Preface¶
Core Argument¶
Alan Woods’s preface to this volume on the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions of 2011 establishes the collection not as a retrospective history but as a blow-by-blow Marxist analysis published in real time on In Defence of Marxism. The decision to preserve the articles in their original, daily form is justified by the need for immediacy; any stylistic gains from later rewriting would have been cancelled out by the loss of that quality. Woods invokes Trotsky’s preface to the History of the Russian Revolution to frame the task: not merely to narrate what happened, but to discover the laws governing why it happened thus and not otherwise. The articles therefore aim to lay bare the role of classes, parties, and individuals beneath the surface of events, and to generate a scientific hypothesis about the direction of the revolution.
A central polemic runs against bourgeois empiricism. Woods attacks the “slavish worship of the established fact” that left Western analysts, from The Economist to Hilary Clinton to BBC correspondents, utterly unable to predict or even recognise the revolution as it unfolded. He cites The Economist on 6 January 2011 claiming Tunisia’s troubles would not unseat Ben Ali; Clinton on 25 January asserting the Egyptian government was stable; and a BBC report on 17 January insisting Egypt would not follow Tunisia because of low education and internet penetration. These failures, Woods argues, stem from a method that selects facts according to unacknowledged presuppositions and cannot grasp the dialectical processes beneath the surface. Marxism, by contrast, is a science—but not an exact one. It is compared to meteorology and geology: chaotic systems where prediction is possible only as general tendency, not precise detail. The inability to forecast an earthquake does not invalidate geology, any more than a three-day weather forecast’s limits invalidate meteorology.
Woods presents evidence for the IMT’s predictive capacity. He quotes his own September 2009 warning that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Morocco were “hanging by a thread,” and reproduces an October 2010 article from the IMT’s website, “Egypt, the Gathering Storm,” which predicted revolution was developing “just beneath the surface” and would “shake the entire region.” This is contrasted with the astonishment of bourgeois commentators. The working class is identified as the decisive agent, and the IMT’s consistent emphasis on the Egyptian proletariat—over the Muslim Brotherhood, pursued by “other so-called Marxists”—is presented as vindicated by events. The preface concludes by situating the Arab revolutions as a manifestation of the general crisis of world capitalism, arguing that the root problem—private ownership and the nation state—cannot be solved within the capitalist system. The volume closes not with a conventional introduction but with the IMT’s Manifesto on the Arab Revolution, offered as a programmatic summation for class-conscious militants worldwide.