NEOLIBERALISM IS DEAD, THE UNION IS NOW RED (Satire)
By Celeste-Cohen Eli, 24.09.2025
Dear Comrades,
We write in appreciation of your role in our historic campaign for last year’s student union elections. Considering our decisive victory and our undeniable mandate (4:3), it felt prudent that we write to our party members and restate the internal platform of KSV-KJÖ for the forthcoming academic year and beyond. We only ask for a moment of your time— as PHD students ourselves, we understand the hardship of such grueling schedules better than most.
Our first demand is the equitable distribution of fiscal resources to our doctoral cohorts. As the vanguard of the student proletariat, it is our duty and obligation to emancipate ourselves from the bureaucratic ruling class, the university administration. The hardship of being a PHD student at a private university in the capitalist age is impalpable. Tucked away in their ivory tower, the administration simply hasn’t got a clue!
But greater renumeration for our PHD’s is only the first of a long line of dominoes which must fall. Our long-term, secret plan is to gain structural power and infiltrate the faculty, via employment. After institutional capture is secured, we’ve begun brainstorming on how to decolonize our imperial university:
Rename the title of Student Body President to General Secretary of the Student Proletariat, and cancel future elections. Of course, everything will be decided upon unanimously.
2. Our concept for CEU’s new auditorium, to be named the Stalin-Lenin-Guevara Hall for Socialist Re-Education and Discourse. This seems self-evident.
3. Initiate the ideological purification of campus and exchange the portrait of the neoliberal architect George Soros with the more ideologically pure Karl Marx.
And this would only be the beginning. In the meantime, the administration should be prepared for significant university disruption. We always have the nuclear option at our disposal—If we must, we are prepared to sit on the floor of the downstairs lobby for a few hours, schedules permitting. In a demonstration of our seriousness, we will even bring our own lunches. There will be no getting up and leaving for a falafel!
Failing to meet our demands will set in motion a revolution—a historical inevitability that will finally sweep away the tyrannical reign of CEU’s academic bourgeoisie. Remember comrades, our hand has been forced. We will accept nothing less than what is rightfully ours. Naturally, we expect to have full solidarity from the entire university community. Always remind tuition paying MA and BA students that our fight is their fight. The logic is, of course, self-evident to any critical thinker.
And to our critics, we lament that your intellectual development has yet to progress to a level sufficient to comprehend the systemic injustice which we face. We ask you: Do you not grasp the basic intersectionality of our financial ecosystems? Do you not see that the systemic oppression which we endure also affects your own material conditions? We are living in a 1984 moment, and to believe otherwise is to follow the pigs on the farm who claim that some animals are more equal than others. It would be utter nonsense, do not forget that!
Our meeting space is right outside the university doors, and we meet every day, whenever a comrade requires a cigarette. To identify a fellow comrade, know that we each stand in a manner which makes it completely impossible for anyone to get around us. As you probably now realize, we are quite numerous, and we meet quite often. The underground is united! Each of these meetings, in its own way, is a miniature revolution. You see, by obstructing students from entering, we delay the neoliberal indoctrination which they are about to receive. Maybe this can be our new slogan, KSV-KJÖ: speaking truth to power, by blocking the sidewalk.
We look forward to seeing your face at our next meeting!
With Revolutionary Greetings,
KSV-KJÖ
