ON

THE
POVERTY
OF
STUDENT
LIFE
Of Student Life

First published November 1966 at the

expense of the Strasbourg Student
Union, originally titled: De la misère
en milieu étudiant (see Our Goals and
Methods in the Strasbourg Scandal).

Translated by Ken Knabb for his

‘Situationist International Anthology’

Re-affirmed and distributed at the

eindexamen exhibition of the Rietveld
Academie, Amsterdam - 2006
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1

ON
THE
POVERTY
OF
STUDENT
LIFE
 2

We might very well say, and no

one would disagree with us, that

the student
is the most
universally
despised
creature
in France
(society), apart from the
priest and the policeman*. Naturally he* is *People in general

usually attacked from the wrong point of view,

with specious reasons derived from the ruling
ideology. He may be worth the contempt of a
true revolutionary, yet a revolutionary critique
of the student situation is currently taboo** ** It’s taboo almost everywhere
at this point...
on the official Left. The licensed and impotent
opponents of capitalism repress the obvious
that what is wrong with the students is also
what is wrong with them. They convert their
unconscious contempt into a blind enthusiasm.
3 On The Poverty

The radical intelligentsia (from Les Temps

* People of the left tend to think
of the student too idealistically,
almost in the assumption that
students are all leftists & thus
never truly criticize his role.
Modernes to L’Express) prostrates itself before
the so-called rise of the student” and the declining
bureaucracies of the Left (from the “Communist”
party to the Stalinist National Union of Students)
bids noisily for his moral and material support.*
There are reasons for this sudden enthusi-
asm, but they are all provided by the present
form of capitalism, in its overdeveloped state.

We shall
use this
pamphlet for
denunciation. We
shall expose these reasons one by one, on
the principle that the end of alienation is only
reached by the straight and narrow path of
** In this passage they’re talking alienation itself.**
about trying to use the current
conditions (no matter how bad)
to a revolutionary advantage.

Alienation is estrangement
or splitting apart. The term
has specialized meanings
in a variety of disciplines. In
sociology and critical social
theory, social alienation refers
to the individual subject’s
estrangement from its
community, society, or world,
a characteristic condition of
workers & citizens in western
capitalist countries.
Of Student Life 4

Up to now, studies
of student life
have ignored the
essential issue.
The surveys and analyses have all been
psychological or sociological or economic: in
other words, academic exercises, content with
the false categories of one specialization or
another*. * Studies on the social role of
students have mostly been
carried out by people who work
(consciously or not) for the
ruling order and such studies
have, if anything, contributed to
the mystification of the issue
by fragmenting it into many
smaller issues.
5 On The Poverty

None of them can

achieve what is
most needed: a view
(CRITIQUE) of modern
society as a whole.
* Read: products and
distractions
** See “The Totality for Kids”
(aka “Basic Banalities”) by Raoul
Vaneigem.
Fourier denounced their error long ago as the attempt
to apply scientific laws to the basic assumptions of
the science (“porter regulierement sur les questions
primordiales”). Everything is said about our
society except what it (really) is, and the
nature of its two basic principles — the
commodity and the spectacle*. The fetishism
of facts masks the essential category, and the
details consign the totality** to oblivion.***

*** The central role of products

& objects in our society rarely
gets questioned. Our societies
are so concerned with the
surface of things that a look
at the larger picture seems
impossible, as we continue to
obsess over what gadget to buy
next.
Of Student Life 6

Modern capitalism and its spectacle allot

everyone a specific role in a general passivity.* * Free market capitalism (and
it’s specialized system of
The student is no exception to the rule. appearances/distractions) has
calculated that in order to

He has a function efficiently, people must

be as passive and politically
isolated as possible and that
passivity should seem like the

provisional only option.

part to play, a
rehearsal for his
final role as an
element in market
society as conservative as
the rest. Being a student is a form of initiation.
An initiation which echoes the rites of more
primitive societies with bizarre precision.
archaic
It goes on outside of history, cut off from
social reality. The student leads a double life,
poised between his present status and his
future role.** The two are absolutely separate, ** The student’s transitional role
takes the form of a ritualistic
and the journey from one to the other is a initiation into general society.

mechanical event “in the future.” Meanwhile,

he basks in a schizophrenic
disordered consciousness,
withdrawing into his initiation group*** to hide *** Students tend to close
themselves into a group with
from that future. Protected from history, the other students forming a
separate social group totally
present is a mystic trance. separate from the rest of
society.
7 On The Poverty

At least in consciousness, the student

can exist apart from the official truths of
“economic life.” But for very simple reasons:
looked at economically, student life is a hard
one.

