The 16th annual Montreal Marxist Winter School was a landmark event for communism in Quebec and Canada. The event received rave reviews from attendees, and the mood matched the seriousness of this moment in history—with all 750 attendees more determined to learn and build the forces of communism than ever.
This determination was required to even get the event off the ground.
In past years, we were able to organize the school at the University of Montreal (UdeM). But in the last year, there has been a crackdown on Palestine solidarity and communist organizing in campuses across the country—a symptom of the ruling class’ growing wariness of anything challenging its rule. The RCP’s student club at UdeM was also targeted. Our club status was revoked, preventing us from using our usual venue.
But, undeterred, we transformed this setback into an advance. In the past, we used to joke that one day, we would be big enough to rent the Montreal Convention Center, the Palais des Congrès. That’s exactly what we did this year. As Hélène Bissonnette, of the RCP Executive Committee, said in her remarks opening the school: “This weekend, the Communists take over a palace!”
In truth, the event was already becoming too big for our usual venue. Last year, as the event attracted 600 communists, the room was packed. This year, 750 people registered from across Canada, including the largest ever delegation from the United States with more than 110 comrades crossing the border to attend the school. We also were joined by guests from Mexico, Chile, Ireland, and the United Kingdom.
The event took place in a turbulent period to say the least—something that is becoming quite banal to say, as Joel Bergman of the RCP executive remarked. World capitalism is sinking ever deeper into a historic crisis, expressing itself through political instability, wars, trade wars, violent coups and genocide.
The question of which road the workers’ movement must take is perhaps more pressing now than at any other time in history. This was the theme of the school this year: “Reform or revolution?”
But the other side of this crisis is increased class struggle and revolutions. The school opened with a discussion on the incredible events of the last month in Minneapolis, where Trump’s violent crackdown on immigrants provoked a massive mobilization of the workers. As Tom Trottier, of the Revolutionary Communists of America, explained, this led to the first city-wide general strike in the USA since the Second World War.
As Tom highlighted, we are far from having a situation where fascism is taking root in the USA. Rather, what we are seeing is the opening of a period of open class struggle. In this context, the nature of the bourgeois state—armed bodies of men in defense of the capitalist status quo—is being revealed in all its ugliness and savagery.
The events of the “Minneapolis Uprising” were a qualitative step forward in this class struggle, and will set a precedent for years to come for the rest of the American working class. As eyewitness accounts from comrades Athithi and Owen explained, the consciousness of ordinary Minneapolitans grew by leaps and bounds through these events, with workers coming to very advanced conclusions and organizing themselves against the state through neighbourhood committees.
These are only the opening shots in a long epoch of wars, revolutions, and counter-revolutions. Inevitably, the crisis of the system will lead to similar developments in Canada too. But, as Tom explained, for these mass movements to succeed they must have a clear political programme, perspectives, and organization.
This is precisely why we are building the Revolutionary Communist Party, to organize the workers and youth who want to overthrow this rotten system, to educate them in the ideas of genuine Marxism, and to build a party capable of leading the masses in these revolutionary struggles.
As was emphasized throughout the weekend, this school was not an academic discussion to merely satisfy the participants’ intellectual curiosity, but was aimed at arming them with the tools to intervene in the struggles to come. Comrades took that idea to heart.
Over three days comrades furiously took notes during sessions on revolutionary history and theory—the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, the myths of Canadian Confederation, the theory of permanent revolution, dialectics and the science of revolution, the climate crisis, utopian and scientific socialism, Marxism versus Keynesianism, Hugo Chávez and the Venezuelan Revolution, and the death of the so-called rules-based order. Each session armed comrades with a deeper understanding of the period that we are living through, and the ideas and methods that we will need in order to lead the working class to victory.
The same insatiable appetite for revolutionary ideas was seen in the book sales. Over the weekend, we sold 1,188 booklets and books, along with 144 issues of the In Defence of Marxism magazine. Comrades left the school with armfuls and carloads of reading materials, including one comrade who confessed, “Yesterday I bought a bunch of books and I told myself I wasn’t going to buy more today. But there is so much to read!” and then bought four more!
The seriousness that comrades took into their education was also carried into our fundraising effort. On Saturday evening, in a session called “Building the Revolutionary Communist Party in 2026”, comrades raised $35,000 in less than an hour, bringing our annual fundraising to $250,000. In doing so we smashed our goal for the winter season by $50,000!
The school concluded with a session on “Reform or Revolution” by comrade Josh Holroyd from the International Secretariat of the Revolutionary Communist International.
As Josh explained, the reformist leaders, who today lead the workers movement all over the world, strive to change the capitalist system from within. They believe that capitalism must be gradually reformed through the existing state. And so, during revolutionary movements, they play a most pernicious role—from the betrayals of the so-called socialist parties in the First World War to that of Syriza in Greece more than 100 years later. Because they do not believe that the workers can take power and run society themselves, they defend the status quo and act as a brake on the movement in its most crucial moments.
As Josh said, “We often say that reformists don’t have faith in the working class, but where does our faith come from? It comes from a scientific study of the class struggle. And it comes from a dialectical outlook that grasps the inevitability of leaps in consciousness.”
And so, with their notes and books in hand, comrades travelled back to their home cities and set to work building the forces of communism in preparation for such revolutionary events. In the words of comrade Rahi from the Scarborough branch, “I was already 100% locked in before this, but somehow I feel even more dedicated to building this party now.”
This school was an important step in the political development of our party. On these granite foundations of Marxist theory we must win over the thousands of workers and youth who are looking for a way out of the present impasse of capitalism. By uniting them under the banner of revolutionary communism, and giving them the ideas and methods needed to win the working class as a whole, we are preparing the victory of the socialist revolution in Canada and the whole world.
