Alex Callinicos
Alexander Theodore Callinicos is a British Marxist political theorist and activist, born in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia. An adherent of Trotskyism, he has been a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and has served as its International Secretary. Between 2009 and 2020 he was the editor of International Socialism, the SWP's theoretical journal, and has published a number of books.
Early life
He became involved in revolutionary politics as a student at Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied for a BA and came to know Christopher Hitchens, then himself active in the International Socialists (the SWP's forerunner). He also received his DPhil at Oxford. The earliest writing by Callinicos for the International Socialists was an analysis of the student movement of the period. His other early writings focused on southern Africa and the French structuralist-Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. In 1977, Callinicos married Joanna Seddon, a fellow Oxford doctoral student.[citation needed]
Career and activism
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 Chris Harman as editor of International Socialism in January 2010 shortly after Harman died and is a British correspondent for Actuel Marx. Callinicos joined the central committee of the SWP in the late 1970s; he retained this position until December 2025.
