Rundale

By László Molnárfi and Elisa Zito

Introduction

As we watch the deliberate slaughter of men, women, and children by the terrorist state of Israel on our television screens and social media apps, we are compelled to action by our shared humanity. While political elites remain silent and motionless, millions across the world are taking bold and definitive action. Students and staff at Irish universities too, outraged by institutional complicity in genocide, have engaged in various forms of protest throughout the year. This complicity ranges from ties to companies involved in illegal settlements to academic institutions that produce military research. When put into practice, this provides the bombs, weapons, and surveillance technologies that are used by the terrorist state of Israel to pursue its 76+ year long campaign of brutalisation against the Palestinian people. Starting with open letters, symbolic protests and marches, escalation was inevitable in the face of continued silence, and it did not take long for Ireland to join the worldwide movement of encampments. 

The Free Trinity encampment and student movement

The Free Trinity encampment, set up on the 3rd of May 2024, sent shockwaves across the country. Inspired by the resilience and bravery of students in Columbia University protesting their institution’s complicity in the Gaza genocide in the face of a brutal police crackdown, the encampment brought the student intifada home. That university management, as well as state actors, were shocked and apparently unprepared to deal with the situation was no surprise given years of milquetoast, moderate, and apolitical leadership amongst students. 

For years the student movement has, in lockstep with the trade union movement, abandoned the social whole and splintered into segmented campaigns aligned with the liberal mainstream. This fragmented and depoliticised student movement represented a fundamental attack on critical thinking by denying discussion of revolutionary questions. We had inherited a legacy of defeat and betrayal, and had entered into a deep slumber after the failure of the 2010s anti-austerity movement from which we are only now beginning to awaken. The Free Trinity encampment was not the first sign of the brewing student rebellion, considering the various disruptions that had taken place throughout the year, and the dazzling takeover of Trinity Students’ Union  by communists in the March 2023 elections. There eventually comes a time when the people say ‘enough is enough’ and refuse to accept the official narrative that  bureaucratic officialdom has imposed on us for far too long. 

This increasing radicalism of the student movement can be credited to the egregious breach of the social contract perpetrated by the ruling class. Successive capitalist governments have done incredible damage to the ordinary people of Ireland. Homelessness has grown to unprecedented levels, the healthcare and housing systems are failing, and education is becoming increasingly inaccessible, disproportionately affecting young people. Blind devotion to neoliberalism leads to social murder. For decades the Irish state, like many others, has pursued neoliberal policies that have ensured people “inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death“  as Friedrich Engels recognized. It is no surprise that all across the world discontent is on the rise. 

Students and staff in universities have struck back all across the globe. From strikes by staff to protests against fee increases, rent hikes, and the lack of workers’ rights for postgraduate researchers, we are seeing the fightback return and our universities once again becoming sites of heightened political contestation. Long-standing liberal homogeneity has broken down across Irish campuses with growing grassroot power and the emergence of militant leadership, polarising college communities. 

BDS and Palestine solidarity

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement aims to target the economic base of Israel as well as its social legitimacy, both of which are supported by Western countries, including Ireland. Israel, being a geopolitical outpost of the U.S-led superpower axis, is the nexus of modern imperialism. Students have conducted a systemic analysis of their capitalist universities, mapping their entanglement with Israel’s military-industrial complex via investments, procurement contracts, and academic research ties. Through this systematic interrogation campus activism and the student intifada has transcended single-issue campaigns and entered the realm of systemic transformation. 

The Palestine solidarity movement on university campuses is thus an expression of rising discontent with capitalist social order as a whole. It represents the youth’s will to challenge the very forms of social existence we have long been told are unquestionable. The encampment itself is a revolutionary structure, embodying a horizontal form of organising that manifests a vision for a post-capitalist future. According to David Graeber, prefigurative politics is the act of mirroring the world that we want to see in present action. The encampments show that the world students want to see is radically democratic and completely antithetical to the hierarchical, rigid, and bureaucratic structures that fester under capitalism and exert a suffocating grip on the neoliberal university.

Student intifada

The student intifada is nevertheless a pluralist movement, involving participants of varying backgrounds and ideologies. The students taking part have varying levels of political consciousness but the encampments have proven their capacity to effectively unite around a common cause. The structures being built on our campuses are revolutionary, even if the actors themselves are not always self-conscious agents of socialist transformation. Teach-ins and political discussions held in the encampments have been revealing the unity between the theory and practice of liberation.

