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It is perfectly understandable that the dandy, the man who is never ill at ease, would be the ideal of a society that had begun to experience a bad conscience with respect to objects. What compelled the noblest names of England, and the regent himself, to hang on every word that fell from Beau Brummell's lips was the fact that he presented himself as the master of science that they could not do without. To men who had lost their self-possession, the dandy, who makes of elegance and the superfluous his raison d'être, teaches the possibility of a new relation to things, which goes beyond both the enjoyment of their use-value and the accumulation of their exchange value. He is the redeemer of things, the one who wipes out, with his elegance, their original sin: the commodity.

-Giorgio Agamben

In recent years, in addition to critiques of the market and of the cycles of exploitation enacted by commodity exchange, a new set of sensibilities has been introduced in critical contemporary art, dealing with the ways in which the commodity and its surrounding economy activate us. One can say that the commodity is only really true to itself as art, and thus the exhibition becomes a format that enables us to see the commodity as it is. In order to understand objects, we must first acknowledge that every artwork is first and foremost a commodity.

In his three-part essay "Art and Thingness," Sven Lütticken examines the art object as a transient object subjected to commodification through a series of processes. Among the many virtues of the text is how Lütticken points out a shift in the object right from the start: "'Things' are no longer passively waiting for a concept, theory, or sovereign subject to arrange them in ordered ranks of objecthood." To my mind, however, this impressive survey neglects to examine the commodity as an entity prior to the art object, as the thing that precedes any object, including art objects.

Following the Marxian analysis of the commodity, my essay will focus on contemporary art objects within the framework of the exhibition-a form of seeing that allows an encounter with the art object as commodity. Even when artists, curators, critics, and spectators opt for an intimate, narrative, symbolic, critical, or any other understanding of objects, in an exhibition objects nevertheless converse in the language of commodities. While formalistic analysis reveals that this non-literal language involves materials, colors, shapes, scale, and composition, what is it exactly that the objects say?

In the section of Capital titled "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof," Marx demonstrates that the commodity is a materialization of our social relations:

A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the product of human labor. It is as clear as noon-day that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than "table-turning" ever was.

According to Marx, the commodity is comprised of two values: use value and exchange value. But there is a third, intrinsic value that stems from exchange value, and it is here that the total and unconditional interdependency between commodities is found. The commodity is the thing that always feels at home. Whereas man suffers from a folkloristic and identity-dependent conception of foreignness, acquaintance, history, tradition, and alienation, and plants and animals have difficulty acclimatizing, the commodity is a mode of being that is free of all these. It is first and foremost a presence.

Their World, Not Ours

Maybe the time when we will be able to discuss this civilization of private property in the past tense is just around the corner, but for now it is still present in all its extremes. Private property remains the cornerstone of an all-encompassing liberal concept of our civilization, and it is the key to understanding our relations with each other and with objects, as well as between objects. It is a conceptual framework based on negation, on exclusion-something can be mine only if it excludes others who might otherwise own it. Yet the logic of ownership that has guided our understanding of the world of things no longer answers to the challenge. Most commodities live longer than their creators and consumers alike-for even a simple plastic bag will outlive us all many, many times over. As commodities ourselves, even our bodily organs can outlive us. Therefore, as all objects that enter into this world are commodities, we must realize that this is not our world, but rather theirs. We dwell in the world of commodities.

In Michael Bay's blockbuster film Transformers (2007), beings from another planet fight for control of Earth. As the mythology in the film has it, these beings arrived on Earth in search of a new planet to settle; upon arrival, considering how to properly disguise themselves, the aliens concluded that cars and weapons comprised the main forms of existence on the planet, and they proceeded to assume those forms. While on one level this can be taken as a mere fiction, the number of cars in the world now approaches two billion, and countries such as Germany produce more cars in a year than newborn babies. Can anyone blame the Transformers for seeing Earth as a planet of cars, and not of humans?

Guy Ben-Ner's video Stealing Beauty (2008), shot without permission in IKEA stores across the world, focuses on private property's relation to the family. In the video, Ben-Ner, his wife, and his two children inhabit IKEA's various domestic settings as if they were in their own home. While shoppers pass through the frame, a series of domestic scenarios play out. The son is caught stealing in school and the father (who masturbates compulsively) offers the son a lesson in moral conduct by explaining the concepts of private property, family, and value. While Ben-Ner's son washes dishes in a display sink with invisible (but audible) water, his daughter reads from Friedrich Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State:

So, the original meaning of the word family, first coined in Ancient Rome, did not have the sentimental and domestic meaning we attach to it today. For the Romans the word "family" did not even refer to the married pair and their children, but to the slaves. "Famulus" means a domestic slave. "Familia" means the total number of slaves belonging to one man. This was the new Roman social organism whose head, the father, ruled over wife, kids, and slaves. And thus, transition into full private property was accomplished parallel with transition to monogamy. The single family became the economic unit of society. Sentimentality and love came only later, to seal the deal.

