All persons are intellectuals
however not everybody in society is given
the position of mental
Antonio Gramsci
Chaussée Ménilmontant barricade, Paris Commune, 18 March 1871. Picture through Wikimedia Commons
J.L.
J.L. is a poet and lives in a home owned by his mom. He pays a symbolic €100 each month as hire. At sixteen, J.L. was despatched to work for a month in a canning manufacturing facility close to the village the place he grew up. This Flemish, middle-class ritual serves two targets: creating the phantasm of sophistication understanding and making certain good grades. J.L.’s guide assortment, comprising thirty metres of backbone, was burnt in his front room.
I.N.
Every month, I.N. receives €1,800 from her mom. She is an solely baby, receiving her inheritance prematurely. Moreover being a nest egg (her mom’s phrases), the month-to-month switch can also be a type of monetary pragmatism: it helps the household circumvent the Flemish nine-percent inheritance tax. At twenty-eight, I.N. remains to be a scholar. Quickly she’s going to acquire her third grasp’s diploma. We graffitied ‘meritocracy is a lie’ on the mom’s villa.
B.R.
Visible artist B.R. is the son of a coronary heart surgeon. Watching her colleagues’ kids develop up into unbearable brats, the surgeon understood that loving a baby additionally means shielding it from the toxicity of middle-class privileges. When B.R. misbehaved as a young person, he needed to bear the monetary penalties himself. His mom by no means gifted him an costly, ostentatious automobile. But B.R. by no means labored to pay for his research. He doesn’t know the sound of a declined financial institution card nor the starvation that follows. B.R. believes that, not like his buddies, he grew up in regular circumstances. He doesn’t see how privilege hides itself from the physique inside the physique. We study right here {that a} pig solely acknowledges itself by its mud.
M.L.
Artist M.L. is the daughter of two legal professionals. At eighteen, she was gifted an house in Amsterdam’s historic Canal District. Since finishing her second grasp’s diploma, she has been renting out her house for just below €2,000 monthly – an quantity she pays herself month-to-month as compensation for her mental work. She leads a nomadic existence and travels from one artist residency to a different. It barely issues whether or not the residency is in Estonia, Portugal or Romania; she might have encountered the identical individuals in France, Sweden or Slovakia. These transnational areas are sanctuaries the place creativity doesn’t must justify itself, the place considering is unbound by obligation and duty. Lets name these areas the mental Cayman Islands and M.L. a group tax evader? We will name them so.
J.V.
Author and columnist J.V. has by no means had an everyday job. Like most of her friends, she is conscious of her privileged place and feels obliged to provide one thing again to society. When a number one newspaper requested her to put in writing a bi-weekly column, she seized the chance with each arms. J.V. fights for the socioeconomically oppressed girl in all her guises: the underpaid cleaner, the imported bride within the nail salon, the undocumented intercourse employee. Is her choice to put in writing columns genuine or hypocritical? Does she legitimize her privilege on the backs of susceptible ladies or remodel it right into a platform for significant solidarity? The reply is that every one these statements are concurrently true. Additionally it is true that we’ve got smashed the home windows of her automobile.
E.V.
Celebrated author E.V. grew up because the eldest daughter of a single mom. Journalists typically ask her in regards to the hardships of her youth and the nightwork in an industrial laundry that financed her research. When she couldn’t discover a job after graduating, she sank into sickness, disgrace and despair. In her work, E.V. rewrites her life story right into a product that may be consumed by the center class.We aren’t resistant to jealousy and petty habits. We now have carved CLASS TRAITOR into her entrance door.
S.V.
Artist and activist S.V. grew to become a father at thirty. That yr, his mother and father gifted him and his girlfriend a townhouse valued at roughly €800,000. As a result of S.V. doesn’t contemplate himself able to working for somebody and doesn’t wish to promote the home whereas his mother and father are nonetheless alive, his on a regular basis existence is precarious by most requirements. This justifies his aggressive competitors for inventive mission subsidies. His just about limitless free time permits S.V. to keep up an in depth community inside the inventive world, which normally helps him safe the subsidies. In September, when the household spent three weeks in Malaysia for a buddies’ marriage ceremony, we pushed a nest of rats via their mailbox.
Okay.L.
Okay.L. was born right into a millionaire’s household and lives in a spacious house in Berlin. He has written a brief guide admiring the 1871 Paris Commune, which was praised in leftist publications for its traditionally substantiated reconstruction of the barricade fights and convincing evocation of proletarian rage. We burned down the L. household’s homes, in addition to the places of work of their legal professionals and insurers. Afterward, we returned to burn down the rubble too.
This text was first printed by rekto:verso. Its translation from Flemish Dutch into English was commissioned as a part of Come Collectively, a mission leveraging present knowledge from group media group in six completely different nations to foster modern approaches.
