For all the excitement about the power of past student movements and how "progressive" students today are, not only are the results underwhelming, I am additionally dumbfounded when "marxists" treat students or "the youth" as a kind of revolutionary class.
Take the case of the recent protest in Vienna against the proposed budget cuts to universities, despite their demands for budget increases. The first to cry out and call for a protest were the rectors, followed by both official and unofficial student bodies. The pro-Palestinian student collectives responded by adopting the demands of the rector's offices, and tacking on a call to end the increasing privatization and military research at universities, proclaiming "whose university? our university!". These demands were not spectacular and you can find them echoed in statements made by reformist, official student bodies. More spectacular was the abject failure to tie in workers' demands and agitate the university workers. This was no accident; the leftist student movement around Palestine has been entirely oriented around the mobilization of students and making big demands to the universities and state. Their impotence became increasingly evident over the years, strengthening the Marxist position, as the students hold no real sway, because they do not run the universities. In their desolate position, the student collectives withered in strength, despite the optimism that this year' s ESC and the aforementioned protest would rejuvenate them. For 3 years they failed to connect to university workers, and now that they had the chance to tie their movement to proletarian economic demands, they were unprepared in their weakened position, and could not take advantage going forward. Because of this, the discourse around university funding remains centered around university management (whose wages increased significantly over the last 20 years) and students (who universities already cater to). The lack of any real proletarian movement in Austria has caused boundless opportunism and this is particularly visible in all leftist, and a majority of Marxist-Leninist, and *especially* Trotskyist parties. The "Marxists" pay only lip service to the proletariat, instead asserting that only young people can be the catalyst for socialism, and focussing almost exclusively on political, rather than economic demands, not understanding that it is the economic demands that give way to the political among the proletariat, not the other way around.
As the student movement around Palestine dies a slow and embarrassing death, the observers of the movement will wonder "what went wrong"? The movement is dying because of its own blindness of the limits of its organization: some students left the country, some became too busy because they were working and studying, others were intimidated because their illegalist actions resulted in terrible state repression, and others still finished studying, alienated entirely from their old structures. The students moved frantically and no doubt had an impact on global support for Israel's ongoing genocide, but they failed to build any lasting momentum. Without this momentum, the anti-Israeli sentiment will surely give way to a great bourgeois alibi, by which the bourgeoisie, collectively responsible for the genocide, will proclaim their innocence and insist they were victims of *Israeli influence*. They can and will wash their hands of the unpleasantries and try to create a nonexistent distinction between them and the actions of first "the Israeli far right" -- then if that becomes impossible, the Israeli state and the Israeli bourgeoisie.
