Last Class (Ever?)

by Lucy S.

I will write again about coming to the end of my master’s program and maybe the end of my time as a student, unless I end up going on into a PhD program.  Tonight, as I listened to our professor talk at the end, or walked down the hall with Erin, another student, or drove home, I was keenly aware at each step that this was my last class there. And it may be my last class as a student anywhere. Maybe this was it for life.

What now?

My arms and hands hurt from carrying everything, and I am weary all over. I brought a glass rectangular pan of enchiladas, and a bag with plates, forks, knives, cloth napkins, and peanut butter cookies. The plates were glass, so it was all rather heavy. I made the enchiladas and cookies today in the sunny kitchen with the windows and doors open and some of my kids in there talking with me or helping me.

For class, we just went over each other’s drafts. I had no draft since my project is done, but I went over the others, and we talked about them. Then we ate the dinner. It was a bit cold and hard since we had to wait two hours after I brought them in, but they were not too bad, I hope. I just wanted to bring food, to do something.

At the end, our professor spoke a little, and he read us this quote from “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction” by Karl Marx. “As philosophy finds its material weapon in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its spiritual weapon in philosophy.”  

The proletariat are the working-class – the workers – all of us who in various ways have to work for wages or have to work to be supported by those with wages (our own work being uncompensated), or those of us who have worked for years (even if we may be unemployed now or retired).  It was a great quote to end on, quite fitting for our class in Marxist Literary Theory. We have been finding our spiritual weapon…

I emailed my professor to ask him for the quote again, and he wrote back with more on it, and said this part also is great:

The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But, for man, the root is man himself . . . . man is the highest essence for man – hence, with the categoric imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence, relations which cannot be better described than by the cry of a Frenchman when it was planned to introduce a tax on dogs: Poor dogs! They want to treat you as human beings! http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm

All of these years, since I first began to pursue my education, this root is what I have sought. I yearned to understand my own condition and our collective condition, to not have it mystified.  I didn't use those words, but I ached to understand all that I could.  And this is a process, not some knowledge you just get and then are done with getting. I don't know what I will do without school. I love it.  And the people I became attached to in my program in my university -- as I was driving home, I was thinking: will they be my friends?  Will any of them want to stay knowing me?  

I am too exhausted to write well; all eloquence eludes me now. But I at least want to note this day. I am so fortunate that I got to do this. My education changed my life.