language and politics of austerity have taken place in a variety of countries throughout the world and embrace a new understanding of the commons as a shared space of participatory knowledge, enrichment, debate, and exchange.
These movements are thinking beyond a financialized notion of exchange based exclusively on notions of buying and selling. They are not simply about addressing current injustices and reclaiming space, but also about reawakening the social imagination, acting on new ideas, advancing new conversations, and embodying a new political language. Rejecting the corporate line that democracy and markets are the same, young people are calling for an end to the normalization of chronic impoverishment, accelerating economic inequality, the suppression of dissent, and the permanent war state. Today’s movement-building youth refuse to be acknowledged exclusively as consumers or to accept that the only interests that matter are fiscal. These creative young people and the movements they are advancing are raising a diverse range of voices in opposition to market-driven values and practices that aim at both limiting agency to civic community and undermining those public spheres that create networks of solidarity and reinforce a commitment to the common good.
Resistance and the Politics of the Historical Conjuncture
Marginalized youth, workers, artists, and others are raising serious questions about the violence of inequality and the authoritarian hierarchies that legitimate it. They are calling for a redistribution of wealth and power—not within the old system but in a new one in which democracy becomes more than a slogan or a legitimation for authoritarianism and state violence. As Angela Y. Davis and Stanley Aronowitz, among others, have argued, the fight for education and justice is inseparable from the struggle for economic equality, human dignity, and security, and the challenge of developing American institutions along genuinely democratic lines. Today, there is a new focus on public values, the need for broad-based movements, and imagining viable systems for securing democracy, social justice, and ecological sustainability. And while the visibility of youth
