“I will not dance to your war drum. I will not lend my soul nor my bones to your war drum …” — Suheir Hammad
On the morning of September 19th, students walked into the University of Helsinki’s main building and declared it occupied. We, Students Against Cuts, organized this action to demand attention to the increasingly precarious conditions faced by students — conditions made worse by the government’s planned cuts to housing allowances, affordable housing, and its pursuit of racist immigration policies.
We oppose all forces sustaining the racist, neoliberal status quo. This means not only the current right-wing government but also those actors who hide behind “neutrality.” In today’s climate, neutrality equals complicity. The university, as a powerful producer of knowledge, cannot remain on the sidelines. We call on the University of Helsinki to move beyond symbolic gestures and take concrete action: defend students’ right to study without the constant threat of economic insecurity, and oppose state-sanctioned racism in all its forms.
From Helsinki to a national movement
Our occupation sparked action elsewhere. Universities across Finland — including the University of the Arts Helsinki, Aalto University, Tampere University, and the University of Turku — have organized their own protests. Although autonomous, these actions are linked through ongoing communication, creating a growing nationwide movement of Students Against Cuts (Opiskelijat leikkauksia vastaan).
Our struggle is not only for students. We stand in solidarity with pensioners, unemployed people, refugees, undocumented people, disabled people, and others affected by austerity. Students are only one group among many. While we acknowledge our relative privilege — access to higher education and platforms to speak — we see it as our responsibility to help stitch together a fragmented resistance into a united front.
Responding to media narratives
Some commentators dismiss our movement by portraying students as privileged and entitled — suggesting we should simply work more or take on larger student loans. But this ignores reality.
Not all students can work while studying: some care for children, some face health challenges, and many already combine full-time studies with part-time work. Student debt in Finland now averages over €20,000, with no guarantee of stable employment after graduation. Rising costs and deepening precarity make these dismissals hollow. We cannot be silenced by such misrepresentations.
Building unity across struggles
The Orpo government’s agenda has sparked protests nationwide. While framed as “fiscal responsibility,” its program serves to increase inequality and consolidate power. This debt-populist narrative obscures alternative frameworks that could ensure fiscal stability without dismantling social protections, and it ignores global justice demands such as debt relief for the Global South.
Solidarity across struggles is historically difficult. White working-class movements and trade unions have often opposed so-called “identity politics,” dismissing the struggles of racialized, queer, feminist, and migrant communities. But these struggles are not distractions from class politics — they are central to it. Equity, care, and mutual aid strengthen, not weaken, the possibility of collective liberation.
In Finland, migrants are still represented as “welfare takers” rather than as essential workers. This reflects colonial amnesia and “white innocence” that underpin national narratives. Meanwhile, openly racist rhetoric is becoming mainstream, legitimizing austerity policies that disproportionately harm migrants and racialized communities. Racism, austerity, and settler-colonialism are intertwined systems of dispossession — and must be opposed together.
Rethinking the neoliberal university
The university itself is not neutral. Academia has long served to suppress and delegitimize knowledge produced outside Western traditions, reinforcing hierarchies of race, gender, and class. The neoliberal university is simply the newest phase of this history.
Drawing on Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s idea of the undercommons, we see possibilities for resistance within but not of the university. During the occupation, we hosted teach-ins, forums, and alternative spaces of learning that disrupted the usual academic order. These gatherings, grounded in care and horizontal organization, point toward new, prefigurative forms of politics.
Toward an anti-colonial praxis
Failing to act in solidarity with dispossessed groups means normalizing right-wing politics. A transformative, reparative class politics requires recognizing how neoliberalism reproduces itself through difference-making and racialization.
For those mobilizing inside universities, this means pushing beyond anti-austerity demands alone. We must actively strive for anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-patriarchal practices. Only then can we build a politics of solidarity strong enough to challenge the intersecting systems of exploitation that structure our lives.