The liberal view of the tension between commodification and family is not the point, of course. Following Marx and Engels, Ben-Ner sees private property as the very basis of the family. For him, the family feels no aversion to living in an IKEA store; rather, it is already there. Standardized consumption outlets such as IKEA answer to the same ancient logic from which the family originates. Richard Hamilton's sarcastic question, "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" is answered by Ben-Ner, who states that our homes are not ours to begin with-we inhabit the world of another. IKEA's objects do not furnish our world, we dwell in theirs.

Guy Ben-Ner's interest in objects and their function has appeared and reappeared throughout his work. Video works such as Berkeley's Island (1999), Moby Dick (2000), Household (2001), Elia (2003), Treehouse Kit (2005), I'd Give It To You But I Borrowed It (2007) include, among other things, a kitchen that becomes the deck of a ship and a desert island, a fridge that becomes a book, a crib that transforms into a prison, a table that changes into a chair, a man that becomes an ostrich, objects that become a bicycle, IKEA furniture that turns into a tree. These are turns from the linguistic to the economic that require a change in the position of the subject: it is no longer humans that conduct things; rather, humans are conducted within them. Stealing Beauty ends with the two children addressing the camera directly with the following speech:

Children of the world, unite. Release the future from the shackles of the past. My peers, it is our time to steal. Not in order to gain property but in order to lose respect for it. Property is like a ghost. You cannot possess it without being possessed by it. Steal and let others steal. Let property move freely from place to place so it will not haunt your home. Steal from the local supermarket. Steal from the city! Steal from the state! Steal from your parents! And above all, don't accept inheritance-steal it. Rob your parents and rid yourself of promises you will have to keep. Children of the world, unite. Release the future from the shackles of the past.

Private property is the basic category of civilization, and it is through inheritance that private property is passed on, thus creating its own history of civilization. Freedom from property and inheritance can free us from this history and present the prospect of a new civilization, with the relation to, and between, objects remaining a primary anchor. For the purposes of tracing our understanding of objects today, however, it is important to understand the category of private property to be an insufficient one.

A well-known advertisement by luxury wristwatch-maker Patek Philippe seems to suggest a way into the paradox of ownership and inheritance by identifying the explicit tension between the existence of the object and the ownership of it:

You never actually own a Patek Philippe.
You merely look after it for the next generation.

By consecrating inheritance, the advertisement asserts that nothing can be owned-only looked after. Not only can we no longer believe in the myth of ownership, but we also require a new ethics for using objects-for taking care, looking after, and watching over them.

If we examine historical events in relation to the commodity, they can reveal an alternate history. For example, we find that the French Revolution, as a revolutionary demand for private property to answer the bourgeois call Laissez passer! Laissez faire!, was also a demand for the free passage of commodities through trade. In the spirit of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), in which private property is a sanctified right (according to article XVII in the declaration), commodities blow with the wind, and every place is their home. And unlike people, commodities such as cars, trains, and airplanes are allowed smoother, and quicker, passage.

Another example can be found in the European Union, which we usually regard as dating back to the European Economic Community. But if we look again at the events during and following World War II, we find that, contrary to the common belief that the unification of Europe started with the Treaties of Rome in 1957-signed by the leaders of France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands, and Luxembourg as a result of the scars of World War II-the union was born, from the perspective of the commodity, in the Vichy government's collaboration with the Nazis in June 1940, when France and Germany worked together for the first time after generations of hostility. Customs regulations were softened, since part of France was occupied by the Nazis and another part was collaborating with them. With the termination of World War II, the relationship simply continued. Thus the commodity teaches us history-the provocative truth it tells us is that the European Union is also a continuation of the collaboration between the Nazis and the Fascists. And insofar as people now have free passage, they are sentenced to be led only as commodities: right of passage is given to them either as members of a workforce or as tourists. The familiar question "business or pleasure?" comes to stand for the limited categories through which movement in the world is allowed.

