In the previous issue of Socialist Voice, Barry Murray asked a crucial tactical question: “Are street demonstrations working?”[1] What has been achieved for the cause of Palestinian liberation in more than a year of mass street demonstrations? Murray diagnoses a central educational issue in the movements coming together over the cause of Palestine, linking it with the wider capitalist and imperialist context, and other crises that stem out of it.
Murray is right: a lot of momentum in Palestine protests has been maintained by compassion, empathy, and sheer horror of the news, testimonies, and videos coming out of Palestine and Lebanon. It is only natural to react strongly to the level of destruction and genocidal murder inflicted by the Zionist regime, and the hypocrisy of the Western powers enabling, arming, and justifying the genocide.
It is understandable to be surprised with the level of hypocrisy and the extent to which the aggression of the Zionist regime on surrounding countries has been allowed to go by the “international community”. At some point, however, this shock has to give way to understanding.
The imperialist coalition, its propaganda and its foot soldiers know this well, and thus they muddy the waters: from claims that the situation in the Middle East is “complex”, to those that the Zionist regime is reducible to Netanyahu and his closest camarilla. On another end of spectrum of pitfalls for understanding are theories that defy materialist analysis of the world: oftentimes antisemitic or conspiratorial, these theories create a vision of the United States and other western states controlled by Israeli lobbies.
The network of capital and the states that maintain its growth through imperialist domination is in front of our eyes, and our educational efforts have two key deliverables: the first is, unsurprisingly, the toolbox for materialist analysis, founded on historical materialism. The second is the deprogramming from the neoliberal hegemonic view of an ahistorical world. We see it well in the case of Syria, where we are told to wait and see, as it is the only way to know where the future of Syria lies.
The denouncing of historical forces is central to neoliberal analysis, drenched in the typically American notion of “freedom”. Being uncompromising in serious materialist analysis, among friends or in the public arena, is not without risk when the dominant narrative is ahistorical one. The responsibility of communist education is to encourage such analysis, and to keep the notions of dialectical materialism in the public discourse.
Education in the protest movements in Ireland cannot be abstract, or distant: the role Ireland plays in the support network of genocide is not a minor one. Here we can point out three aspects: technological, logistical, and financial. All three, when investigated, lead back to the triple-lock of imperialism on Ireland, that of the European Union, Britain, and the United States. The presence of technological companies and their facilities, data centres, and financial capital flows is directly linked to the systems of surveillance, repression, and murder in Palestine.
Other applications of these technologies are used to improve the reputation of technology whose primary users are in the business of exploitation and murder. The IPSC (Irish Palestinian Solidarity Campaign) recently focused their BDS efforts on the technology giant RedHat in Ireland, after RedHat bragged on their website about systems they delivered to the Zionist regime. Of course, RedHat is not an exception in the western technology ecosystem, well represented by a number of companies operating in Ireland, settled comfortably between the three keyholders of the triple-lock.
When it comes to logistics of imperialism, maybe the best classroom for political education in Ireland today is Shannon Airport. Serving American imperialist wars for decades, Shannon Airport puts Ireland on the map of the “War on Terror”, the Palestinian genocide, as well as CIA abduction and torture networks. Protesting at Shannon Airport in the past years and in this year of genocide alike have shown the vulnerability of this military enterprise operating in a civilian airport.
The presence of protestors in Shannon triggers a large police presence, disproportionate police aggression and arrests, and disrupts operations of the US military. This has all happened without any actual physical threat to the airport. Shannon remains Ireland’s biggest, and most visible pressure point, particularly important as it de-normalises the United States in the eyes of the Irish people. It is not a normal country, it is a country waging wars and conscripting Irish land, workers, and infrastructure in this bloody endeavour.
Shannon connects the many crises we face: as a refuelling site for the American military, it is a major node of the fossil fuel economy of the world’s biggest fossil fuel consumer. As an enterprise in which our workers have no realistic opportunity of industrial action, Shannon shows the crisis of our labour and trade unionism. See you in class, in Shannon.
[1]Murray, B (2024) “Are Street Demonstrations Working?” Socialist Voice website, accessed on 31st December 2024 (https://socialistvoice.ie/2024/12/are-street-demonstrations-working/)
