#marxistsatthemovies, or, this just happened.

What follows is a poorly formatted collection of my 100-some-odd contributions to the #marxistsatthemovies hashtag.

vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical7 Oct Organic Composition Of Human Bondage, Capital #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical7 Oct The Critique of Everyday Life of Brian #MarxistsAtTheMovies

vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical7 Oct The Practice of Every Day Is a Holiday Life #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical7 Oct The Suburban Commando Revolution #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical7 Oct The Production of Spaceballs #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h The Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2 of Equality #marxistsatthemovies
from Albany, NY
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h No Future For Old Men: Queer Theory and The Death Drive #MarxistsAtTheMovies
from Albany, NY
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h Is The Rectum a Shallow Grave? #marxistsatthemovies #noideaifbersaniisamarxist
from Albany, NY
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h Last Chance David Harvey#MarxistsAtTheMovies
from Albany, NY
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h Rebel Cities Without A Cause #marxistsatthemovies #nodemands
from Albany, NY
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h Minor Literature Report #MarxistsAtTheMovies
from Albany, NY
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical14s Joshua Cloverfield #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical12m There's Something About Mariategui. #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical15m Mad Max: Beyond Horkeimer. #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical28m The Good Jameson #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical 6h They Camatte Night #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical6h The Twilight Saga: Eclipse and Reemergence of The Communist Movement #marxistsatthemovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical6h Scattered Dreams, Speculations on Value #marxistsatthemovies
from Albany, NY
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical6h Two, Three, Many Days of The Condor #MarxistsAtTheMovies
from Albany, NY
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical7h When Harry Haywood Met Gwendolyn Midlo Hall #MarxistsAtTheMovies
from Albany, NY
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical7h New Modern Times #MarxistsAtTheMovies
from Albany, NY
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical7h Theory of Orlando Bloom #MarxistsAtTheMovies
from Albany, NY
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical7h How To Train Your Dragon Is It To Be Done? #marxistsatthemovies
from Albany, NY
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical7h The Coming To America Insurrection #MarxistsAtTheMovies
from Albany, NY
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical7h Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl-Interrupted #marxistsatthemovies
from Albany, NY
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical11h Pages from a Black Worker's The Notebook #MarxistsAtTheMovies
from Albany, NY
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical11h Crazy Indignant Heart #MarxistsAtTheMovies #charlesdenby
from Albany, NY
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical11h Midnight Notes on a Scandal #MarxistsAtTheMovies
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vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical11h The London Hanged 'em High #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical11h Love Is A Many-Splendored-Headed Hydra #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical12h Walk Hard Road to Renewal #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical12h Grosse Pointe Blanqui #MarxistsAtTheMovies (inspired by @BigMeanInternet threatening to have me killed.)
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical12h Seven Days in May 68 And Its Afterlives #MarxistsAtTheMovies

vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical12h Bandung of Outsiders #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical12h Ranciere in The Dark #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical12h WALL-E-rstein #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical12h Balibars of Fury #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical12h Up in the 18th BrumAire #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical12h 62. The Civil War in Frances Ha #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical12h 61. Fourier Rooms. #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical12h 60. Fragment on The Time Machines #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical13h 59. Labor and Monopoly Capitol Critters #MarxistsAtTheMovies #actuallytv
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical13h 58. The Black Atlantic Jacobins Dahlia #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical13h X:Men Origins of Wolverine, The Family, Private Property, And The State #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1m Time, Labor, and The Social Network Domination #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical10m The Long Kiss Goodbye Twentieth Century #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical12m A Kiss Before Dying Colonialism #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical10s Facing Reality Bites #MarxistsAtTheMovies cc: @afrofabulist

vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical21m The Fetish Of The Commodity and its Secrets and Lies #MarxistsAtTheMovies

vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical24m So-called Primitive Love Accumulation #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical44m Deconstructing Harry, Reconstructing Womanhood. #MarxistsAtTheMovies #hazelvcarby
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical48m All Quiet On the Cultural Front #MarxistsAtTheMovies #MichaelDenning
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical55m Off Limits to Capital #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical57m Critical Condition of Postmodernity #MarxistsAtTheMovies #richardpryor
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h Driving Miss Days of War, Nights of Love #MarxistsAtTheMovies #technicallyanarchists

