Yes, those people, what they learned was political praxis: How to succeed and win an argument. How to be effective, in a minority, how to dominate a room. I was a member of a less rigid, less orthodox, (markedly less effective!) socialist student movement in the UK at a similar time as them in the late 70s and I know some, a little, of how they operate. An older generation in the SDS learned similar lessons during the anti Vietnam war campaign in the USA.

Some anticommunists fail to understand or believe you can ever cease to be a communist. Arguably, they're right: there are political lessons which can't be unlearned. Putin is anything but a communist, Russia is not a socialist state. Do you think Putin has unlearned what he learned across the sixties and seventies and eighties as a loyal party member? Different to Claire Fox but similar lessons learned I would argue.