Student revolts for Palestine have exploded in universities across the world. Campuses can be fertile ground for resistance and militant action.
By Sophie Squire
Wednesday 22 May 2024
The student encampment bloc at the national demonstration for Palestine
A student revolt has exploded across the world. There are around 130 encampments for Gaza in the United States, around 30 in Britain, and more at universities globally. It marks a qualitative shift in the scale of protests in the Palestine liberation movement. Why are the campuses such fertile ground for resistance?
Whether fighting against university fees, the climate crisis or Palestine, students have repeatedly shown they can be the most militant, creative and energetic sections of any movement. But this has not always been the case. Universities were once training grounds for the children of the ruling class. For hundreds of years, they were elite clubs.
And many ordinary people today are still locked out, with only 35 percent of young people going to university in 2023. But it has changed as capitalism has expanded. The bosses realised they needed a better-trained workforce to operate their new machines and technology, maintain their system and train the next generation of workers. After the Second World War, as capitalism entered an unprecedented boom, those in charge made a big push for much wider sections of society to enter higher education.
And even after the coalition of the Lib Dems and the Tories reintroduced university fees, which raised tuition fees above £9,000, students are still flocking to higher education. In 2021 the number of students in Britain reached record levels, with nearly three million students at university. Attending university can lead to people being more wedded to the current system, believing that university can lead to a higher status, better jobs and better wages. It can be a means of fulfilling the aspirations of a “good” life under capitalism.
But when those aspirations aren’t fulfilled, it can also fuel resentment against the system. The post-war period has seen millions more students, often from different geographical areas and backgrounds, thrust together in institutions that claim to encourage debate and the exchange of knowledge. This means that campuses are contested places ideologically—and so radical ideas can flourish.
Another reason political activity has the potential to explode in universities is that most students aren’t bound by the grind of wage labour like workers. While students are increasingly being forced to work while they study, many still have time to organise and mobilise in a way that those in full-time work struggle to do. And students can fight as a minority. Any section of students can go and set up an encampment on campus.
Whereas in a workplace, you generally have to mobilise the majority of the workplace to strike or walkout. However, these favourable conditions don’t mean university campuses are automatically liberated spaces where ideas can flow freely. As in any arm of the state, universities are places where the ruling class can express and disseminate their ideas.
And increasingly, with the marketisation and privatisation of universities, administrations are looking to sell education for profit and stamp out dissent. The Tories have given the go-ahead for university bosses to attack mainly arts and humanities subjects by slashing funding. In the present day, this has led to university administrations pushing forward with widespread redundancies of workers.
Yet despite victorious ruling class attacks on education, students remain a force to be reckoned with, as the pro-Palestine encampments have shown. Many have already begun to compare student mobilisations today to the wave of protests on campuses in 1968. No year revealed the power of students more than that year.
The spirit of revolt spread across the world, with students rising in their millions from France to Mexico to the US. Protests organised by students against US involvement in the Vietnam War became some of the biggest in the country’s history. The launch of the Tet Offensive by the Vietnamese resistance in January 1968 shook US society. Tension on campus rose, and students organised sit-ins, occupations and marches.
Thousands of students joined the protests at the Democratic National Convention in August of that year. And students globally didn’t just battle against imperialist war. Mexican students rose up, partly to rage against their government’s lavish spending on the Olympics in Mexico City.
They were angry that while the government spent millions, most Mexicans were living in dire poverty. Their protests came to a head on 2 October 1968 when an estimated 15,000 students took to the streets of Mexico City chanting, “No queremos olimpiadas, queremos revolución!—We don’t want Olympics, we want revolution!”
But the Mexican state was ready for them. The army murdered up to 400 people, and the streets ran with blood. It was a show of how ruling classes can fear the power of students and go to terrible lengths to suppress them. Students also offered up some of the strongest opposition to Stalinism.
When Russian tanks crossed the Czechoslovakian border in August 1968 to depose the Communist Party leader, Alexander Dubcek students were some of the first to fight back. They took to the streets, faced down the tanks, and won support from workers. This insurrection made space for discussion about a socialism that looked nothing like the bureaucracy and repression of Stalinism.
All of these struggles fed into each other, inspiring and prompting new groups of students to rise up across the world. The 1968 risings led some to believe that students, not workers, could be a vanguard for revolution. And in the decades following the 1970s, when workers’ struggle faded, it isn’t hard to see why some looked to other subjects to fight for liberation.
