Bwog got a little misty-eyed when we applauded for our favorite professors yesterday. The end of classes always both feels much too soon and way overdue—in a “shit, I haven’t done anything for this class since the midterm” kind of way. This week, we’ll celebrate the people who teach us things by reducing them to pithy stereotypes. It’s only because we love! We’ll start with the Marxist.

Here we have the Marxist. He is a bit dated, torn, a collector’s item, one might say.

Marching through Hamilton with round yellow-tinted lens from which he sees the commodification of the globalized world, the Marxist struggles to provoke the children of Generation Y. In the prelude to his course, he recites an account of a Chinese migrant worker who spends 87% of her day in a factory for a salary of $70 American dollars a month to make Tonka trucks for Target. Pointing at his students donning screen-printed tees and chomping on granola snack bars, the Marxist reminds the bourgeois elite that sit before him of the sweat and blood of the proletariat that are forever in the threads of their discount tops and the grains of their crunchy snacks.

The Marxist does a significant amount of scoffing. Why wouldn’t he? His every day is haunted by Walmart, the mass consumption of grapefruit in the dead of winter, 12oz steaks, and PhD students. He often reminds the class that, “I too am a commodity. And when you enter the workforce, you will be nothing but an expendable source of labor.”

Rubbing his withered temples, he asks if anyone knows the meaning of “fetishization.” Silence. Nothing! His students are a spectacle of kitsch and bouge. They oppress with every apathetic sip from their aluminum water bottles. He denounces the “iTunes,” the “MyBooks,” and the “FaceSpaces,” and begs for someone, anyone, perhaps the androgynist who sits in the back or maybe anarchist who walks in 40 minutes late, to stand with him in protest against the forces of capitalism.

—Sarah Camiscoli
Illustration by Chloe Gogo