013. Ashkan Behzadi, Saharnaz Samaeinejad, and Alan Woods

This week on the podcast, Ashkan Behzadi and Saharnaz Samaeinejad interview Marxist political theorist Alan Woods about art and socialism. Alan Woods was born in 1944 in Swansea, South Wales, into a working-class family with strong Communist traditions. At the age of 16 he joined the Labour Party Young Socialists and became a Marxist. He studied Philosophy and Russian at Sussex University, and later in Sofia (Bulgaria), and at Moscow State University (MGU). He has a wide experience of the international labor and solidarity movements, particularly in Latin America, Pakistan, Russia, and Spain, where he participated in the struggle against the Franco dictatorship. He is a member of the National Union of Journalists in the UK. Along with Ted Grant, Alan Woods was one of the main theoreticians of the Militant tendency in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, and the editor of the Militant International Review. He is currently the political editor of the popular website In Defence of Marxism (www.marxist.com), and Secretary of the International Marxist Tendency (IMT). He is the author of hundreds of articles, pamphlets, and books, covering a wide range of issues including revolutionary politics and current events, economics, history, philosophy, art, music, and science. You can read some of Alan's articles on his website, In Defense of Marxism: https://www.marxist.com/tag/65-alan-woods.htm This episode was produced by Ashkan Behzadi and Saharnaz Samaeinejad in collaboration with TAK ensemble, and edited by Ashkan, Saha, and Marina Kifferstein.