Everything that comes into this world does so as a commodity. The world belongs to the commodity, not to us. And today it would be hard to deny that we have more intimate relations with commodities than we do with each other. On a social level, the commodity can be considered part of a networked economy of exploitation: from design and creation, through marketing and distribution, to consumption and waste. According to Marxian tradition, the fetishism of commodities empties them of meaning, hiding the real social relations invested in them through human labor. This allows the imaginary, ideological, and symbolic social relations to be, in Sut Jhally's terms, "injected into the construction of meaning." Jhally maps the new meanings advertising produces through commodity fetishism in four successive religious stages: 1) utility/idolatry, in which commodities are freed from being merely utilitarian things; 2) symbolization/iconology, in which commodities serve as abstract representations of social values; 3) personification/narcissism, in which they are intimately connected with the world of interpersonal relations; and 4) lifestyle/totemism, in which the first three stages merge to define the group under a singular lifestyle.

Money is the ultimate representational system of value in this civilization. Marx has demonstrated that it is through the objective symbol of money value that commodity fetishism conceals labor, and thus social relations. In spite of the fact that the producer's labor is the source of the commodities' value, within the context of the market the producer thinks of the fruit of his or her own labor as a consumer would-as objects to be bought and sold. In this way, the commodity echoes the workers' silence. As David Harvey puts it, "capital is not a thing, but rather a process in which money is perpetually sent in search of more money." As an object, then, the commodity materializes labor as capital-operating as both thing and process. The universality of money becomes easily exchanged for the particularity of the commodity. But when the commodity's particularity must be converted into the universality of money, things become much more problematic. Interestingly enough, the commodity actually loses its money value at the moment of payment-as soon as the commodity is purchased, it is on its way to becoming waste.

According to Marx, the commodity must have human labor invested in it. But although it is the result-and the reflection-of social relations, the commodity, be it goods or services, fetishizes itself through the equivalence of money value, presenting itself as a relation between objects-kicking men out of the equation, so to speak. But in a consumer economy in which cause and effect can no longer be traced-for example, when there are more commodities than human beings-we can no longer believe that commodities are mere materializations of our social relations. While they may still be this, they also have a social life of their own that has included us in it. Marx's quote above seems to suggest that we are actually a materialization of their relations. Consider our bodies-blood sugar levels, kidney stones, cholesterol levels, or cancerous pollution. In our relations with commodities, we no longer have the ability to decide between production or consumption, improvisation or function, profit or loss. It is in this way that, as part of the social relations that materialize within it, the commodity gains a life of its own-beyond even the means of its invention: design, manufacturing, production, marketing, shipment, disposal, and evacuation.

The Exhibition

In his seminal 1967 essay "Art and Objecthood," Michael Fried recognized the Minimalist ("literalist," according to Fried) object's tendency towards anthropomorphism. It is an art object that aspires to be a subject associated with the viewer's space, that has a presence equal to that of man in the space:

literalist art stakes everything on shape as a given property of objects, if not indeed as a kind of object in its own right. It aspires not to defeat or suspend its own objecthood, but on the contrary to discover and project objecthood as such.

Paradoxically, it is the critical tools used by formalists (and those leaning towards mysticism in all things) that allow for an entry point into the language of things. It is taken for granted that art objects speak-with us and amongst themselves. Neo-materialist formal languages center on questions of material, shape, volume, scale, composition, and authorship only through the commodity character of objects. But at the end of the day, literalist/minimalist attempts maintain the logic of cause and effect, the duality of object and subject. They tell us that the artist created an object aspiring to a presence equal to that of the viewer. Whereas Minimalism is anthropocentric, commodities exist prior to the viewer and to the artist.

Beyond being a narrative and an event, the exhibition is a form of exiting. As soon as you enter an exhibition, you walk through it as if you were on your way out. In this sense, the exhibition and the commodity share an allegorical relation. When we wish to describe what is being exhibited, we usually use the words "object," "piece," "artifact," "thing," "product," and even "commodity." One's preference depends on the discourse to which the description belongs. "Object" is used commonly in contemporary art, as it is regarded as intrinsically constitutive of subjects. "Object" is an interesting word, for in Hebrew it means "will" ( chefetz-similar to "having an objective" in English). "Piece" is also common in this context, as it introduces a maker, a master of that piece, suggesting the thing to be passive and transparent, a mere projection of its maker's intention. "Thing" is used mainly in relation to a mute presence that calls for contextualization. "Product" refers to a process of creation, bringing with it an impression of finality, a fait accompli. And "artifact" relates to an outcome or a residue. "Commodity" is used primarily in the context of a critique of the market, but I believe that this term should include all of the terms mentioned above. In a world where everything is already a commodity, "object" and "thing" are in this respect terms that attempt to cleanse the commodity of the chains of its birth, thus hiding its history and the means by which it appears in the world.

