Authors¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter’s authors, Alan Woods and Rob Sewell, are presented not merely as biographic subjects but as living embodiments of a revolutionary lineage. Both were raised in South Wales in Communist households, a formative environment that, the text implies, produced a deep, pre-political commitment to Marxism from their teenage years. This personal history is deployed to establish their authority as organic intellectuals of the working-class movement, not detached academics. Their current standing as leading members of the Revolutionary Communist International (RCI) and as political editors—Woods for the RCI’s In Defence of Marxism website, Sewell for the British section’s The Communist—further anchors their work within an active, polemical political project rather than a purely scholarly one.
The digest of their published output functions as a compressed curriculum of the RCI’s theoretical and historical preoccupations. Woods’s bibliography is notably broad, ranging from classical Marxist philosophy (Reason in Revolt, The History of Philosophy) and foundational revolutionary figures (Lenin and Trotsky, Bolshevism) to specific national and historical struggles (Spain’s Revolution Against Franco, Ireland: Republicanism and Revolution, Class Struggle in the Roman Republic). This range signals an insistence that the Marxist method is universally applicable across epochs and geographies, from the ancient world to modern Venezuela. Sewell’s list is more tightly focused on the history of the workers’ movement and political economy: the rise of fascism in Germany (Socialism or Barbarism), the English Revolution (Chartist Revolution), British trade unionism (In the Cause of Labour), and a reader’s guide to Marx’s Capital. The joint authorship of the two-volume In Defence of Lenin is the culminating entry, explicitly framing their entire corpus as a sustained polemical intervention to rehabilitate Leninism against its detractors.
The chapter’s implicit polemic is directed against all those—academic Marxists, reformists, centrists, and anti-Leninists—who would dismiss or distort the revolutionary tradition that Woods and Sewell represent. By foregrounding their lifelong political commitment and their prolific output, the text argues that serious Marxist theory is inseparable from revolutionary practice and party discipline. The authors are not presented as neutral commentators but as combatants in an ongoing ideological war, wielding historical analysis and philosophical argument as weapons in defence of a living, fighting Marxism.