Summer break is nearly over, and MIT’s most promising young minds are trading calculus for Kropotkin as it’s back to school for the barricades. The Institute’s Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) chapter, having completed its first full year of consciousness-raising, is reconvening this fall sharper, angrier, and somehow still enrolled full-time in some of the most competitive STEM programs on Earth.

Credit belongs first to Richard Solomon, the chapter’s Political Education Chair and a Political Science PhD candidate whose personal website proudly notes his research spans “comparative history, and leftist politics.” Solomon, who spent time as a U.S. State Department vice consul in Riyadh before discovering his true calling, has clearly mastered the arts of recruitment, agitprop, and taqiyya. Any man who can take a promising Course 18 math major and, within a single academic year, transform him into a published op-ed revolutionary deserves recognition for pedagogical excellence rarely seen outside a seminary.

That math major, Anton Perez, co-authored February’s “Sanctuary Campus Now” manifesto demanding MIT defy federal subpoenas and train Graduate Resident Advisors in warrant law. Perez has since been elevated to chapter President, a remarkable rise for someone who told The Tech the group exists “to advance an explicitly working-class politics” — a mission statement delivered with a straight face by a young man who will graduate into six figures.

Rounding out the cadre are physicist Eda Lozada, mechanical engineer Graciela León, and urban planner Victor Dominguez, each bringing elite technical training to the urgent project of abolishing the class system that funds their tuition. None will ever punch a time clock, drive a forklift, or worry about a shift schedule. But they will spend the fall semester “powermapping,” per YDSA’s own national training materials, to help build a workers’ paradise.

Godspeed, comrades. This time for sure.

Story suggested by The Geek That Can Speak