In this prefabricated world, one can claim that all things are commodities: objects, land, air, garbage, debt, action, and so forth. And the double-sided nature of the exhibition can also be understood in terms of the commodity-like the commodity, the exhibition is dependent yet independent, it is social and yet it is indifferent, it is inside us yet it is not of us. Objects in an exhibition are characterized by a suspended duration of being, allowing them an existence beyond use and exchange value. As both a retinal and non-retinal viewing mechanism, the exhibition embodies a much wider aesthetic experience that allows us to view commodities as they are. More than in any other context, commodities are most true to themselves as art.

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Neo-Materialism, Part I: The Commodity and the Exhibition - Journal #20

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Shoshana Zuboff on surveillance capitalism | VPRO Documentary

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Is there anything more contemptible than an undergraduate? Not if you believe the news. In recent weeks, thousands of students have been arrested, manhandled, banned from campus, evicted from housing, and attacked with rubber bullets, tasers, and chemical irritants at the behest of their own institutional leadership. Mainstream coverage of students protesting the war in Gaza regularly proclaims concern for young people's well-being, while revealing a clear desire to do them harm. Social-media comment sections are full of impassioned calls to ruin lives for what are, objectively, minor transgressions. Somehow this is not felt to be in contradiction to the overriding imperative of student safety. This style of thought is currently shared by many members of America's political and economic ruling class, constituting something like a spontaneous ideology that crosses party affiliations. Meanwhile, Israeli forces have destroyed or damaged at least 80 percent of schools in Gaza, prompting experts at the United Nations Human Rights Council to suggest that an intentional "scholasticide" is underway. Respected news outlets insist that the specter of student-led pogroms on elite campuses is worthier of attention. The anti-student imaginary is full of massacres that aren't happening, rather than the ones that are.

What accounts for this collective pathology? Or to put it differently: Why does everyone hate college students? In academic as in other counterinsurgencies, it seems that there are times when it becomes necessary to destroy the village in order to save it. To protect students from other students, it is necessary to put a large number of students behind bars. In a fine article entitled "The Campus Does Not Exist," Samuel P. Catlin points out that the logic of campus security is structured around a fantasy figure that the queer theorist Lee Edelman calls The Child. The Child is not necessarily an actual child; rather, it's an embodiment of innocence as well as an investment in the (heterosexual) future, even at the expense of people who need help right now. Edelman names this complex "reproductive futurism." (Another pervasive moral panic that orbits around The Child is the current surge in trans- and homophobia, focused as it is on high school sports and the putative threat of "grooming.") College students conveniently enter and exit the category of The Child depending on the exigencies of the moment. So do literal children: it is, after all, in the name of the abstract Child that conservatives defend the rights of fetuses even as they eviscerate funding for schools and social programs. But the Republican Party has no monopoly on this libidinal deformation. For the most part, it has been liberal-minded administrators and college presidents bringing down the hammer on campuses.

As Catlin observes, universities present unusually harsh discipline as justified when student-Children are under threat. Police and administrative violence can be applied to students themselves once they have been stripped of citizenship in the academic state and designated "non-affiliates." We have seen this happen in the mass arrests at Columbia, NYU, Yale, USC, Emory, UT Austin, Cal State Humboldt, UCLA, and many other institutions. (The list has grown so long that keeping track is difficult.) Catlin argues that this process of recategorizing certain students as "outside" agitators is part and parcel of how both university administrations and the culture at large construct the "campus." The campus is not so much a physical space as an imaginary one, commonly represented as a site that is forever in crisis. Notions of the crazy, dangerous things that happen on college campuses seem to live rent-free in the minds of many Americans, including, or especially, those who have no direct contact with institutions of advanced learning. Catlin notes that people like to get worked up about protecting Children on Campus even if they happen to be indifferent to students in the flesh.