Harry Potere Operaio and the Half-blood Modern Prince #MarxistsAtTheMovies #2for1

vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical53m The Sandlotta Continua #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical54m Romano Alquati Holiday #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical54m Radio Days Alice #MarxistsAtTheMovies

vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h For a Few Dollars Padmore #MarxistsAtTheMovies

vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical15s FINALLY GOT THE NEWSIES #MarxistsAtTheMovies

vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical47s Detroit Rock City, I Do Mind Dying #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical24s Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James and the Giant Peach #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical2m Bodies, Rest, and Moten. #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1m Policing the Bubblegum Crisis #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical3m The Psychic Life of Power Rangers #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical4m Gender Trouble in Little China #MarxistsAtTheMovies

1. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical3m

   Bifo Sunrise #MarxistsAtTheMovies

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2. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical12m

   Love at Tronti #MarxistsAtTheMovies

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3. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical17m

   Cookie's Fortunati #MarxistsAtTheMovies

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4. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical32m

   All that is holy smoke is profaned #marxistsatthemovies

    from Albany, NY
5. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical40m

   In Foucault Blood #marxistsatthemovies

    from Albany, NY
6. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical41m

   The Curious case of Walter Benjamin Buttons #marxistsatthemovies

    from Albany, NY
7. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical50m

   #FREEMARISSA

    from Albany, NY
8. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical50m

   Sergei Eisenstein #marxistsatthemovies #justsaying

    from Albany, NY
9. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical52m

   No More Marcuses #marxistsatthemovies

    from Albany, NY
10. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Stalin Down #MarxistsAtTheMovies

     from Albany, NY
11. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Rob M.N. Roy #MarxistsAtTheMovies

     from Albany, NY
12. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    In The Heat of The Proletarian Nights #MarxistsAtTheMovies

     from Albany, NY
13. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    I Hardt Guattaris #MarxistsAtTheMovies

     from Albany, NY
14. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Occupy Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps #MarxistsAtTheMovies

     from Albany, NY
15. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Abolish Working Girl #marxistsatthemovies

     from Albany, NY
16. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    How Deleuze Your Lover #marxistsatthemovies

     from Albany, NY
17. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Wild at Hardt and Negri #marxistsatthemovies

     from Albany, NY
18. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Subalterner and Hooch #MarxistsAtTheMovies

     from Albany, NY
19. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Against the True Romance of Community #marxistsatthemovies

     from Albany, NY
20. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Gramsci's All That #marxistsatthemovies

     from Albany, NY
21. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Legends of the Fall of the House of Labor #marxistsatthemovies #davidmontgomerypresente

     from Albany, NY
22. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    City of God and Country #marxistsatthemovies

     from Albany, NY
23. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Timecop, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism #marxistsatthemovies

     from Albany, NY
24. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    All that is solid melts into Air Bud #MarxistsAtTheMovies

     from Albany, NY
25. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Born in Flames #marxistsatthemovies

     from Albany, NY
26. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    The Salt of the Earth #marxistsatthemovies

     from Albany, NY
27. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Swimfanon #marxistsatthemovies

     from Albany, NY
28. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Bakunin to the Future II #marxistsatthemovies

     from Albany, NY
29. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Hot to Trotsky #marxistsatthemovies

     from Albany, NY
30. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Attack the Bloch #marxistsatthemovies

     from Albany, NY
31. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    A Socially Necessary Labor Time To Kill #marxistsatthemovies

     from Albany, NY
32. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Adams Family Use-Values #marxistsatthemovies

     from Albany, NY
33. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Midnight in Paris Commune #marxistsatthemovies

