More than 60 people attended a meeting on Monday (March 28) with comrade Alan Woods in Rosario which was held in the office of the CTA trade union in the La Toma Cultural Centre – a building that used to be a supermarket but was then occupied by its workers and remains under workers’ control.

Alan started by reminding those present that twenty years earlier, the “bourgeois intellectuals” had promised us a world of peace and stability under the rule of capitalism and the free market; today we still suffer the consequences of the reactionary utopia which was behind ideas like “the end of history” and “the end of ideologies”.

The revolutionary process which started in Latin America about ten years ago, and its continuation in the recent struggles in the Arab world, shows both the relevance of Marxist theory as well as the key role of the working class and its internationalist viewpoint.

Life teaches, as Lenin used to say. We should draw all the necessary conclusions from this process which has opened up, where the ruling class is unable to meet the most elementary demands of its slaves. It is not able to meet them in the less developed capitalist countries, but also in the advances capitalist countries themselves, Alan explained.

The capitalist crisis, which started about two years ago and which manifested itself as a financial crisis, is now revealing its real face: a crisis of overproduction, inherent in a political and economic system that is based on the overexploitation of the workers, the theft of surplus value, the profits of a small minority and the destruction of the environment.

For many years these contradictions accumulated everywhere and as Hegel explained, necessity expresses itself through accident. In this case the “accident” was the suicide of a Tunisian youth which sparked off the Arab revolution. This spark set the Arab world in flames because the objective conditions were already mature.

After a fruitful debate, Alan Woods concluded the meeting pointing out that these are interesting times. There will be advances as well as setbacks in the class struggle, but the only answer to the problems facing the overwhelming majority of humanity is the struggle for international socialism. As part of that struggle we need to build the forces of the International Marxist Tendency.