Search - List of Books by Alan Woods
"Blame someone else and get on with your life." -- Alan Woods
Alan Woods (born in Swansea, Wales in 1944) is a Trotskyist political theorist. Alongside Lal Khan, he is one of the leading members of the International Marxist Tendency and editor of the "In Defence of Marxism" website, Marxist.com. In response to the United States-backed coup attempt of 2002 in Venezuela, he was an important figure in founding the Hands Off Venezuela campaign*.
[[Image:Alanwoodsconhugochavez.jpg?|thumb|left|250px|Alan Woods and Hugo Chávez in one of their many meetings together.]]
Early life
He was born into a working-class family with a strong Communist tradition. At the age of 16 he joined the Young Socialists and became a Marxist joining the Militant tendency within the Labour Party. He studied Russian at Sussex University and later in Sofia (Bulgaria) and at the Moscow State University (MGU). He, his wife, and two small daughters moved to Spain in the early 1970s where his well-known political stance placed him amongst those struggling against the Francisco Franco dictatorship. Woods speaks several languages, including Italian, English, Spanish, French, German and Russian.
The split in the Militant
In the early 1990s Woods and his mentor, Ted Grant, were expelled from the Militant tendency and its parent organization, the Committee for a Workers International, over what they considered to be the ultraleft turn of this organisation when it decided to split from Labour. Grant and Woods and their supporters internationally formed the Committee for a Marxist International in 1992, which was later to be known as the International Marxist Tendency, and remained active in the Labour Party.
Recent activities
He was the editor for some years of the Marxist journal Socialist Appeal, published in London, which is now edited by Mick Brooks. Alongside Lal Khan, he is currently a leading theoretician in the International Marxist Tendency and editor of the website In Defence of Marxism.
His writings on the current revolution in Venezuela and the tasks to be carried out by revolutionaries elsewhere are followed around the world.
At the political level he has had meetings with Hugo Chávez repeatedly and defends the idea that the Bolivarian Revolution is the germ of the World Revolution, and he also travels and supports other revolutionary processes in Pakistan, Bolivia and Cuba.
Woods is a close friend of Trotsky's grandson Vsievolod Platonovich "Esteban" Volkov, who regards Woods' work as closest to Trotsky's theories.
- Marxism in Our Time (1992)
- China in Crisis (1994)
- The Socialist Alternative to the European Union (1997)
- Revolution in Albania (1997)
- A New Stage in the Capitalist Crisis (1998)
- Indonesia: the Asian Revolution has Begun (1998)
- The Kosovo pogrom and the Balkan Powder-keg (1998)
- Crisis in Russia, the free market failure,
- History of Philosophy,
- Two books co-authored with Ted Grant
- Lenin and Trotsky: what they really stood for (1969)
- Reason in Revolt: Marxist philosophy and modern science (1995)
- Bolshevism: the Road to Revolution (1999).
- Marxism and the National Question (2000)
- British Poets and the French Revolution (2003)
- The revolutionary dialectic of Republicanism - An Open Letter to Irish Republicans (2003).
- In Defence of Marxism - Reply to Israel Shamir (2004)
- The Celia Hart Controversy - Stalinism or Leninism? (2004)
- Ireland: Republicanism and Revolution (2005)
- The Venezuelan Revolution - a Marxist perspective (2005)
- Marxism and the U.S.A.[1] (Wellred USA, 2005).
- The Reawakening of the World Working Class and the Tasks Faced by Marxists (2006)
- Reformism or Revolution ... Marxism and Socialism of the 21st Century (reply to Heinz Dieterich) (2008)
