It was May 3rd 2024 when we set up the Free Trinity encampment for the cause of Palestine. On that eve, 70 students with about 40 tents descended on campus, making our physical mark, a call to action to put an end to suffering, for a people who we have never met, on a land in which we have never stepped foot in. It was in the midst of the university closing down, having heard of our plans, and our rush to outpace them elicited an immense excitement. At the meeting prior held in a cramped room filled to the brim with tension, arguments were made for and against rushing to set up the camp that eve. Standing at the trembling brink of a catalyst moment, the forces of push-and-pull were at play; an action always seems out of reach until it is done, forever a seed of doubt in the overcoming of capitalism’s desire to keep us helpless. In the end, it was stressed that our actions, as the world is watching, will reverberate across Ireland and the globe, being the first of its kind domestically. It was thus our responsibility to give history a push, and so fortune favours the bold, we raised our hands in unanimity to push ahead.

It was the most peculiar timing, as the action was originally planned for the day after, had it not been leaked to the far-right press. By nightfall, our camp was set up, and coincidentally, it was an awards ceremony that night on campus for members of sports clubs and their acquaintances. As we stood in the dark, with the clear skies, the trickling of students from our university’s bar, to the club, to home, to the afters began to take place, walking from there straight across the encampment.

They were all chanting for a Free Palestine, in unison with us, and they were wearing suits and ties and dresses, emanating a radical belief in the good of humanity that stood in stark contrast to the bourgeois formality of their attire. Within this new generation, thus, stood a seed for revolutionary transformation, as the ideas of the ruling elite have clearly found no root within, if only to play-along. When the ideas of the ruling class are ridiculed, satired and unrecognised, paradigms break down and new ones are established, the foundations of society are rocked. It felt as if revolutionary politics was making a comeback, as if this immense energy was waiting to explode out onto the social field, overtake it, grapple with it, and overturn present social relations and bring about new ones.

It was our finest moment, a light shining through the dark tunnel of neoliberal dominance, and for a glimpse, it seemed like another world was possible. It was trembling - yet so calm - as if one was standing on the edge of the precipice of a better future, to echo the words of Bobby Sands in 1981. It made us feel insignificant, as the momentum of history was driving us, and the fate of our protest now firmly in its guiding hand, a brief experience of the sublime. Before being snapped back to reality - someone was shouting that we need to film this - we were standing in awe at the procession of thousands of students. This camp was a protean force for change that was able to evade the capture of institutional mechanisms of control, and hence resist capital. This strikes terror into the hearts of the ruling class.

The return of the revolutionary horizon after decades of paralysis has been hinted at by political commentators, that the end of history is in fact no nearer, and that our struggle to topple all despotic signifiers, blockages and restraints on human activity is not over. The last time that such a project was attended, hence the historical comparisons in popular culture, was over 5 decades ago, but ended in failure. In this way, there is a parallel between ‘May 68 and April-May 2024, that of a lost future.

Jacques Derrida coined ‘hauntology’ in Specters of Marx (1993), where he described how the ghost of Marxism lingers in the post-Cold War world. History never truly disappears; instead, unresolved ideological struggles continue to haunt us. This was taken up by Mark Fisher in Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (2014) which expanded on the idea of a ‘lost future’. The participants of ‘May 68 reported feeling haunted by the uprising, not just by its unfulfilled promises but by the way its revolutionary energy lingered in the margins of political life. In a similar fashion, the April-May 2024 upsurge in political organising has left us grappling with the lost future imagined by the encampments - a future of radical solidarity, direct democracy, and post-capitalism.

Without a doubt, the encampments were successful in universities to various extents. The Free Trinity encampment lasted 5 days, with the university folding to the protestors’ demands swiftly, securing divestment from Israeli entities. While this is symbolically significant, it is but a drop in the ocean in terms of economic power. We have moved only inches, not miles, towards a Free Palestine. The end of the encampment, despite our hopes, did not catalyse a broader movement towards radical change. The subsequent weekly march for Palestine passed as every other one, in liberal complacency. The hopes of a workers’ strike, an encampment at Shannon Airport or intensified, simultaneous and mass-based targeting of state buildings with direct action failed to materialize. The rest of the movement lagged behind, and the students had achieved their aims, so it seems that there was nothing else to do.

Some disagreed. There was a hardline faction at the encampment that advocated for transforming our demands for university divestment into a national campaign. This would have led into conflict with the state forces, and would have provoked an attempted eviction by Gardaí. The idea was that this would catalyse a defensive reaction, and subsequently a mass movement. Those advocating for this were in the minority. The majority of students did not agree with this programme. Yet, it is possible that in the sudden opening of the horizon for radical politics, had leadership advocated for it, this would have marked a bifurcation point. A divergence in world-history. When it was proposed in a meeting at nightfall, it was voted down. Did we commit a mistake of world-historic proportions?

