In the early 2000s while in Mexico City I ended up on the campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. This is an enormous university, by any of the standards I know. The university had 370,000 students (as of 2023, but I believe a similar number 20 years ago).
Walking around I met some students and followed them to a meeting of the Spartacist Youth League.
I had no idea what that was, other than the name seemed interesting and the people were nice.
Then the meeting started. After a long speech by the organizer (my Spanish was only good enough to understand half), students took turns standing and giving their own speeches. A few of the speeches were in English, which surprised me. The content was surprising too. One of the speeches was to persuade mainland China to abandon capitalist reforms. Another was in support of North Korea.
As the meeting ended, my new friends asked me what I thought.
“I’m not sure if I understood, but was there a speech in support of North Korea? In support of the government of North Korea? And the continuation of the revolution there?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say that.”
“Yes, well even a place like North Korea is not completely Communist, but we have to support their continued struggle.”
“But aren’t things actually awful for people who live there? The majority population who are not the elites?”
“Well, there is a process, it’s true. And like I said, even North Korea is not completely communist.”
To NYC
Months later I became an MBA student at Columbia, a university that was in the news earlier this year because of student protests against the Israel–Hamas war. As part of that, student protestors took over Columbia’s Hamilton Hall again (previous time, anti-Vietnam War in 1968).
Grad students like myself tended to have fewer reasons to explore campus buildings, but Hamilton Hall was a building that I entered exactly one time when I was a student.
Back then, on Thursday nights, MBA students had an on-campus happy hour. In a bad economy, those happy hours were usually just beer and some pizza (nothing like the catering during the good old Dotcom days, I was told).
But one night I noticed something on my way to the event.
A poster for the Spartacist Youth League. Taking place in Hamilton Hall that night.
Fueled by my experience at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a semester of microeconomics, I imagined leading a group of my friends to debate the communists. And I set out to bring at least a dozen people with me.
I tried to persuade friends at the happy hour:
“After this let’s go to the Spartacist Youth League! They’re having a meeting at Hamilton Hall. We can talk with them about economics!”
“The what?”
“The Spartacist Youth League. They’re communists! Let’s go to their meeting. We can school them on free markets!”
“I was planning to go to the afterparty.”
“Well, we can go before that.”
And this memorable (to me) exchange:
“Hey, after this beer let’s go debate the kids at the Spartacist Youth League. They won’t know what hit them.”
“Is this the communist club you’ve been talking about?”
“Yes, look, they’re probably undergrads. And they probably haven’t even read The Communist Manifesto. It will be a slam dunk.”
“Why do I want to talk to kids who think they’re communists?”
“It will be hilarious…. Let’s do it!”
“No one thinks this is a good idea.”
I can only imagine why I ever thought that I’d convince a dozen people to go with me. But I did manage to convince one classmate. He was an international student from France and arrived an hour late, several beers into his night. (Note: He was also the closest thing to a communist the class had.)
The Meeting
I walked into Hamilton Hall, which was a nice reminder of the older east coast university lecture halls I used to know. Unlike the business school buildings, which were modernist and bleak (and in appearance the most communist-looking things on campus), Hamilton Hall was traditional. It had the solid stone and hardwoods that I still associate with learning, at least outside of the sciences. A statue of Alexander Hamilton stood out front.
I took a seat toward the back of the club meeting classroom. The meeting had already begun and, as in Mexico, there were speeches and commentary. There was also an older guy at the side who might have been a professor or a walk-in from the street, but he didn’t do anything except nod his head.
In format, it could have passed for that first meeting I attended in Mexico City but, fortified with happy hour beers, this time I spoke.
I wish I could recount all that happened. The arguments, the quotable exchanges, the drama, but I remember just these two:
- A young man said, with exasperation, “OK, maybe I’m not really communist, but I’m a socialist. I just am. And when people ask me, ‘Are you really a socialist?’ I say ‘Yes, I am. I really am a socialist.’”
- I destroyed every single person in that room (happened before #1 above).
Don’t believe me? Ask the French guy. He was there.
How Did I Do It?
In reality, I didn’t do much. I arrived at a meeting of people who should have known the Spartacist arguments much better than me. But with some amount of human experience, those arguments seem artificial, theoretical, and childish. They imagine a world where human behavior has completely changed. They ignore the history of top-down autocratic states. They don’t speak with people who voted with their feet leaving those states. Things I’ve written about here many times.
At the end, a few members came up to me to get my name and email but I never heard from them again.
That little episode was my only direct encounter with university-based communism or socialism.
Maybe I should have gone to another meeting. Maybe I should have gotten their emails in return.
Maybe I could have continued the discussion.
Then again, maybe I would have just wasted a lot of time discussing bad ideas.
Back in a university now, I’m always surprised to hear about the presence of these old (and I thought, discarded) ideas. I barely encounter them directly, but I see that I just focused on a couple corners of campus that happen to be naturally resistant (the business and engineering schools). Until recently, I had not heard of the “long march through the institutions.”
I’m told that the recent campus protests have roots in Marxist ideology. I feel that there is much more to it than that.
While my earlier experience with the Spartacist Youth made me feel that they were ignorant, unserious, and definitely lazy, perhaps things have changed. The arguments still don’t work, but organizational strength, committee membership, and infusion into class curricula makes for a stronger foundation.
And also from a hidden source. “The most congenial home left for Marxism, now that it has been largely discredited as a theory of economics and politics, is in departments of literary criticism.”
That was written back in a 1990 issue of the NY Review of Books, of all places.
I didn’t appreciate the potential for people to continue to believe in these ideas back then because I had mostly experienced the abandonment of communism and certainly Marxist thought. When I was in college the remaining communist-leaning professors seemed like dinosaurs from another age. I remember Doris Lessing’s NY Times Op-Ed explaining political correctness as the refuge those dinosaurs would flee to.
I’ve only recently appreciated the long march strategy and the planning that took. But now I see that the dinosaurs never left. They just evolved.