Trinity Is Not The Battleground Of The Working Class

With incredulity I read a recent piece about a Workers’ Party society split over American / Russian imperialism, Americans joining the society en masse and other absolute nonsense. A Trinity society of any kind is not an important  staging ground for the working class despite the delusional ideas of grandeur that individuals in Dublin attach to it. If anything it shows the complete, continued and unflinching detachment that professional middle class leftists have from the rest of the country and the working class they purport to advance the rights of. 

Even in a sprawling university like Trinity where there is a deep class divide, students can still sink their teeth into class based organising while being on campus. Extra pairs of hands are always needed for the many CATU branches in Dublin trying to organise against the Councils’ rent increase or for maintenance repairs like in Mac Uilleam in Tallaght. Extra pairs of hands are still needed in the IWU to flyer and talk to migrant security officers who are being super exploited by the security baron companies. I suspect many of those involved in society drama and campus nonsense see themselves as above the ordinary day to day and difficult organising work and thus act as if they are allergic to it.

The college experience of political activism is bad for the left and has been bad for the left for as long as I can remember.  It has produced some of the useless and self absorbed “activists” with no real world experience who are divorced from ordinary people. 

The scene re-enforces obscure ideological puritanism and divorces intelligent and well meaning people from real world issues that actually matter, instead focusing on strengthening inward looking sectism.

That does not make the concept of imperialism, hegemony or unipolarity of the world an irrelevant series of concepts to understand, but it wrongfully obscures the priorities people should have when approaching the uplifting of our class from a weak disorganised mess into a powerful locomotive of change. 

We live in Ireland. Ireland is a transit point for American and Zionist imperialism via Shannon Airport, foreign direct investment and multinational corporation. That is the starting point of any tangible discussion that interlocks the cost of living crisis and material suffering of the working class to imperialism. Most importantly to change that, progressively minded people need to command respect and build up the power of our class.

If the 60+ attendees that attended the Workers’ Party Trinity Society AGM are serious about our mission as progressively minded people and communists then they’re not going to continue to expend more time on infighting on Trinity but instead lend themselves to some of the above aforementioned organisations and other movements and structures that are building up the power of our class, or at the very least craft campaigns that make meaningful changes on campus BDS, high rents, imperialism, and the connection to Zionism seem to all be non-issues by the student activist milieu the last year or two. 

Trajectories for young student activists are set early on with what they aspire to be. High paying NGO / political advisory / nepotistic union jobs are on the horizon for many. Organising is the grounding and political filter that will determine who is committed to the cause of our class and who is a hobbyist voyeur.

Young, well educated and well intentioned people have an essential role to play in the revolution, but that role will not be materialised through identity politics. That role will be materialised by concentrating on class based issues, class based organising and the immediate connection to the world they live in. Wolfe Tone knew that, Robert Emmet knew that, Pádraig Pearse knew that and so did James Connolly.