It is hard not to wonder about the possibility. Many of us, when looking at what is, are haunted by what could have been. Frantz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth (1961): “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it”. A historic moment comes once in a generation; a heavy responsibility to bear, and not all the facts are readily available to leadership to make an informed decision on what to suggest to the student body as the way forward. The days of the encampment went fast, rushed and erratically, as is the case with historical moments, waged with heated passion, but often unclear communication between those with differing views. History can only be lived forwards, but it must be understood backwards. Was it a premature departure? Should we have stayed? Should we have dreamt bolder?

Such judgements are based on informed intuition, behind which lies a probabilistic calculation of the selected course of political action’s success, reflecting the contingent nature of history, taking into account various on-the-ground factors, as the subject relatively approximates objective reality.

It seemed that the historical moment had exhausted itself after the compromise agreement between students and senior management. Unlike in the case of ‘May 68 in France, the working class and its organizations, having been co-opted by the neoliberal establishment, failed to mobilize. This is equally true for the rest of the world. In many countries, students faced state repression outright, and the working class did not rally to their defence. Since students operate as a subset of the pro-Palestine campaign and the rest of the movement was not ready to escalate, nothing could have been done to break the impasse. On top of this, students who were actively involved numbered hundreds, not thousands. Ultimately, even within the student movement, mass politics has been non-existent since the failure of the November 2010 anti-austerity protests. It is, in turn, not possible to conjure up thousands of additional students out of thin air, despite our best efforts. This gives credence to the argument that our lost future was foreclosed before it could even begin. If the material conditions are not ripe, leadership cannot intervene towards revolutionary ends. From this angle, students would have left and the encampment would have fizzled out had we voted to change the scope of our movement. This is bolstered by the fact that throughout the year, the demands were locally-focused, thus the subjective attitudes of students were path-dependent on this prior structuring of the campaign. Yet, the feeling that more could have been done is pervasive. The hardline faction’s argument for taking on the state, in any case, was not without merit.

During the 5 days of the Free Trinity encampment, students were the vanguard of the movement. We held sway over the movement. In this, there was hope. The Irish context differs widely from other countries in the West, insofar as Palestine enjoys passive support amongst the majority of the population. It had been the case that for South Africa, the Dunnes Store strike in the 1980s led to an explosion of support for boycotting apartheid, eventually leading Ireland to ban the country’s imports, sparking a worldwide shift. The protest called at a day’s notice during the encampment had an energy unlike anything we have seen before, with thousands of attendees. The encampment should have exploited the opportunity and appealed directly to the working class. Overlooking this was a colossal mistake. The university was of strategic importance in the political sphere, and media attention abounded, increasing the chances of triggering upheaval. The fight between students and state forces could have spilled onto the streets and then it could have taken but a single action, outside of campus, to trigger a path-dependency of a mass movement’s confrontation with state repression, leading to revolutionary conditions. Was another ‘May 68 a mere brick throw away? We will never know, because no one threw a brick. The pages of history remain half-turned.

If not a premature departure, it was certainly a ‘traumatic departure’ for students whether they left by will or were removed by force, as subsequent events of demoralisation have not been adequately re-inscribed into the symbolic order of our movement. This is one possible interpretation of the April-May 2024 events relying on Cathy Carun’s framework in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (1996). Meaning is necessary, so that the movement can understand its next steps. If unanswered questions linger, irrationality takes root.

On the one hand, the demoralisation is evident in the strengthening of adventurist factions within the pro-Palestine movement that prioritize direct action by an already-radicalized core over mass politics. This shift naturally follows a perceived failure of a movement.At the core of it, there rises a distrust of mass politics, justified by conceiving of the masses as fundamentally reactionary in the imperial core.

On the other hand, the prevailing attitudes of liberalism take hold within leadership. Radical organizers are burnt out, leaving a vacuum. In this environment, there is a turn towards seeking legitimacy within institutional frameworks rather than challenging them outright. Thus, the movement risks being co-opted, reduced to symbolic gestures rather than sustained political struggle.

As the world descends into fascism, it begs the question, whether the rise of radical politics in the 2020s is a mere dead cat’s bounce of progressivism. The intensity of our mass movements have steadily decreased across the decades; in all of it, this is the outstanding issue, that participation has dwindled even during times of political crisis. It could be, rather than the start of popular politics, an ultimate foreclosure, as humanity embarks on a dark journey. It is history folding unto itself as a series of defeats in dénouement, from October 1917, to ‘May 68, the anti-austerity movement of the early 2010s and then April-May 2024, as we slowly wake from our dreams of emancipatory politics to the harsh realities of contemporary capitalism. This is not the emergence of popular resistance, but its unwinding. Intellectually, we might turn to pessimism, but at heart, we must feel hope. We have a responsibility to not give up. With the lessons learned from our past struggle, we can reignite the movement once again. All progressive forces should mobilize to turn the tide, relying on deep organizing and mass politics.

László Molnárfi
Student activist at Trinity College Dublin.