But acting alone, students cannot topple governments or shut down society in the way that workers can. It is still only workers that have the power to usher in a revolutionary transformation of society. Of course, this doesn’t mean students should pack up their tents, leave their occupations and let the organised working class get on with it.
When workers and students fight together, they can be a formidable force. And students can act as a detonator for wider movements. In May 1968, students in Paris, France, showed that they were just that. Students were already radicalising against the Vietnam War and the constraints of their curriculum.
Other students were angry about the conditions they were forced to study in and the stultifying conformity that pervaded social life. The family was taken to mean a man working while a woman toiled at home. Men and women were kept in separate university halls. After being under construction for six years, Nanterre university, in the Paris suburbs, still needed to be completed.
Yet it was meant to be home to more than 12,000 students, who were forced to live and study on what was essentially a building site. Anger at the administration boiled over, and they occupied a building and brought the protest to the prestigious Sorbonne University. The police brutally repressed this protest.
All night, students continued to join the protests and fight the cops. Police violence provoked sympathy for the students among workers. People let injured students into their homes and threw water on the ground to neutralise the tear gas.
The students kept going despite the cop attacks, and on 10 May, 50,000 marched and occupied the Sorbonne. The police once again attacked them. The tenacity and courage displayed by the students won them real support from the working class and unions.
It was so great that the CGT and Force Ouvriere, two of France’s biggest union federations, called a one-day strike to support the student demonstrations. As many as ten million people joined the strike that day, giving workers a real glimpse of their power and potential. Socialist Worker wrote that workers at the Sud-Aviation factory—who were some of the first to occupy their workplace—were inspired by seeing students fighting back.
“A whole unknown world was revealed to the startled eyes of the majority of workers —a world of struggling students which had been forgotten… Sud‑Aviation suddenly felt less alone,” it wrote. Workers spread strikes and occupations. By 20 May, most industry sectors had been affected, and nine million workers were on indefinite strike. The general strike showed workers that they could bring society to a standstill and run it.
While eventually union leaders sold out the workers to regain control, this general strike, sparked by students, showed the potential of workers to control society. The lessons of 1968, in France and elsewhere, are that students have real power to galvanise and spark wider revolts against the system.
A student revolt has exploded across the world. There are around 130 encampments for Gaza in the United States, around 30 in Britain, and more at universities globally. It marks a qualitative shift in the scale of protests in the Palestine liberation movement. Why are the campuses such fertile ground for resistance?
Whether fighting against university fees, the climate crisis or Palestine, students have repeatedly shown they can be the most militant, creative and energetic sections of any movement. But this has not always been the case. Universities were once training grounds for the children of the ruling class. For hundreds of years, they were elite clubs.
And many ordinary people today are still locked out, with only 35 percent of young people going to university in 2023. But it has changed as capitalism has expanded. The bosses realised they needed a better-trained workforce to operate their new machines and technology, maintain their system and train the next generation of workers. After the Second World War, as capitalism entered an unprecedented boom, those in charge made a big push for much wider sections of society to enter higher education.
And even after the coalition of the Lib Dems and the Tories reintroduced university fees, which raised tuition fees above £9,000, students are still flocking to higher education. In 2021 the number of students in Britain reached record levels, with nearly three million students at university. Attending university can lead to people being more wedded to the current system, believing that university can lead to a higher status, better jobs and better wages. It can be a means of fulfilling the aspirations of a “good” life under capitalism.
But when those aspirations aren’t fulfilled, it can also fuel resentment against the system. The post-war period has seen millions more students, often from different geographical areas and backgrounds, thrust together in institutions that claim to encourage debate and the exchange of knowledge. This means that campuses are contested places ideologically—and so radical ideas can flourish.
Another reason political activity has the potential to explode in universities is that most students aren’t bound by the grind of wage labour like workers. While students are increasingly being forced to work while they study, many still have time to organise and mobilise in a way that those in full-time work struggle to do. And students can fight as a minority. Any section of students can go and set up an encampment on campus.
Whereas in a workplace, you generally have to mobilise the majority of the workplace to strike or walkout. However, these favourable conditions don’t mean university campuses are automatically liberated spaces where ideas can flow freely. As in any arm of the state, universities are places where the ruling class can express and disseminate their ideas.