Catlin, however, underemphasizes the reality that sadism directed toward students is a fundamental component of public discourse on higher education. The student is somebody to whom discipline is always rightly forthcoming. Even more so when students are already hateworthy for other reasons: being humanities majors, feminists, queers, critics of colonialism. Even more abhorrent are art students, surely the most frivolous of all. But anti-student sadism generally does not dare speak its name outright. Hence the search for an innocent figure to protect against the disaffiliated student. Jewish people under the threat of antisemitism have been adopted as a new Child, requiring protection at any cost. This scenario-vulnerable Jews under siege-is infantilizing, and, by extension, antisemitic. Invoking antisemitism is a way to enjoy real, potential, or purely hypothetical anti-Jewish violence by concern-trolling about it. We have witnessed congresspeople all but salivate as they ask questions about the supposed genocidal intent of slogans such as "from the river to the sea." Since these sanguinary visions have little correlation with what protesters say or do, their wellspring seems to be the questioners' own imaginary. The figure of the student in revolt becomes the vector for the self-proclaimed philosemite's bloodlust. This student inflicts upon Jews the fantasized violence from which only actual violence can provide protection. It has been said that every accusation is a confession; I wouldn't put it so categorically, but talk of rampant antisemitism on campus mirrors the logic of Biden's claim that, without Israel, "there wouldn't be a Jew in the world that is safe"-a statement that serves as an ostensible warning but rings more as a threat.

It's moot to speculate how much of this rhetoric is genuine conviction and how much is performance, or whether there is even a difference between the two. There are, of course, powerful material interests that ratify this fantasy. While donor interests might explain the economic and political rationale behind the crackdowns at universities, they do not account for the specific patterns of brutalizing discourse, which seem to be surplus to the demands of capital and the state. Businesses, after all, still need universities to deliver qualified labor power and subsidized research, both of which are under threat from disruption on the scale we have been witnessing. I propose instead that the ferocity of the antagonism must come from the dense overdetermination of higher education's role in class reproduction.

First: it ought to be self-evident that the paradigmatic function of universities is to reproduce class. Until recently, the point of the Ivy League was simply to produce Ivy League graduates who could serve as a prefabricated (wealthy, white, Christian) ruling elite. Whatever knowledge students obtained along the way was essentially decorative. In recent decades, this function has partly broken down as degrees have become little more than a sorting mechanism-even at the lower end of the labor market-rather than a ticket into the bourgeoisie. While Ivy League universities retain their class-reproducing function to a greater extent than other schools, the ongoing diversification of student bodies countrywide (including a growing number of people from working-class backgrounds) has scrambled ideas of what exactly a student is. No longer automatically a wealthy, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, the Ivy League student is now many things at once: privileged brat, liberal arts major turned barista, future finance bro, precocious tech entrepreneur, preppy legacy dullard, affirmative action fraud, dupe of tenured radicals, coddled baby, violent militant. This is what a discourse of class looks like in ruins.

Some of these valences of the Student do connote class superiority; when these are made the targets of anti-student zeal, the fantasy is one of revenge. But the modality in which one imagines revenge converges with the Student's other incompatible roles in at least one key way. The Student is preeminently a subject of discipline. Arrogant snowflakes meet the real world, where facts don't care about your feelings; would-be radicals get job offers rescinded; would-be gender theorists get their dignity stripped in low-paying service jobs. In all of these scenes, a real insight into the falling value of advanced education in the labor market is articulated as schadenfreude, with boss or dean serving as avenging angel. In this respect, administrative and police violence, in concert with labor discipline, produces the real unity of an otherwise incoherent category. I would suggest that the figure of the student in current discourse is not a set of empirical characteristics; -rather, it is defined by susceptibility to discipline. A student is a person to whom an expanded range of disciplinary procedures can be applied, since they are at the mercy of multiple sovereignties. Thus, students can be simultaneously arrested by the NYPD, evicted from their homes, and suspended from academic programs. And in Gaza, they are being killed.

There is nothing all that unique about the discipline to which students are exposed. Outside campus gates, non-graduates and the working poor face arbitrary power in even more naked forms. But off-campus violence is naturalized by economic and governmental rationalities in different ways. Here, the "mute compulsion" of economic relations limits the moral responsibility of individual actors, including bosses themselves. Getting fired may ruin your life, but that's just the economy, stupid. At the same time, police and the legal apparatus directly coerce and punish. Despite being unambiguous manifestations of state power, police and the law nevertheless appear as the de facto forms of violence through which any bourgeois society controls its underclass; there is nothing shocking about a poor person getting arrested or getting shot, and accordingly, nothing like the same attention is paid to such events compared to happenings on the mythic Campus. To those on the receiving end of economic exploitation and state repression, the student's position is enviable indeed.

