Revolution #159, March 22, 2009
Spreading Revolution and Communism
at NYU and the New School
I had the opportunity to be around NYU and the New School campus for about a week with Revolution newspaper, in the wake of the near-40 hr. student occupation of NYU’s Kimmel Center for University Life. The student occupation was a very bold and inspiring step outside the boundaries of “apathy-as-usual,” and even “protest-as-usual.” A couple of their demands centered around their school divesting in companies that are connected to the Israel war machine, and offering scholarships to Gazans. This occupation occurred as dozens of similar acts condemning the recent Israeli assault on Gaza sprouted up across universities in the UK. It also succeeded a student occupation at the New School back in December, with students demanding that their school’s president Bob Kerrey, a Vietnam War criminal, resign. As revolutionary communist youth, we waded right into the controversy, debate and struggle on these two campuses.
The potential for this nascent student movement is great, and the administrations of both NYU and the New School are well aware of this. When I attempted to join a teach-in at the New School about their recent occupation and future plans to demand the removal of their president, among other demands, I was stopped at the door by security guards demanding that I produce a student ID or leave. “There’s not gonna be any demonstration here,” one of the guards told me. Some students I talked to outside were buzzing about some student groups’ plans to shut down the school on April 1 if the president and vice president John Murtha didn’t resign. In conversations we had with key organizers of both schools’ student movements, some big questions were really wrangled over. Is nothing short of a revolution required to transform the role education plays in society, and who has access to that education? How could an uncompromising student movement work to change the terms of the debate on crucial issues such as the Israeli occupation of Palestine? How did these occupations raise students’ sights on what can and cannot be challenged and transformed? Should the students simply go for more “palpable” demands to not alienate people and antagonize the administration, or should the purpose be to change society’s current political polarization in a way that’s favorable for radical change and revolution? What about leadership and a vanguard party, and why is it necessary if we are serious about this revolution business? One of the leading members of the New School in Exile (responsible for the New School occupation) was taking a class called “Resistance,” and they were currently discussing the pros and cons of vanguard leadership. He bought the new RCP manifesto, curious to engage this question more.
We interviewed one of the student occupiers at NYU and one thing he said really stuck out. He declared that ever since the occupation, some of the occupiers have had a hard time going back to “life as usual”. Once they’ve challenged the reactionary authority of their university, it opened up doors of possibility that before seemed locked. These students are not done in struggling for their demands to be realized. But we weren’t simply cheering passively from the sidelines. One big question we wrangled over with this student occupier was whether the student body of NYU, and society at large, were ready for the ideas and science of revolution and communism. He argued that we needed to more or less meet people where they’re at. We argued that the state of the world and where U.S. society is “at” are unacceptable, and that people don’t intuitively come to see the need or possibility for socialism and communism. All of this was a very exciting challenge of applying the concept “Fight the Power, and Transform the People, for Revolution.”
Another experience we had was taking the newspaper into the “Think” coffee shop near NYU campus, a popular hang out spot for students. We decided to just “interrupt” each table of students in a friendly way, getting the paper out and talking to students about the Bold Initiative, and any skills or thoughts they had that they’d like to contribute to Revolution. This was something I’d never tried before, and it was a valuable experiment with much rich experience to apply to distributing the newspaper in bolder ways, with lots of vitality. The atmosphere at the universities in lower Manhattan is showing real signs of life, and what’s needed more than anything else is for us to be there, “learning while leading, leading while learning.”
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