On the weekend of October 24–25, the Revolutionary Communists of America gathered 270 comrades for the second annual Chicago Marxist School. Party members and guests across the Midwest and central United States traveled to the Windy City.

Delegations came from Minneapolis, Dallas–Fort Worth, St. Louis, Detroit, and New Orleans, as well as 23 other cities including Milwaukee and Madison, WI; Memphis, TN and Louisville, KY; Cleveland, OH and Evansville, IN; Des Moines and Ames, IA; Houston and Austin, TX; and Columbia, MO, Denver, CO, and New York City.

It was the second in a series of three Marxist Schools that the RCA is hosting this fall, following one in Los Angeles and another to be held in New York City on November 7–8.

The Communist Manifesto

The first session of the weekend was on The Communist Manifesto, which is more relevant today than when it was written 178 years ago. When Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels wrote the Manifesto, modern industry was beginning to take Europe by storm. Today, capitalism has entangled every corner of the world, and introduced a massive global division of labor.

But, through the development of modern industry, capitalism creates its own gravediggers: The working class. This mass of propertyless workers are forced to sell their labor-power to the ruling class. In 2026, there are a staggering 3.6 billion wageworkers—far more than in Marx and Engels’s day.

Every year, because of capitalism’s senile decay, more workers reject the system. Millions are turning towards communism. To paraphrase Marx, the communists have “no interests separate or apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.” They are only distinguished by their ability to bring forward the common interests of the whole working class—independent of nationality, gender, or race. What they lack is training in the Marxist method, which is the purpose of the revolutionary party.

Today, we need more professional revolutionaries who can translate our ideas into action at a moment’s notice. While the rest of the left bends to the ruling class’s ideas, including “lesser evilism,” revolutionary communists maintain absolute class independence. It’s our duty to raise the class question underpinning every struggle, and weld a revolutionary leadership that can overthrow capitalism.

A school for revolutionaries

Over the next two days, we had ten sessions to educate comrades on the class-struggle history of the United States, questions of tactics and strategy, and the climate crisis.

Alex Oas illustrated the life of Eugene V. Debs, an unparalleled, homegrown working-class revolutionary. The US ruling class argues that socialism is foreign to America, but Debs’s life proves just how wrong they are. The Haymarket Massacre, Gilded Age company towns, and the Socialist Party of America shaped Debs’s political outlook, and drove him to revolutionary conclusions.  He never yielded to his class enemies, whether in agitating against the imperialist slaughter of World War I, or in his defense of the October Revolution. Despite this, Debs shied from factional and theoretical struggles, which played to the advantage of the right wing of the Socialist Party. As communists we must honor Debs’s legacy and emulate his revolutionary spirit, which also means learning from his mistakes.

Detailing the rise of industrial unionism, Jaybre Acres chronicled the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) through the 1940s. When the methods of craft unionism reached an impasse during the Great Depression, three communist-led strikes in 1934 broke the logjam by using class-struggle methods. These were the San Francisco Longshoremen’s Strike, the Toledo Auto-Lite Strike, and the Minneapolis Teamsters’ Strike. In contrast, today’s union bureaucrats seek any means to find “amenable” compromises with the bosses—to our class’s detriment. History shows that for the labor movement to win, it must embrace class independence.

Stanton Young spoke about the partnership between the two great leaders of the Russian Revolution: Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. The pair came to the same fundamental conclusions in the course of 1917. Sweeping aside the pettifogging arguments of “internet Stalinism,” genuine Marxists must learn from the evolution of Lenin and Trotsky’s thought from 1903 to 1917, and after.

On the fight against imperialist war, Nico Melton highlighted how the conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran are radicalizing a whole generation of American youth. Revolutionaries must understand that imperialism is an inevitable stage of monopoly capitalism, and that only through abolishing capitalism can we bring an end to imperialism’s horror.

Josh Lucker spoke about the efficacy of “direct action.” Because of the lack of a visible revolutionary alternative, people who are desperate for a way out of capitalism’s impasse take up such methods. However, only a laser-focus on training Marxist cadres can prepare us for the massive class battles to come.

Mark Rahman reexamined Democratic President FDR’s New Deal. Rather than a program of benevolent reforms, Roosevelt aimed to use the New Deal to head off the brewing revolution among the masses.

Owen Phernetton took a deeper look at the 1934 Minneapolis Teamster Local 574 Strike, whose Trotskyist leadership embodied the class-struggle attitude we need today in the labor movement. Finally, Simon Jarcho analyzed the dread-inducing climate catastrophe that only socialist revolution can put an end to.

Preparing for Revolution

In the final session, Tom Trottier of the Executive Committee outlined how the greatest event in human history came to be: the Russian Revolution of 1917. This was the first time the working class overthrew capitalism and held onto power, resisting the counterrevolutionary White Army and 21 foreign imperialist armies.

How did the Bolsheviks achieve this in an economically backwards and formerly semi-feudal country? As Trotsky explained, “… the greatest revolution in all history was not led by the party which started out with bombs but by the party which started out with dialectical materialism.”
The years leading up to the Revolution forged the Bolsheviks into a battle-hardened outfit of professional revolutionaries. Pivotal to this was the constant reeducation of the party cadre. This is what allowed the Bolsheviks to sink roots into the working class across Russia.

The RCA today is emulating Bolshevism’s lessons in the United States. Our sights are set on the building of a mass communist party for the historic struggles ahead, which will require a sacrifice of our comrades’ time, energy, and finances.

Through our communist fundraiser and raffle, we raised $6,444. The attendees were so eager for communist theory that the bookstore had little time to restock. In total, comrades spent over $11,000 at the bookstore—almost twice as much as last year!

To close out the event, Bryce Gordon of the Executive Committee remarked on the progress made by the RCA in Chicago and all across the country. “Ten years ago,” he said, “in the fall of 2016, we organized the Midwest Regional Marxist School, which would later evolve into this event, Chicago Marxist School … And I believe we had about 25 or 30 people present, mostly from Minneapolis and St. Louis … Fast forward ten years, we’ve had nearly 270 people present at this event this weekend.”

Broadening out our view, Bryce went on to tie the weekend’s sessions to the US and world situation. Trump can’t deliver on his promises for the “best jobs, biggest paychecks, and the brightest economic future in history.” This isn’t just because of his own incompetence, but more fundamentally, because capitalism is in a deep, organic crisis.

Bryce ended his remarks with a note on the “Red Autumn” currently sweeping through Europe, and the inevitable revolution coming to America: “The events taking place in Europe right now are just an initial preview of what’s coming. The working class is going to move, rest assured. But what’s not inevitable is that those struggles will have a genuine communist party that’s up to the task. That’s our job to build that.”

To conclude the event, the attendees of the Chicago Marxist School joined in singing a song that sections of the French youth out on the streets have adopted: The Internationale. Against the backdrop of imperialist war and austerity, in the city that gave us Haymarket, the Pullman Strikes, and Fred Hampton, hundreds felt the approaching dawn of a new world as we sang:

The earth shall rise on new foundations.
We have been naught, we shall be all.

If you agree that this rotten system must be swept into the dustbin of history, and you live in the American Northeast, join us for our final Regional Marxist School in New York City on November 7–8.