Ellen Meiksins Wood

Ellen Meiksins Wood (April 12, 1942 January 14, 2016) was an American-Canadian Marxist historian, and one of the primary developers of the Marxist tendency known as political Marxism.

Biography Wood was born in New York City on April 12, 1942, as Ellen Meiksins one year after her parents, Latvian Jews active in the Bund, arrived in New York from Europe as political refugees. She was raised in the United States and Europe.

Wood received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Slavic languages from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1962 and subsequently entered the graduate program in political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, from which she received her Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1970. From 1967 to 1996, she taught political science at Glendon College, York University, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Along with Robert Brenner, Wood is credited as a founder of political Marxism, a rejection of orthodox Marxism which focusses on non-teleological approaches to historical change and capitalist development.

Meiksins Wood's many books and articles were sometimes written in collaboration with her husband, Neal Wood (1922–2003). Her work has been translated into many languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, German, Romanian, Turkish, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Of these, The Retreat from Class received the Deutscher Memorial Prize in 1986. Wood served on the editorial committee of the British journal New Left Review between 1984 and 1993. From 1997 to 2000, Wood was an editor, along with Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy, of Monthly Review, the socialist magazine.

In 1996, she was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada, a marker of distinguished scholarship. She and Neal Wood divided their time between England and Canada until he died in 2003.

Selected works