And increasingly, with the marketisation and privatisation of universities, administrations are looking to sell education for profit and stamp out dissent. The Tories have given the go-ahead for university bosses to attack mainly arts and humanities subjects by slashing funding. In the present day, this has led to university administrations pushing forward with widespread redundancies of workers.
Yet despite victorious ruling class attacks on education, students remain a force to be reckoned with, as the pro-Palestine encampments have shown. Many have already begun to compare student mobilisations today to the wave of protests on campuses in 1968. No year revealed the power of students more than that year.
The spirit of revolt spread across the world, with students rising in their millions from France to Mexico to the US. Protests organised by students against US involvement in the Vietnam War became some of the biggest in the country’s history. The launch of the Tet Offensive by the Vietnamese resistance in January 1968 shook US society. Tension on campus rose, and students organised sit-ins, occupations and marches.
Thousands of students joined the protests at the Democratic National Convention in August of that year. And students globally didn’t just battle against imperialist war. Mexican students rose up, partly to rage against their government’s lavish spending on the Olympics in Mexico City.
They were angry that while the government spent millions, most Mexicans were living in dire poverty. Their protests came to a head on 2 October 1968 when an estimated 15,000 students took to the streets of Mexico City chanting, “No queremos olimpiadas, queremos revolución!—We don’t want Olympics, we want revolution!”
But the Mexican state was ready for them. The army murdered up to 400 people, and the streets ran with blood. It was a show of how ruling classes can fear the power of students and go to terrible lengths to suppress them. Students also offered up some of the strongest opposition to Stalinism.
When Russian tanks crossed the Czechoslovakian border in August 1968 to depose the Communist Party leader, Alexander Dubcek students were some of the first to fight back. They took to the streets, faced down the tanks, and won support from workers. This insurrection made space for discussion about a socialism that looked nothing like the bureaucracy and repression of Stalinism.
All of these struggles fed into each other, inspiring and prompting new groups of students to rise up across the world. The 1968 risings led some to believe that students, not workers, could be a vanguard for revolution. And in the decades following the 1970s, when workers’ struggle faded, it isn’t hard to see why some looked to other subjects to fight for liberation.
But acting alone, students cannot topple governments or shut down society in the way that workers can. It is still only workers that have the power to usher in a revolutionary transformation of society. Of course, this doesn’t mean students should pack up their tents, leave their occupations and let the organised working class get on with it.
When workers and students fight together, they can be a formidable force. And students can act as a detonator for wider movements. In May 1968, students in Paris, France, showed that they were just that. Students were already radicalising against the Vietnam War and the constraints of their curriculum.
Other students were angry about the conditions they were forced to study in and the stultifying conformity that pervaded social life. The family was taken to mean a man working while a woman toiled at home. Men and women were kept in separate university halls. After being under construction for six years, Nanterre university, in the Paris suburbs, still needed to be completed.
Yet it was meant to be home to more than 12,000 students, who were forced to live and study on what was essentially a building site. Anger at the administration boiled over, and they occupied a building and brought the protest to the prestigious Sorbonne University. The police brutally repressed this protest.
All night, students continued to join the protests and fight the cops. Police violence provoked sympathy for the students among workers. People let injured students into their homes and threw water on the ground to neutralise the tear gas.
The students kept going despite the cop attacks, and on 10 May, 50,000 marched and occupied the Sorbonne. The police once again attacked them. The tenacity and courage displayed by the students won them real support from the working class and unions.
It was so great that the CGT and Force Ouvriere, two of France’s biggest union federations, called a one-day strike to support the student demonstrations. As many as ten million people joined the strike that day, giving workers a real glimpse of their power and potential. Socialist Worker wrote that workers at the Sud-Aviation factory—who were some of the first to occupy their workplace—were inspired by seeing students fighting back.
“A whole unknown world was revealed to the startled eyes of the majority of workers —a world of struggling students which had been forgotten… Sud‑Aviation suddenly felt less alone,” it wrote. Workers spread strikes and occupations. By 20 May, most industry sectors had been affected, and nine million workers were on indefinite strike. The general strike showed workers that they could bring society to a standstill and run it.
While eventually union leaders sold out the workers to regain control, this general strike, sparked by students, showed the potential of workers to control society. The lessons of 1968, in France and elsewhere, are that students have real power to galvanise and spark wider revolts against the system.
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