     from Albany, NY

On momentum

This afternoon John Sexton sent an email to the entire NYU 'community.'  It is a curious email.  In it, Sexton boasts of having increased the "average scholarship grant from 34% of tuition to 55% of tuition," and details the ongoing efforts to raise $1 billion dollars for undergraduate financial aid.  Now, a %21 increase in financial aid would indeed by a good thing, if tuition itself had not increased by more than thirty percent over the same period.  For the 2013-14 year, NYU has estimated that tuition and fees, health insurance, and room and board all add up to a cost of over 72,000.  As such it's really not that much of a surprise that NYU generates massive levels of student debt - the most of any university with more than 10,000 students, says the Wall Street Journal,  Because NYU has so many students, this means it is also the tax-exempt school which generates more aggregate student debt than any other such institution in the U.S. (That doesn't include U of Phoenix or Nova Southeastern, which have gotten rich in part by consuming GI Bill money and spitting out degreeless veterans or veterans with worthless degrees.)  In his claim, then, that he is "calling our community together – students, faculty, administrators, alumni, Trustees – and re-sharpening our focus on financial aid and student debt," the JSex doth protest too much.

Indeed both of the two initiatives that the email actually describes - a "Finish Line" grant program to reduce debt by as much as $5,000 and a "Global Pathways Scholarship" program (GPS!  GET IT?) to defray costs of studying abroad by as much as $4000 are at best purely cosmetic.  NYU student debt is often far higher than its median $30,000, a figure likely deflated by the large number of very wealthy students whose parents bankroll their education, and the difference between $80,000 and $75,000 is pretty small in the scheme of things.  At worst they are cynical ploys, PR stunts attempting to rebrand NYU as debt conscious and concerned about students' welfare in contrast to Sexton's earlier strategy of telling overburdened students to consider CUNY - a move some students brilliantly parodied several years ago, and as a defense against the critiques made by groups like NYUFASP and SAASP and, before them, Take Back NYU and the Tuition Reform Action Coalition.  The GPS logic is particularly flimsy.  NYU makes large amounts of money sending students abroad while charging them New York-equivalent tuition and board, a practice it intends, as Sexton notes in his email, to expand further.  The GPS is less a charitable attempt at providing students with an opportunity to defray the costs of lost wages than it is a fairly crude spatial fix.

There are steps NYU could take to alleviate debt burdens.  President Sexton could sell the Fire Island bungalow that student debt paid for and donate the money to the financial aid fund.  He could throw in the next three years of his $1.5 million salary and whatever obscene amount of money NYU plans to pay him each month after he steps down in 2016.  These would be reformist gestures, of course.  They would never address the structural questions which have made the contemporary university into a debt vampire, an agent of racial capitalism, grown engorged from the contingent labor of so many adjuncts and temps and subcontracted workers across its global network, flush with oil money and grand plans.  But Sexton could take these steps tomorrow.  He will not in part because he does not give a shit about students in debt except to the extent that said debt keeps him in bungalows and other sundry real estate holdings, and it makes him look bad.  It threatens his self-crafted image as the avuncular cosmopolitan liberal subject of a new global order structured by the globalization of university neoliberalism which privileges NYU's commodification of alterity and geographic urban cartographic non-contiguity.  Back before Abu Dhabi, Sexton had a name for this practice, "embracing the other," a term which placed his own well-known predilection for granting and demanding hugs from students at the center of a development-oriented diplomacy, the object of which was, through the embrace of difference, to make NYU the "university of the other" for the 21st century.  At the heart of that vision, making it possible, was the labor of south and southeast asian guestworkers building the emirati campus, student debtors working twenty or thirty hours each week trying to stay afloat, de-unionized graduate employees, exploited adjuncts, clerical workers fending off demanded contractual takebacks, school of continuing and professional studies students funneling money down the for-profit drain to help finance John Sexton's air travel between New York and Abu Dhabi to instruct grateful colonials about the wonders of god and baseball.

If there is any value in this latest missive, it is perhaps the evidence that several years of increasing scrutiny of NYU debt and increasing militancy of NYU debtors and their allies have the administration on the defensive.  Our move now.