DURING Italy’s Valle Giulia riots on March 1 1968, approximately 4,000 people gathered in Rome’s Piazza di Spagna and marched through the Sapienza University’s campus with the intention of occupying the school.

When they arrived at the campus, many of the students found themselves confronted with a police bloc which soon broke away to deal with a violent incident by a single student.

Instead of holding a peaceful protest, many of the students reacted against the police by throwing stones and other sharp objects.

In response to the violence of the students, Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote a poem entitled Il PCI ai Giovani! (The Italian Communist Party to the young!) which is better known today as “Vi odio cari studenti” (“I hate you dear students”).

Pasolini’s poem accuses the students of being the power-driven children of an elite class of wealthy parents while also declaring his sympathy for the policemen who are the young sons of farmers and workers.

Here Pasolini put his finger on the paradox of the divide between leftist theory and its disconnect from the reality of class politics that haunts us still today.

From the 20th century to the present, the conception of class, labour and leisure have entirely changed largely due to how technology has reorganised not only work, but also our concept of what work is, how it is executed and how to get away from work and even the concept of travel.

Today even university studies have fallen into the conceptual framework of “work” despite the fact that the students who were typically aligned with the left during the 1960s were often anything but conscious of class, privilege and the very material reality of labourers.

Where academia gave birth to the theories of class consciousness, what we are seeing today in the vestiges of late capitalism is that the intellectual class is entirely disconnected from the reality of class politics today. 

Take, for instance, how academia frames the discussions around class today where divisions are harsh, tempers inflamed and where any difference of opinion is cause for mobbing or virtual harassment on social media.

Where class issues are clear in terms of historical material analyses, it is unclear where class structures clash whereby today an entire generation of university graduates who are often employed in jobs where they never needed a university degree.

Indeed, statistics are showing us that many university graduates will likely end up working at any number of vape stores or restaurants given that over 40 per cent of uni graduates are landing jobs for which they never needed a university degree in the first place.

And those who do end up going on to graduate studies, a good number of these students end up turning their studies into a “job” as they then prepare for further studies which involve another market layer of competency exams and online courses meant to give the student the illusion of actually working.

Meanwhile, evidence abounds that shows class inequality has much more to do with economic success or failure than the rising costs of education today.

The problem with this paradigm is that studying of any sort is simply not work any more than staying home for the holiday due to the lack of funds has anything to do with travelling to Val d’Isère for skiing.

Certainly, studying involves a certain amount of labour, effort, dedication and time, but it is not labour in the strict sense of the word as it envelops the entirety of class privilege beginning with an access to money and time that people who are actually working have little to no access to.

Instead of going on riding holidays or glamping in a yurt, almost every working-class person today is unable to go on holiday, much less have the time to plan one due to the increase in cost of living and the stagnation of wages.

Even outside Britain, we are seeing how among Americans with bachelor’s degrees, 4.8 per cent  (close to 3.7 million) lived in poverty in 2017 which was an increase of 4.5 per cent (3.3 million) from 2016, according to the US Census Bureau. 

Given the increase of poverty among the educated today, it is hard to square the assumption of holidays for any sector of the population which is not of the elite class.

Certainly, as headlines of holidays have been splattered about the media since late spring, the reality of the “holidays” is one of near starvation for many families as foodbanks run low on supplies and families, more desperate than ever, are relying on food parcels.

All class issues are whitewashed amid scandals as news abounds with the impending pension crisis, headlines abounding with news that millions of Brits expected to die in poverty.

If one thing is clear from the increase in poverty and loss of secure wages for a rising number of those living in Britain, we are no longer able to pretend that leisure culture is what it once used to be for most.

With the heightened consciousness of sleep health and mattress quality, little is mentioned that those evangelising these notions have made a fortune from exploiting the class of people who are the least able to think of sleep quality.

Today, more and more parents report that they are unable to go anywhere for the holidays aside from local parks and museums while the pressure mounts for them to live up to an impossible ideal as they struggle to earn enough money to survive.

Meanwhile, poverty is rising across the country and very little is being done to address the situation which has led to an increase in suicides by those unable to pay their council tax.

There is a cruelty in where our society is heading and how money is being extracted from the poorest because of the simple fact that they are alive. 

With options like this, it is no wonder that so many people are killing themselves as life becomes unbearable.