Alan Woods

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Alan Woods with Hugo Chavez (2006)

Alan Woods (* 1944 in Swansea ) is a Trotskyist politician and journalist. He lives in London.

Woods heads - in an elected capacity - the work of the International Marxist Tendency (IMT) and is editor-in-chief of the Internet portal In Defense of Marxism . In 2002 he was one of the founding members of the global initiative Hands off Venezuela (HOV) .

Life

He comes from a family with strong roots in the Communist Party of Great Britain . At the age of 16 he joined the LPYS Young Socialists , the Labor Party's youth organization , in his hometown of Swansea. The Trotskyist tendency around Ted Grant had already won over some comrades within the Welsh LPYS structures. They managed to convince Woods of their line within a short time. A friendly relationship quickly developed with Ted Grant, with whom Woods worked closely until Grant's death in 2006. The two men had met in 1960 during a political seminar organized by the Welsh LPYS in Swansea, at which Grant gave a lecture. After finishing school, Woods studied Russian at the universities of Sussex (in Brighton in the south of England), Sofia and Moscow. Then he went to Spain. Together with Spanish and other British comrades, he built the group "Nuevo Claridad" (from 1976: "El Militante. Voz del Socialismo Marxista y la Juventud"), which at the time of the collapse of the Franco dictatorship for the establishment of a socialist workers' republic occurred on Spanish soil. After his return to London in the early 1980s, he was actively involved in building up the now rapidly growing Militant Tendency . As a member of the Militant leadership, he was expelled from the Labor Party in 1983.

Split in the militant group

From around 1988 onwards there were serious disputes within the Militant group, which came to a head in the course of 1991 and led to the definitive split in "the tendency" in January 1992. Together with Grant, Woods stuck to the strategy of “preparatory entry ” in the Labor Party, while an increasing majority of the association followed Peter Taaffe's view that Militant should now compete as an independent political party against what they saw as the bourgeois Labor Party . Woods, together with Grant and his supporters, was expelled from the militant leadership of the association due to the exercise of their democratic right - enshrined in the association's statutes - to form a minority stream. From then on Woods took over the editor-in-chief of the new Marxist newspaper within the Labor Party, the Socialist Appeal. Marxist Voice of the Labor Movement . Internationally, after the current around Grant and Woods split off from the Committee for a Workers' International (CWI), he was involved in the establishment of the new umbrella organization, the International Marxist Tendency (IMT).

Rise of Reason

In 1995 Woods and Grant published their jointly written book Rise of Reason - Marxist Philosophy and Modern Science on Natural Sciences. To market this publication, the Internet platform www.marxist.com was founded in 1996 , which became the central organ of the IMT. The book itself has been criticized by well-known natural scientists and Marxist theorists because of the distortions it contains in places in basic scientific knowledge, for example the big bang theory or the existence of black holes :

“The Austrian Promedia Verlag has made a no less carefully crafted, albeit unfortunately expensive book out of it. Its scientific content, however, lacks this care. The more carefully one studies it, the more doubts arise about the arguments of both authors. "

- Young world

Works

  • Marxism in Our Time (1992)
  • China in Crisis (1994)
  • Bolshevism - The Road to Revolution: A History of the Bolshevik Party , Well Red Publications (1999) ISBN 978-1-900007-05-4
  • Revolt of Reason (English edition under the title Reason in Revolt : 1995, German edition: 2002)
  • The Origins of the Russian Revolution (Lancaster Pamphlets) (1993), ISBN 0-415-10232-4
  • Bolshevism, the road to revolution: a history of the Bolshevik Party from the early beginnings to the October Revolution , 1999, ISBN 1-900007-05-3

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Alan Woods: Marxist Philosophy and Modern Science - Introduction to the ebook edition of Reason in Revolt. In: In Defense of Marxism. June 12, 2015, accessed March 19, 2018 .
  2. ^ Peter Mason: Science, Marxism and the Big Bang: a Critical Review of 'Reason in Revolt' . Socialist Books, 2007, ISBN 978-1-870958-41-7 .
personal data
SURNAME Woods, Alan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British Trotskyist politician, author and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH Swansea