Students, driven by the gulf between their institutions’ self-professed ‘values’ of commitment to social justice and their unethical ties, are engaging in combat with the structural forces dominating our society, revealing the deep connection between our universities and the imperialist military-industrial complex. Within the Irish context, the depraved colonial slaughter Israel is conducting in Gaza has brought attention once more to the parallels between the British colonisation of Ireland and Zionist colonisation of Palestine, and brought students back to colonial understandings of our own history after decades of revisionist consensus. The growing anti-imperial consciousness of the students became apparent in Trinity, as it has on other campuses since, through the anti-imperialist slogans daubed throughout the camp. 

Encampments as autonomous war machines

In each occupation there thus lies the specter of revolution, and an embryonic socialist consciousness. By asserting themselves physically on the grounds of campuses, the encampments pose the question of power, and the democratic control of education. They are what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called ‘autonomous war machines’, a protean force for change that evades the capture of institutional mechanisms of control. This power deterritorializes, sprawls and begins to consume rigid bureaucracy and official structures with an insatiable hunger. Yet, capitalism fights back, releasing the pressure valve to co-opt nascent movements, in order to defuse revolutionary situations, or cracking down on dissent.

Within the heart of the empire, the United States, only brutalisation is acceptable, but in Ireland, the victory at Trinity College Dublin demonstrates that capital, forever malleable, can acquiesce to popular demands in countries where imperial ties are weaker. The marked difference in the approach can be traced back to the chokehold of right-wing Zionist ideology on American politicians, whether they be Democrats or Republicans, funded by AIPAC and supported by the military-industrial complex, pressuring university management to call the police on their own communities. In Ireland, we at least have the privilege of being largely free of these specific forces, which has allowed our movement to grow and sustain itself without the grotesque violence meted out to our comrades in the United States and more recently in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, amongst others. 

The victory at Trinity was nevertheless momentous. This campaign group has been active for a decade and has been ignored for a decade. Seizing the historical moment created by the mass Palestine solidarity movement the student encampment won their demands in a mere 5 days. Crucial leverage was won by blockading the Book of Kells, the main source of the College’s tourist revenue, at a cost of €10,000 per hour. It is a testament to the power of targeted, collective, and radical direct action hitting institutions where it hurts the most: their finances and reputation. Unlike the Occupy Movement in the early 2000s, the horizontal structure of the encampment was coupled with specific demands made in relation to particular institutional ties. It is, to date, the most militant action that has been taken in solidarity with Palestine in Ireland after October 7th.

The Free Trinity encampment has spawned a wave of similar action, from UCC to UCD, as well as Queens’ Belfast, earning the ire and fear of university managers across the 32 counties. When students realised that power lies not in the seat-at-the-table politics of the committees but in the disruption of the university, excessive reaction was sure to ensue. The response of universities, from disciplinary action and preposterous fines, to slander and even physical force, neatly exposed the class alliance between college bureaucrats and the state. If students stand unmoved in the face of such intimidation, the university managers will eventually be forced to bargain with them, and successive victories will ensue. The cracks have already begun to appear, with universities across the island releasing statements in an attempt to preempt embarrassing and costly disruption on their campuses.

Connecting struggles outside of campuses

However, these encampments face the prospect of isolation if they are unable to connect to social forces outside of university campuses. While students have stepped up to do their part in the movement at this critical juncture – and their militancy continues to be of the highest caliber – organised labour remains paralysed. It is only through the alliance of students with workers that a truly transformative impact can be made. On campuses, this has taken the form of joint work between student BDS groups and Academia for Palestine (AfP) branches, made up of academic, technical and administrative staff, to pressure institutions into divestment.

However, what has been lacking is the involvement of concerted trade union action that could allow a wider popular mobilisation of progressive social forces. The trade union movement in Ireland has long been sold out to the establishment, and in many cases operate as nothing more than appendages of the state and firms. Their radical members stand impotent as union leadership substitutes marches and declarations for substantive action, with an eye to safeguarding their own positions within the revolving door, quid-pro-quo system. There needs to be a rebellion of rank-and-file members against this sad state of affairs, within university campuses and beyond their walls. We look with hope to trade unions to take their place in history once again and fight for progressive change, in the tradition of Larkin and Connolly.

As to students, our legacy will be the birth of a new, radical student movement, and for this we will be remembered. We are at the very beginning of this new era. We have a growing number of students participating in our actions, yet it is nowhere near the mass movements of the past that saw tens of thousands on the streets fighting for a better world. Although we are merely building towards that, we have sparked a movement towards radical change by showing that a fightback is possible and within our grasp. In the end, paradoxically, we hope that our success will be the reason we will be forgotten, what our struggle has achieved this year becoming a mere footnote to what is yet to come – the students and workers united, fighting for another, more just, free, and equal world.