October 21, 2026
by Jonathan Nagy
“Socialism, since it has become a science, demands that it be pursued as a science, that is, that it be studied.” — Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880)
Why Study Marxism?
Many organizers today are adopting political identities associated with Marxism and applying Marxist ideas to their work in the spontaneous mass movement. Some Americans are self-identifying as “socialists” or “democratic socialists,” and some of our leading organizers are identifying as “communist,” amid a broader upsurge in political engagement around elections and campaigns rooted in socialist ideas. However, Marxism is not a left ideology; it constitutes a scientific approach to the study of the development of human society, rooted in the organizing experiences of revolutionary movements through history.
Communist and socialist organizations across the country are experiencing growth in membership and are responding to this growth either by turning toward a study of philosophy, theory, and history to understand this changing political landscape, or by doubling down on “success” and moving blindly forward, equating growth in membership or an organizing victory for a clear political direction.
Within this changing landscape, the University of the Poor Chicago Network re-established regular meetings at the end of 2024 to further develop our collective and work toward consolidating our political direction in Chicago. These discussions showed us that, much like other organizers engaged in the class struggle, we were asking deeper and more complex questions about emerging conditions without a framework to research, study, discuss, and act with clarity.
In seeking to navigate our rapidly changing local conditions across multiple fronts of struggle, including I.C.E. attacks on our communities, the rapidly escalating housing crisis, and the electoral arena to name a few, we were stuck in the realm of abstract observations and not yet equipped with the knowledge of theory to guide these discussions about our practice. Conversations lacked a solid theoretical framework and therefore remained rooted in our personal experiences in the spontaneous struggle. We collectively acknowledged that our time together could be used to propose and develop strategic interventions within the class struggle, but we were stuck on discussing only the particularities of our own organizing projects.
Thus, from our own need and experiences working within expanding mass organizations and organizing projects addressing the urgent needs of our society, we proposed to develop a foundational study of Marxism. We were seeking a framework for consolidating our own internal understanding of Marxism as a science to understand the development of societies, while also preparing ourselves with a process to train ourselves as teachers to be active in the spontaneous movement.
To begin our study, we turned to Lenin’s pamphlet, The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism (1913). The first course was developed around the question, “What is Marxism?” and was formulated as an internal study of University of the Poor Chicago members. For this purpose, most of the participants were University of the Poor members, leaders across our network that had been attending regular discussions and had a general knowledge of the University of the Poor Program. We did, however, make some exceptions.
This course was planned during a period of intense spontaneous struggle organized against President Trump’s “Operation Midway Blitz” in Chicago. Members of our network were working alongside emerging leaders within the class struggle that were experiencing very rapid growth and asking very deep questions to understand the moment. These emerging leaders were positioned in leadership roles within our “rapid response” and mutual aid network in defense of I.C.E. attacks after years of training and development within the mass movement. Before we issued invitations, we held extensive discussion about the concerns that a study might reduce the capacity of these leaders to respond to the moment, while also expressing a need to improve the quality of the movement work.
Our network chose to invite these leaders to join the University of the Poor study. Our invitations were met with excitement, making the study a hybrid between University of the Poor members and spontaneous movement leaders. All participants in this first study expressed that they had some experience with reading or studying Marxism, but expressed an inability and desire to systematically apply the content of study to their work in the class struggle.
Since we began these efforts, the University of the Poor Chicago network has consolidated behind a call to develop a system for the study of Marxism, as agreed upon in our Summer Conference in 2026. We are working to advance our collective project of laying a foundation for a Communist Party in the United States connected to the emerging mass movement, and in particular to an independent working class party. We see our work in Chicago as an example of hosting collective discussions rooted in our own practical experiences of applying the study of Marxism toward our broader, collective goals.
Using the Struggle as a School
In Chicago, we have experimented with many forms and content of study, all to better understand our local history. Our study has tended to be more specifically focused on particular questions and not on a system of inquiry and observation. Over time and through experimentation, we came to understand that our time studying together is integral to the development of our organization and the development of the revolutionary movement itself. Our purpose was in part to clarify our experiences, but we needed also to study our experiences within a broader understanding of our city’s social and political landscape, as well as society more broadly.
Therefore, the quality and content of our study should be aimed at that goal. At this stage, this is particularly relevant to training and consolidating revolutionary cadre emerging from the independent working-class struggle. As the University of the Poor Program asserts in the section, “Tasks of Revolutionaries in the U.S.”:
“The practical political unity of the leaders of the struggles of the working class is essential for moving out from under the political and ideological domination of the ruling class. That unity is impossible without the identification, training, testing, organizing, and uniting of revolutionary political leaders inseparably connected with the struggles of the poor and dispossessed.
Their primary responsibility is to be the most active part of the different fronts of struggles of this revolutionary section of society, and to turn those struggles into schools of revolutionary class consciousness and political organization while resisting the efforts of the bourgeoisie to turn them to their own ends or destroy them. Indispensable to our training is a study of the revolutionary theory of Marxism, which can only be mastered through its testing, application, and enrichment in practical revolutionary work.” — (In summary of the University of the Poor Program, “Tasks of Revolutionaries in the U.S.”)
The University of the Poor Program provides the framework for considering what a system of Marxist study might contribute to our work in Chicago and across our University of the Poor network. The working class is already engaged in struggle, but these struggles do not necessarily produce an independent, working class political perspective on their own. This is where we can make a key intervention through study.
