On Wednesday, I lectured on feminism, work and capitalism to my undergraduates. At the end, I announced it was my last lecture of term: I’ll be striking as part of @UCU’s campaign against casualization, pay cuts and precarity in higher ed, in solidarity with my fellow workers.

I told my students that I do so with a heavy heart. I told them that, despite the government’s campaign, in collusion with senior administrators, to transform the university from a public good into a private concern, I was not yet a seller of services, they were not yet buyers.

I told them that we are, for now, still participants in the project of the university, a project not of commodification, but of love: love of knowledge, of imagination, of each other. I told them that this project is under threat, because the work of love is still work.

I told them that when their teachers strike, they name their work as work. That this is important for the reasons Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James and Silvia Federici taught us: it serves capital to mystify and naturalise our labour as merely love – even if it is also love.

I told them that what Nancy Fraser says about the fantasy of the ‘anti-commodified’ zone as a space of freedom applies to the classroom: we can’t simply celebrate the love of the classroom as if this does not itself serve the interest of capital.

I told them that, though it might not seem like it, when their teachers strike, we also strike for them, and for those we hope come after them. I told them that our working conditions are their learning conditions, but also that our employer is their university.

The picket is a classroom. Don’t cross it. Join it.