What accounts for this distinction is that the student is seen as a future worker, or a potential future member of the reserve army of labor-even if, empirically speaking, a large percentage students work their way through college, and that ostensible future is increasingly a vanishing one. The myriad ways in which students feed into capital accumulation are not directly visible, since, qua students, students are not exploited. In this sense, their activities are perceived as analogous to other kinds of "unproductive," unwaged labor, such as housework. This is to put things in categorical terms that do not necessarily correspond to reality. Graduate students, for one thing, are often clearly workers (as teaching and research assistants), and successfully organize as such. But "worker" and "student" are at least notionally meant to exclude each other.

The campus thus appears to be a zone in which economic necessity is suspended. A corollary is that violence against students appears to be divorced from the "normal" repression of proletarians. To witness the spectacle of anti-student discipline is to see the force of pure sovereignty, stripped of its economic naturalization. The student is the torsion point at which the mute compulsion of capitalist social relations meets Louis Althusser's two state apparatuses: the "ideological state apparatus" that reproduces labor power, and the "repressive state apparatus" that metes out discipline and punishment. That students apparently have nothing more useful to do than to learn (or, heaven forbid, make art) is a source of envy, admiration, and resentment, some of it merited, since the quarantining of students from everybody else is part of class society's logic of separation. But resentment from on high is never merited in the slightest.

A proper contextualization of the current campus protests should not only slot them into the legacy of previous student movements (for which the mythos of "the sixties" is now set in stone). It should also tie them to other recent episodes of mass social unrest in the United States, such as the uprisings for Black lives in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, and then across the nation after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. During the Black Lives Matter protests, relations between segments of the college-educated but downwardly mobile middle class and racialized proletarians became acutely problematized. Two symmetrical but contradictory representations of these events proliferated across traditional and social media alike. On the one hand, the poor and people of color were subject to a familiar and often blatantly racist rhetoric of feral lawlessness. On the other hand, educated and largely white "riot tourists," who dared to betray their race and class by performing material acts of solidarity with the insurgents, found themselves called out for supposed hypocrisy, often by liberals and even leftists. The question of what actions other than pointless virtue signaling or grindingly slow institutional reform might be permissible for the "graduate without a future," a term coined during another cycle of global revolt, was left unanswered. A solution wasn't found, of course. In any case, despite great efforts made by Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion bureaucrats to roll out new "woke" capitalism within academia, the most important instances of unity happened not in the seminar room or corporate office but in the streets, where shared outrage at the police occasionally bridged real and persistent inequalities between different camps of demonstrators.

These moments of collective action may have been just as chimerical as the cross-class alliances of older proto-revolutionary sequences, such as when French lycéens steeped in Lacan and Mao's Little Red Book descended to the factories in the 1970s. There is something inherently absurd about these scenes: students who play revolutionaries always seem to wear an ill-fitting costume, even when their revolutions are quite real. Yet something of this sort remains at the horizon of any student movement that has the potential to transcend the hoary rituals of campus protest. There is a chance that pro-Palestinian students, recognizing the treason of their elders (university presidents, police chiefs, and far too many professors), will ally their specific grievances with a more totalizing proletarian critique of the educational system's function as an engine of class dominance. To the advantage of our ruling class, this critique too often tends to be conflated with reactionary anti-student propaganda that fills the airwaves with horror stories about the American youth wing of Hamas. To put it succinctly, poor people hate students for good reasons whereas rich people hate them for bad reasons. Is it possible to disentangle the rational hatred of the poor from the irrational hatred of the rich? Not in words. But the history of revolutionary movements is a history of attempts-often failed-to unify various groups, in practice more than in theory: peasants and soldiers in 1917, workers and students in 1968.
A previous version of this piece appeared on Substack.

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On hating students - Features - Education - e-flux

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Is there anything more contemptible than an undergraduate? Not if you believe the news. In recent weeks, thousands of students have been arrested, manhandled, banned from campus, evicted from housing, and attacked with rubber bullets, tasers, and chemical irritants at the behest of their own institutional leadership.

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Shawn Fain: Workers Deserve More Time for Themselves

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Yesterday UAW president Shawn Fain spoke before Congress in support of Bernie Sanders’s new 32-hour workweek bill. Jacobin publishes Fain’s remarks here in full.