I try and avoid the IMT website as much as possible. I have barely frequented it in months. However, now and then, some news will come up in the search results and I will give it a skim. I doubt I will ever commit to reading a full article on that loathsome website again. Back in September, the organisation proudly announced that Alan Woods had published yet another book – this time on philosophy. This vanity publishing is unlikely to have been put through any properly rigorous editing process, and is likely to be a splurge of Woods’ undisgested thoughts poured upon pages and pages of precious paper. No one outside his sect is likely to bother reading it, and I feel sorry for the poor sod who commits to ‘studying’ this weighty tome. Even most of the members in the sect are unlikely to read it, though many will pretend that they have due to peer pressure.
Woods is not a philosopher and has received no professional training on the subject. He is simply regurgitating the misunderstandings of Marx, Engels, Kautsky and other Marxist intellectuals, instead of coming up with any truly original thought. Sadly, since IMT cultists have been trained to see Woods as a universal genius, they will take him as a serious authority on philosophical matters and read the book in this light. I cringe when I think of the money I wasted buying IMT publications. Instead of wasting my time reading such bilge, I would prefer to flip through some pages of Nietzsche, Kant or Hegel. There is nothing I can get from Woods’ work that I could not get in higher quality from Heidegger or Wittgenstein. Heck, even Jordan Peterson is probably more profound than Woods, and he is pretty useless as far as genuine philosophy goes.
I have no intention of purchasing or reading this nonsense, except perhaps to entertain myself with how embarrassingly bad it is, and write a review for this blog. But there are so many things which are more enjoyable, like listening to Frank Sinatra for the umpteenth time.
I think the worst bit of intellectual dishonesty I ever heard from Uncle Alan was at an IMT weekend back in 2014 during a session on the 1968 strikes/student demonstrations in France. In talking about Ernest Mandel’s contention at a meeting in January of that year, where Mandel allegedly said you ‘could write off the working class for 20 years’, Woods was like ‘this guy called Ernest Mandel, he was a university professor, and university professors tend to be very ignorant creatures’….
Now of course, while Mandel did eventually do a PHD (think he graduated in 1972 and the thesis became his book ‘Late Capitalism’), he was not an academic originally but a Trotskyist militant who did time in a concentration camp during WW2, hence suffering far more hardships than Ted Grant. I’m not holding any torch here for Mandel (for this purpose it doesn’t matter whether you agree with his work or not), that was just a staggering bit of falsification on Woods’s part (not to mention the anti intellectualism, which at times in the IMT borders on Maoism). I knew it at the time, was angry, and regret not challenging it.
Thanks, I didn’t know this. I have heard Alan trashing Mandel before on many occasions. (I believe I was at a lead-off or two where he brought up this slander.) Any Trot who happened to be a rival of Ted Grant is rubbished in IMT mythology.
Woods himself has a PhD, which is hilarious when you think about it.