In our society of
“abundance,” he
is still a pauper.*
* Students are notoriously poor, 80% of students come from income groups
even those who come from
wealthy families. well above the working class, yet 90% have
To this effect there is a whole less money than the lowest laborer. Student
range of specialized products
students spend their money poverty is an anachronism, a throwback from
on in order to fulfill the role
properly. an earlier age of capitalism; it does not share
in the new poverties of the spectacular soci-
eties; it has yet to attain the new poverty of
the new proletariat.
Of Student Life 8

Nowadays the teenager shuffles off the

moral prejudices and authority of the family
to become part of the market even before he
is adolescent:

at fifteen he has all

the delights of being
directly exploited.*
In contrast the student covets his pro- * As the market develops, it
targets increasingly younger
tracted infancy as an irresponsible and docile consumer ages, leading to
generations of people more
paradise. Adolescence and its crises may and more accustomed to the
language of advertising.
bring occasional brushes with his family, but
in essence he is not troublesome: he agrees
to be treated as a baby by the institutions
which provide his education. (If ever they stop
screwing his ass off, it’s only to come round
and kick him in the balls.)
9 On The Poverty

“THERE
IS NO
STUDENT
PROBLEM.”
9 On The Poverty

"STUDENT PASSIVITY IS
ONLY THE MOST OBVIOUS
SYMPTOM OF A GENERAL
STATE OF AFFAIRS, FOR
EACH SECTOR OF SOCIAL
LIFE HAS BEEN SUBDUED
BY A SIMILAR IMPERIALISM."
The same atmospheres which give rise to racist
fraternities doing blackface likewise allow for students
being forced to pay obscene prices for student
housing likewise allow for that misogynist pig Castro to
teach Leadership at Cal Poly. What is unforgivable is
the general student complaisance in the face of the
misery of others. For the student, there is only one
real alienation: his own. And not unnaturally he takes
refuge in an unreal present: the spectacle of
commodity society.

The student is a proud servant: "the more chains

authority heaps upon him, the freer he is in fantasy.
He shares with his new family, the University, a belief
in a curious kind of autonomy. Real independence,
apparently, lies in a direct subservience to the two
most powerful systems of social control: the
bourgeois, patriarchal family and the State. He is their
well-behaved and grateful child, and like the
submissive child, he is truly overeager to please." The
real poverty of his everyday life finds its immediate,

PROBLEM.”
fantastic compensation in the opium of cultural
commodities. In this cultural spectacle he is allotted
his habitual role of the dutiful disciple, the infantilized
child: a Sisyphean cycle of immediate gratification
before all else.

We offer no thanks to most political and cultural

groups on campus. All too often they are just as
complacent, and it is only a basic fact that "opposition
to the world offered from within - and in its own terms -
even by supposedly radical organizations, can only be
spurious." Such opposition helps consolidate the
social order, and are really no more than the "checks
and balances" of the system. Their leaders make of
these organizations their private property; a stepping
stone to a role within the ruling class at large.
 9 On The Poverty

"WE MUST DESTROY THE SPECACLE ITSELF, THE

WHOLE APPARATUS OF CISHETEROPATRIARCHAL,
RACIALIZED COMMODITY SOCIETY, IF WE ARE TO
REALIZE HUMAN NEEDS. WE MUST ABOLISH THOSE
PSEUDO-NEEDS AND FALSE DESIRES WHICH THE
SYSTEM MANUFACTURES DAILY IN ORDER TO
PRESERVE ITS POWER."
The liberation of modern history, and the free use of its hoarded
acquisition, can only come from the forces it represses. They
are "the wretched of the earth," as Frantz Fanon called them.
To transform the world and to change the structures of life are
one and the same thing for the proletariat: they are the
passwords to its destruction as a class, its dissolution of the
present reign of mere survival, and its accession to the realm of
liberty. To quote the situationists, "The only poetry it can
acknowledge is the creativity released in the making of history,
the free invention of each moment and each event: the
beginning of the revolutionary celebration, the partisan festival."

PROBLEM.”