The anarchists were drinking victory shots and making toasts because even though they’d never met with success before they surely knew it when they saw it or it found them. Snapcase, his beard effulgent with spilled drink, was sure that school was out forever. He’d tossed Jessica’s survey of art history, his own Norton Shakespeare, and somebody’s copy of Derrida’s The Gift of Death into the fire pit they had dug in the backyard. The shallow hole was surrounded by salvaged chairs and shaded by a blue canvas canopy they’d stolen from some resort because property was always already theft anyway and plus they had really wanted that canopy.

I think a lot of people come of age and go to college and suddenly discover there’s this whole world of ideas, many of them quite radical, that they just never knew existed before. So they wind up torn between the ideas themselves — about class interests and conflict and this and that — and the privilege and access of the academy that allowed them to access those ideas in the first place. Certainly punk rock culture and real anarchist culture — where it exists — is absolutely gritty. It’s hands digging through garbage and breaking into buildings and rebuilding things from trash. And so I wanted to show, not so much that conflict or contrast — though that too, I guess — but more just to prove that that simultaneity was possible.

Not all the characters come from privileged backgrounds — not everyone in the anarchists’ house.

No, but privilege is a relative term. There’s old Against Me! song called “Baby, I’m an Anarchist!” which is about rejecting liberal compromise. It’s sung from the perspective of this anarchist activist who’s explaining to his liberal partner why he’s not in fact going to continue being involved with him or her. It has this amazing line in it toward the end of one of the verses where he says, “In the backseat of your father’s new Ford / You believe in the ballot, believe in reform.” That line always stuck with me because I think it embodies how relative the idea of privilege really is. From the perspective of the person singing this song, the most extreme idea of privilege imaginable is the ability to buy a new Ford. And that’s not even to say that he’s wrong. The fact that some people buy yachts doesn’t change the fact that somebody with a Ford has more money than someone without a Ford.

—-http://www.bookslut.com/features/2010_07_016306.php