Marxism teaches us how to think, not what to think—how to investigate real conditions, identify and understand key contradictions, evaluate political forces, and make judgments that can inform collective action. In the development of communist cadre connected to the working class struggle, we are working to establish a process to evaluate the experiences of our cadre and use those experiences to guide our work forward.
The relationship between study and organizing is reciprocal. We learn from the struggle through our understanding of Marxism, while our experience in the struggle gives us material through which to test and develop our understanding of Marxism. We continue to develop the structure of our study program and work toward new solutions to new areas of growth in this program as we move forward with future experiments in study.
Study as Cadre Development
Following our first attempt at the “What is Marxism?” course, we ran an evaluation of the course. This process consisted of internal discussion and debate between the course facilitators and our members who participated in the study. The facilitators also prepared a detailed evaluation form for participants that we used to guide our reflections. Through evaluation, we determined our primary goal of establishing a culture of study rooted in Marxism was accomplished. All participants and facilitators left the course with a deeper understanding of Marxism rooted in their current organizing experiences and a commitment to future study. Members of the network with extensive experience in Marxist study reported a recommitment to study and a refreshed understanding of how their past experiences in Marxist study were reinforced by a new understanding developed through concrete discussion about the current environment.
As facilitators, we identified the commitment to future study as a positive and unexpected outcome. In order to sustain the energy toward future study, we set about the next challenge of developing a plan for a second course and further investigating the conditions for a more robust system of study. We identified goals for the second course of: 1) expanding the core of facilitators and including them in additional collective study beyond the text, using the opportunity to train more of our network in teaching Marxism; 2) clarifying the content of the course, incorporating feedback from participants and new facilitators; and 3) considering where we could begin to sort content into additional layers of more-advanced study.
Expanding our facilitator core was an opportunity to continue developing cadre capable of teaching this course, while continuing to clarify our collective understanding. Consolidating complex information into clear, digestible, fundamental points and leading discussion requires connecting theory to experience. It is important to note that these lessons were crafted directly from the experiences of the facilitators, and were facilitated to be conversational and to draw out questions The ability to recognize the essence of political questions as they emerge and help others develop their own capacity for analysis grows through participation in struggle.The intergenerational composition of the study group and the myriad of experiences across class struggle, allowed facilitators to draw on real, tested experiences to illustrate the content of the study..
While the first course was taking place, the idea of joining a course about Marxism became very popular in our community of organizers. There was a large demand for participating in a future course, and our network wanted to make an effort to provide access to the course for organizers engaged in the spontaneous movement but who were not members of the University of the Poor. This decision to expand the study to this audience produced its own interesting challenges, primary among them the question of addressing sustained, future study with organizers disconnected from our internal process.
Learning as a Collective
As we continue to lay a foundation of a fundamental understanding of Marxism, we also want to be able to address the increased need for clarifying lingering questions, guiding new Marxists through the process of building their own study collectives, and helping to prevent organizers from turning toward misleading leftist texts not rooted in the science of Marxism. We are still developing our process toward sustaining a culture of study, rather than one-off studies.
Our experience therefore raises the question of how study can be organized within and sustained by the collective, supporting the need of organizers to answer questions related to their personal experiences and research. If people are encouraged to study and set on a path, but are not supported, we may inadvertently reproduce the individualism that collective organization is intended to overcome. Collective study, by contrast, creates opportunities to compare experiences, develop a common language, coordinate work, and bring theoretical questions back into practice. At the same time, the demands on people’s time suggest that we will need to think strategically about what can be sustained as a collective while leaving enough flexibility for experimentation and individual study.
A key lesson of these two courses on “What is Marxism?” study is inherent in how we taught the course, rooted in discussion between students and facilitators. Marxism teaches us to see the world as it is, and the practice of Marxism teaches us to analyze concrete situations. In our teaching of the fundamentals of Marxism, it was essential that we not teach abstractly, but present ideas within a context of the experiences of the collective. A significant portion of each class was dedicated to participants sharing their existing understanding, or existing experiences connected to the topic of study. Facilitators spent time preparing ahead of each class to be able to respond to what participants would bring, and were also prepared to collectively respond to anything unexpected.
Therefore, the course was shaped around the experiences of those participating, not unilaterally lectured from the perspective of facilitators. In this way, every participant left the course with a different level of understanding, which presents another unique challenge for sustained study. We will need to continue to develop strategies to address the individual learning needs of each participant within the collective as we find ways to sustain future study.
Toward a System of Study
Developing a system for the study of Marxism in Chicago is one component of the broader effort to develop communist organization and contribute to the emergence of an independent working class party. The spontaneous movement provides the material basis for this development; communist organization makes its political development more conscious; and Marxism provides a scientific basis for understanding that process. The practical question for us is how these elements can be brought together in an organizational form that can be tested and refined through experience.
We are not struggling to create better students of Marxism in isolation, but to develop leaders who can increasingly apply Marxist analysis within the class struggle, train others, and participate in building a political program for an independent working class party. Our experience with the study gives us an opportunity to ask what forms and content of study actually contribute to working-class political organization.
Jonathan Nagy lives on the northwest side of Chicago and was raised in rural Ohio on the west side of Cleveland. He helps facilitate our local University of the Poor network in Chicago. He organizes with a local independent political organization (IPO) called United Neighbors of the 35th Ward, where working class neighbors come together to build power through local elections. He serves as Chief of Staff for Alderwoman Rossana Rodriguez Sanchez and manages City Council’s Committee on Health and Human Relations.
—
