This article by Alan Woods deals with barbarism and the development of human society. In post-modern writing, history appears as an essentially meaningless and inexplicable series of random events or accidents. It is governed by no laws that we can comprehend. A variation on this theme is the idea, now very popular in some academic circles that there is no such thing as higher and lower forms of social development and culture. This denial of progress in history is characteristic of the psychology of the bourgeoisie in the phase of capitalist decline.

The document which we publish below puts forward the position of the Marxist tendency on the perspectives for the world revolution in a comprehensive way. It analyses the global crisis of world capitalism, economic perspectives and the stage reached by the class struggle in the developed capitalist countries, and also the revolutionary developments in the former colonial countries, the worldwide struggle against imperialism, the attitude of Marxists to war, the situation inside the mass parties and trade unions of the working class, and the tasks of the revolutionary tendency.