UCL Students Against Students Fragment #1: We Are Trapped And Dying

Students against students find themselves stuck in the cesspit of the modern academy, their limbs weighed down with the excrement of ages. They watch with a certain morbid delight, which shudders into a wild scorn, the goings-on of an institution they know is false, dislocated. Every time they step into the vomitorium and watch the puce bile spill seething out of the gaping mouths of those poor, alienated creatures called lecturers, sometimes they sit, demoralised and alone; sometimes they venture a question, and are rewarded for their precocious little minds; the most conscious stay at home, tired from one more nihilistic assault on the nearest cheapest bar.

The old days are gone if they ever existed. Soaring ivory towers raced unto heaven laden with the material production of the feudal peasantry, carrying the human intellect to phallic heights thence unknown. But today those towers are torn down and rebuilt into 60s tenements – and where thinkers once traced the outlines of heaven in gold-dust paid for with the blood of the noble poor, today their time is spent in the craven reproduction of stale and mouldering ideas, speaking with an authority they know is false on Marx, Lacan, Bataille; and speaking with a true authority on the false and deluded ideas of cretins from Nozick and Rawls to Winch.

The world around us is collapsing and the academy remains the ludicrous plaything of capital. The best of the worst are mired in charitable activity, naively exchanging their labour for a sense of moral well-being while the CEOs of those charities cream off the surplus; the worst of the worst cherish their imagined superiority, imagining that somehow attendance at these ludicrous knowledge factories makes them better people than those they see around them. In UCL Union there is a sign which says “this is a private member’s club […] workmen and contractors are not welcome.”

We stand outside that pathetic hologram of a world, where petty rivalries and networking for future career opportunities dominate social relations; we have not yet decided whether and how to stand against it.

Join us in spitting on the visage of our great leader Malcolm Grant; perchance the venom will eat away his cheap façade and reveal the hideous pulsating organ of capital that resides beneath.

We are waiting in the pub.

Solidarity is strength;
Death to academic separation

studentsagainststudentsucl@googlemail.com