Class struggle is real | Eurozine

All people are intellectuals

But not everyone in society is given

The role of intellectuals

Antonio Gramsci

jl

JL is a poet and lives in a house owned by his mother. He pays the iconic €100 per month as rent. At age 16, JL was sent to work for a month at a cannery near the village where he grew up. This Flemish middle class ritual fulfills two goals: to create an illusion of class understanding and ensure good grades. JL’s collection of books, consisting of a 30-meter spine, was burned in his living room.

in

Every month I receive 1,800 euros from my mother. She is the only child and receives inheritance in advance. In addition to being a nest egg (mother’s words), monthly transfers are also a form of financial pragmatism. It helps families avoid the 9% inheritance tax in Flanders. He is 28 years old and IN is still a student. Soon she will earn her third Masters degree. We doodled “Meritocracy is a lie” on our mother’s villa.

br

Visual Artist BR is the son of a cardiac surgeon. Watching her colleagues’ children grow up to be an unbearable brat, the surgeon realized that loving a child also means protecting it from the toxicity of middle class privileges. When Br cheated as a teenager, he had to suffer financial consequences himself. His mother never gave him an expensive, exaggerated car. However, BR did not work to pay for his research. He does not know the sound of the decline of bank cards or the continued hunger. Unlike his friends, BR believes he grew up in normal circumstances. He does not see how privilege is hidden from within the body. Here we learn that pigs only recognize themselves through the mud.

ml

Artist ML is the daughter of two lawyers. At age 18, she was presented with an apartment in Amsterdam’s historic canal district. Since completing her second Masters degree, she has been renting an apartment for just under 2,000 euros a month. This is the amount she pays monthly in compensation for her intellectual work. She leads the existence of nomads, moving from one artist’s residency to another artist’s residency. Whether your residency is in Estonia, Portugal or Romania is hardly a question. She could have met the same people in France, Sweden and Slovakia. These transnational spaces are sanctuaries where creativity does not need to justify itself, and thoughts are not covered by obligations and responsibilities. Let’s call these spaces the Intellectual Cayman Islands and ML the community tax evasionist. We call them that.

JV

Writer and columnist JVs have never done regular work. Like most of her peers, she knows her privileged position and feels obligated to return something to society. When a major newspaper asked her to write a biweekly column, she seized the opportunity with both hands. The JV fights in all her outfits for a socioeconomically oppressed woman. Low-wage cleaners, imported brides, undocumented sex workers. Is her decision to write a column authentic or hypocritical? Does she justify privilege on the backs of vulnerable women, or will she turn it into a platform for meaningful solidarity? The answer is that all these statements are true at the same time. It is also true that we smashed the windows of her car.

EV

The famous author EV grew up as the eldest daughter of a single mother. Journalists often ask about her youth’s difficulties and the nightwork of industrial laundry that funded her research. When she was unable to find a job after graduation, she was sunk into illness, shame and depression. In her work, EV rewrites the story of her life into a product that the middle class can consume. We are not immune to jealous and petty behavior. We carved a rank traitor into her front door.

SV

Artist and activist SV became father at the age of 30. That year, his parents gave him and his girlfriend a townhouse worth around 800,000 euros. His everyday existence is unstable to most standards as SV believes he cannot work for someone and does not want to sell his house while his parents are still alive. This justifies his active competition for artistic project grants. His virtually unlimited free time allows SV to maintain a broad network within the art world. This usually helps him secure subsidies. In September, when family spent three weeks in Malaysia for a friend’s wedding, we pushed out a rat nest through their mailbox.

KL

KL is born into a billionaire family and lives in a spacious apartment in Berlin. He writes a short book celebrating the 1871 Paris Commune. It was praised in the left-wing publication for its historically demonstrated reconstruction of the Barricade Battle and a compelling evocation of the rage of the proletarians. He burned down the L. Family home and the offices of his lawyers and insurance companies. After that, I returned to burn the tile rub.

That’s what this article was like First published Rekto: Verso. The translation from the Dutch to English in Flanders was commissioned as part of Togethera project that utilizes existing wisdom from community media organizations in six different countries to promote innovative approaches.