University for All

Photo: Claudio Fuentes Madan

It seems they got bored that university was only for revolutionaries, probably because of statistical evidence, and now it’s not about revolutionaries, but about taro and its vegetable stand in the classrooms of all the university headquarters in the country. I sneaked in in that bundle, and I’m finally undertaking a career recognized by the Ministry of Education, where they do not ask me the names of the five heroes of the empire: Batman, Elastic Lass, Spiderman, Superman and… I’m always missing one.
Since there are not enough books to go around, we have classes once a week, which is not enough to go over all the content, so there is a web of guides, scanned books and summaries that people hand around and that way we start to fill in with some indolence the spaces under the list of objectives and contents that, normally, we should master. Those who don’t have the ability to print, make photocopies or have access to a computer, have a very hard time compiling all the info.
Just the same, we should not complain, we have classes. Personally, I prefer to study alone, so that before I only went to school to air my doubts. Now, having given up, I decided that I prefer to present myself at an exam with my doubts rather than with my teachers’ explanations, and I should mention that I don’t have any emergent teacher, but all of them are over 50 years old.
Since I like philosophy a lot, it is where I have most doubts. In spite of an overdose of Marxism-Leninism, which now they call Philosophy and Society, but it’s all the same, I get excited as an opponent (I have an idealist-pseudo bourgeois streak according to my books).
Two sets of categories exist in Marxism that are conceptually opposite but that simultaneously interact, I did not understand the pair happenstance-necessity, I did not understand the the concept that happenstance could reside in Marxist ideology. So I go to school with my doubt. I arrive, raise my hand after a while so I won’t make a bad impression and I blow out the super question to the prof, who jovially responds:
Let’s see, Claudia, look, it’s very simple, the need is, for instance, when you need to fix up your house with construction materials that you don’t have, then one morning you go out and find yourself with a truck full of materials in front of your house, and it doesn’t belong to anyone, that is the happenstance that meets your need, do you understand?
Since I am a respectful student, I said: more or less, prof.