A small team of revcoms returned to Yale University to follow up Raymond Lotta’s intervention in Timothy Snyder’s class, where Lotta had called out Snyder’s lies about communism and challenged Snyder to debate the reality of communist experience.

Reverberations from Raymond Lotta’s Frontal Challenge to Anti-Communist Timothy Snyder

This intervention on February 29 had a big impact at Yale and more broadly in academia, capturing the attention of students and faculty for weeks following, and we didn’t want this challenge to simply be absorbed into the daily fabric of campus life, as an interesting “one-off.” Lotta’s challenge had cracked open the possibility of breaking through the bullshit “narrative” promoted by Snyder (and others) that communism is no different than fascism and both are “totalitarian” horrors. We didn’t want to let that opening get slammed shut. We also wanted to learn more about the mood among students at this time of great turmoil and danger.

We decided to lead with the flyer promoting Raymond’s national tour (The New Communist Revolution So Badly Needed… vs. the Anti-Communist Brainwash You’re Getting) and the pop quiz “Everything You’ve Been Told about Communism IS WRONG: CAPITALISM IS A FAILURE, COMMUNIST REVOLUTION IS THE SOLUTION.” We reproduced copies of the recent recom.us article "Revolutionary Communism vs. 'Decolonization' Theory: Three Huge Differences," the revcom.us article summing up the initial revcom intervention (above) and announcements for the "The BIG Problem with Netflix 3 Body Problem" program at New York Revolution Books. We had copies of the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America and important revcom pamphlets on the table along with palm cards for the Bob Avakian Interviews and some provocative placards we had made up, including a challenge to take the pop quiz. We staked out a street corner right outside the student union and jumped into it.

Taking the Quiz and Then Going Deeper

Once we got started, it quickly became clear that on this day, we needed to lead with the pop quiz. It seemed that students were much more drawn to the "challenge" of testing their knowledge than the "invitation" to take a flyer, even when posed sharply, and we were in for a roller-coaster day.

One of the posters challenging students to take the quiz was hand drawn on dayglow paper and was readable from a distance. We could see students pointing at it from across the street and coming over to the table. While there was a lot of ebb and flow, during the breaks between classes there were sometimes a dozen or more students crowding around the table. A student might stop, and a couple of their friends would see them, and they would stop. One group of students told us they wanted to go get a friend who knew more about Chinese history, and they brought him back to take the quiz. Others would stop to get a flyer and then end up spending 15-20 minutes talking with us.

One graduate student, who also taught a class focusing on how neoliberal policy impacted the inner city, asked if Raymond could speak in his class.

An undergraduate took the quiz and suggested bringing Raymond into his contemporary China class. At the same time, he talked about the lack of hope that he and his classmates feel looking at the world today.

All kinds of students stopped; both graduate and undergraduates, many from the liberal arts but also from the sciences, with a lot of international or first-generation immigrant students. 

We struggled with every student who stopped to take the pop quiz on the spot and not to just leave with it. While most still took the quiz with them, 16 took the test at our table, and this led to some very intense moments, where, after reading the first question or two together, we would end up in deeper conversations—the vicious French suppression of Algeria, the murder of students at Kent State and Jackson State during the protests against the Vietnam War and more. This, in turn, would often lead to the situation today with the draconian attacks on students and faculty opposing the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Students who began the pop quiz as a lark started wanting to see what the next question was.

The second set of questions, comparing and contrasting the Constitution of the United States with the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, written by Bob Avakian, was more difficult because students hadn’t read the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, and some didn’t fill that section out. One exception was an older Chinese student who carefully read each question out loud and answered them (correctly). When he got to the questions comparing Constitutions, he continued to read and answer them correctly. He told us that he hadn’t read the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic but he knew these statements banning discrimination and guaranteeing employment definitely weren’t in the U.S. Constitution. As he finished, he smiled and said, “You must be the communists.”

A Wide Range of Students

We found ourselves constantly challenged. One student, whose family was from Cuba and whose uncle had been persecuted for publishing an anti-Castro paper, was genuinely interested and raised the question, “Yes it seems you have something very positive in your Constitution but what are you going to do in the real world when confronted with big problems?” We ran into a number of students whose families came from countries once dominated by the Soviet Union after it had become a capitalist-imperialist rival to the U.S. and who mistakenly considered their families’ experience to have demonstrated the failure of communism. While we contested their assessment, we also pointed to this as one of the big reasons they needed to hear Raymond Lotta.

In a real stroke of good luck, we met a student who had been in Snyder’s class when Raymond had issued his original challenge. This student was one of several who had stuck around to talk to Lotta after Snyder had herded others out of the classroom. He told us that Raymond’s challenge had compelled his breakout group to focus more on the crimes of Western imperialism than they would have otherwise, including the British government’s enforced starvation of millions of West Bengalis during the second world war and the fire-bombing of Dresden. He said he was still a little torn by the intervention, which he characterized as “a little Stalinist,” but had, himself, been challenged by Raymond and was happy to find us back on campus.

We also met our fair share of “haters,” mostly Zionists. They wanted to take the pop quiz to somehow poke holes in it. While most of this was also bullshit, they sometimes posed provocative questions like, “Wasn’t it true that Stalin and the Soviet Union supported the creation of Israel?” (yes) or, in response to question 5, “Does that mean you are opposed to religious freedoms” (no, but we will struggle fiercely against reactionary religious practices). Another person challenged us—“Yes, Stalin and the Soviet Union passed legislation protecting the rights of Jewish people, but didn’t they also imprison and murder tens of thousands of their own people in the purges leading up to the World War 2?”

Proceeding from the New Communism

Even though these questions were coming from backward and sometimes reactionary individuals, some of them hit at real contradictions we feel we need to dig into and grapple with more. And they pointed to the fact that we need to do a better job of bringing forward Bob Avakian, BA, and the new communism, specifically in regard to the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, but more overall. That’s a question of us proceeding fully and consciously from the framework of the new communism brought forward by BA. Bob Avakian broke with some of the unscientific ways of thinking that had persisted in the approach of the previous revolutionary thinkers, societies and movements and has forged a qualitatively more scientific way to go at the problems that will face any socialist society moving to eliminate all oppression and to “free the spirit from its cell.” (See, for example, BA on “Truth is…truth” in his social media message Revolution Number 23.) The pop quiz actually gives us the basis to do that.

We also thought we needed to think more strategically about using @BobAvakianOfficial. We brought a sound system but in all the hubbub around the table, there never seemed a good way to start playing an excerpt. We have to work on that. One idea is simply to say that at a certain point we are going to take a break from everything else to play one or two of the dispatches and work off them.

Despite the shortcomings, this turned into a very significant outing, where we all felt that we were just scratching the surface and had us thinking about the possibilities—including of getting back to Yale once more before the end of the school year.