Alex Callinicos

Alex Callinicos

Alex Callinicos
Born	Alexander Theodore Callinicos (1950-07-24) 24 July 1950 Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe)
Era	20th- / 21st-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Marxism
Main interests	Politics  · Political economy  · Social theory
Influenced by Hegel  · Marx  · Lenin  · Luxemburg  · Trotsky  · Lukács  · Gramsci  · Cliff  · Althusser  · Harman

Alexander Theodore Callinicos (born 24 July 1950) is a Zimbabwean-British political theorist and activist. In an academic capacity, he serves as Professor of European Studies at King's College London. An adherent of Trotskyism , he is a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and serves as its International Secretary. He is also editor of International Socialism, the SWP's theoretical journal, and has published a variety of books.

Biography

Callinicos is a descendant, through his mother, of the 19th century English historian Lord Acton. During World War II his Greek father was active in the Greek Resistance to Nazi occupation, whilst his mother, the Hon. Ædgyth Bertha Milburg Mary Antonia Frances Lyon-Dalberg-Acton, was the daughter of the 2nd Lord Acton. He was educated at St George's College, Harare.^{[citation needed]}

Callinicos himself first became involved in revolutionary politics as a student at Balliol College, Oxford, from which he received his BA and where he knew Christopher Hitchens. His first writings for the IS were an analysis of the student movement of the period. In 1977, Callinicos married Joanna Seddon, a fellow Oxford doctoral student. He received his DPhil at Oxford. His early writings focused on southern Africa and the French structuralist-Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser.

Callinicos participated in the Counter-Summit to the IMF/World Bank Meeting in Prague, September 2000 and the demonstration against the G8 in Genoa, June 2001. He has also been involved in organising the Social Forum movement in Europe. He was a contributor to Dictionnaire Marx Contemporain (2001), and has written articles in New Left Review.

He was Professor of Politics at the University of York before being appointed Professor of European Studies at King's College London in September 2005. He succeeded the late Chris Harman as editor of International Socialism in January 2010 and is a British correspondent for Actuel Marx.

Callinicos joined the central committee of the SWP in the 1980s; he still retains this position. His leadership has been criticized in terms of the response of the Central Committee to an allegation of rape by a leading party member of a much younger, female member.

In January 2013, in the context of an serious internal crisis in the SWP associated with the party's response to this rape allegation, he wrote a defence of Leninism and 'Democratic Centralism'. The leadership of the party had been criticized as being 'cult-like'. Callinicos disagreed with the need for limiting the power of the leadership, and disagreed with the need to make the party less heirarchal.

Callinicos has also taken a prominent position in the arguments about another issue which has divided the Socialist Workers Party, the use of the internet. He has complained about "the dark side of the Internet" in which individuals have "used blogs and social media to launch a campaign within the SWP". When a small number of SWP members used Facebook to discuss the crisis in their party, they were expelled.

As a conseqence of the rape scandal which has engulfed the SWP, his invitation to a conference in Delhi (India), organised by the Historical Materialism journal, with which Callinicos has been connected, was withdrawn in March 2013.

Works

Books

• 1976: Althusser's Marxism (London: Pluto Press) ISBN 0-904383-02-4
• 1977: Southern Africa after Soweto (with John Rogers) (London: Pluto Press), ISBN 0-904383-42-3
• 1981: Southern Africa after Zimbabwe (London: Pluto) ISBN 0-86104-336-7
• 1982: Is there a future for Marxism? (London: Macmillan). ISBN 0-333-28477-1
• 1983: Marxism and Philosophy (Oxford Paperbacks) (Oxford: Clarendon). ISBN 0-19-876126-0
• 1983: The revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx (London: Bookmarks). ISBN 0-906224-09-8
• 1985: South Africa: the Road to Revolution (Toronto: International Socialists). ISBN 0-905998-55-3
• 1985: The Great Strike : the miners’ strike of 1984-5 and its lessons (London: Socialist Worker) ISBN 0-905998-50-2
• 1986: The Revolutionary Road to Socialism (London: Socialist Workers Party). ISBN 0-905998-53-7
• 1987: The Changing Working Class: Essays on Class Structure Today (with Chris Harman) (London: Bookmarks) ISBN 0-906224-40-3
• 1988: South Africa Between Reform and Revolution (London: Bookmarks). ISBN 0-906224-46-2
• 1988: Making History: Agency, Structure, and Change in Social Theory (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press). ISBN 0-8014-2121-7
• 1989: Marxist Theory (editor) (Oxford: Oxford University Press). ISBN 0-19-827294-4
• 1990: Trotskyism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). ISBN 0-8166-1904-2
• 1991: The Revenge of History: Marxism and the East European Revolutions ISBN 0-271-00767-2
• 1991: Against Postmodernism: a Marxist critique (Cambridge: Polity Press). ISBN 0-312-04224-8
• 1992: Between Apartheid and Capitalism: conversations with South African socialists (editor) (London: Bookmarks). ISBN 0-906224-68-3
• 1994: Marxism and the New Imperialism (London ; Chicago, Ill. : Bookmarks). ISBN 0-906224-81-0
• 1995: Theories and Narratives (Cambridge: Polity Press). ISBN 0-7456-1201-6
• 1995: Race and Class (London: Bookmark Publications). ISBN 0-906224-83-7
• 1995: Socialists in the trade unions (London: Bookmarks) ISBN 1-898876-01-0
• 1999: Social Theory: Historical Introduction (New York: New York University Press). ISBN 0-8147-1593-1
• 2000: Equality (Themes for the 21st Century) (Cambridge: Polity Press). ISBN 0-7456-2324-7
• 2002: Against the Third Way (Cambridge: Polity Press). ISBN 0-7456-2674-2
• 2003: An anti-Capitalist manifesto (Cambridge: Polity Press). ISBN 0-7456-2903-2
• 2003: New Mandarins of American Power: the Bush administration’s plans for the world (Cambridge: Polity Press). ISBN 0-7456-3274-2
• 2006: The Resources of Critique (Cambridge: Polity). ISBN 0-7456-3160-6
• 2009: Imperialism and Global Political Economy (Cambridge, Polity). ISBN 0-7456-4045-1
• 2010: Bonfire of Illusions: The Twin Crises of the Liberal World (Polity). ISBN 0-7456-4876-2
• 2012: The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx (Haymarket) ISBN 978-1-6084-6138-7

Articles

• "The Anti-Capitalist Movement And The Revolutionary Left"
• "The 'New Middle Class' and socialists" (1983)
• "The grand strategy of the American Empire"
• "Plumbing the depths: Marxism and the Holocaust"
• "Interview with Alex Callinicos: The Imperial Assault on the Middle East"
• "Imperialism and Global Political Economy", International Socialism, 108, Autumn 2005.
• "Where is the radical left going?", International Socialism, 120, Autumn 2008.
• Callinicos A. (2007), "Does capitalism need the state system?", Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 20(4), pp. 533–549.

External links

• Alex Callinicos Internet Archive
• Callinicos lecture on "Imperialism and the Global Political Economy," UK: 2009.