Militant training as a tool for transformation
This article is republished from Orientación, Year 3, Issue No. 19, the official publication of the Central Committee of the Argentine Communist Party (PCA). Over the past year, the CWPUSA launched its Joseph Weydemeyer National School which aims to equip the new generations of future cadre with the foundations of Marxism-Leninism and with the ability to facilitate the objectives of the school at the level of the base organizations. In addition, the CWPUSA has been involved in various binational schools with our comrades of the Communist Party of Mexico (PCM). We republish the following article in reflection of lessons drawn from these qualitative steps in the ideological development of the CWPUSA. In that regard, it is necessary to orient our political education to over come the ideological-political crisis that abounds and ultimately root it in the ultimate goal: the overthrow of the capitalist system.
The crisis being experienced by the Argentine and International Communist Movement, as well as the so-called “popular organizations” in our country that struggle and identify themselves as left-wing, stems from various sources. However, there is a fundamental pillar of the crisis and the ideological deviations prevailing in these times: the question of political education. But political education understood from a very different point of view than that upheld by these organizations and parties—that is, a political education whose function is to transform society, one that provides theory to militants fighting for the seizure of power, without focusing on reading the classics of Marxism from an academic perspective or attempting to generate a kind of intellectual superiority over other workers.
Communists reject this way of thinking, since we understand that revolutionary theory is for—and of—the entire working class and the people, and that its main function is to contribute to the strategic objective, not to academic studies that remain almost exclusively reserved for small groups that do not seek to socialize them. On the contrary, in many cases they end up in spaces created by the bourgeoisie to strip Marxist-Leninist theory of its revolutionary content.
Education must move in one direction only: organizing for struggle. Study circles or political education talks that do not push the proletariat to take a stand, to take into its own hands the historical responsibility we have as a class to change the reality in which we live, are merely sterile and/or academic actions, turning revolutionary theory into just another body of knowledge—when this theory is a guide for action, not for theses or colloquia of supposed leftist ideas.
That is why today we see the need to advance spaces for revolutionary political education, as exemplified by the Communist Party in the Province of Córdoba, which maintains its educational activity regularly and uninterruptedly, and also by the regional organization of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, which, far from slowing its activity, has planned and is promoting, starting in January 2026, education in Marxist-Leninist theory aimed at incorporating the knowledge necessary for the struggles to come. There is no way to understand how the economy functions and the general laws of capitalism without recognizing that the solution lies in organizing to overthrow bourgeois power and build a new society without exploiters or exploited.
All of the above does not mean that the Argentine Communist Party seeks to place itself above other organizations; rather, it points out and is concerned about the ideological crisis we are witnessing and, at the same time, takes responsibility for this problem as its own, promoting the creation of educational spaces that move in a revolutionary rather than academic direction.
As a result and symptom of this crisis, we find the absence of a revolutionary Program in Argentina, one that extensively analyzes the functioning of Argentine capitalism, its structure, and its position in the global imperialist pyramid. Instead, we see only phrases and slogans disconnected from reality, such as: “Argentina is a dependent country,” “We are a colony of the U.S.,” and even certain delusions like: “We must refound the Nation.” These statements are symptoms of a lack of knowledge of revolutionary theory, with no argumentation to support them, and are used in a slogan-like manner, confusing the working class about the reality in which it lives.
For this reason, it is of utmost importance and priority for revolutionaries to study Marxism-Leninism in order to seize power and change the reality in which we live. But it is also necessary to open these spaces to the working class, today completely stripped of these ideas, which are nothing other than the path toward its own liberation.