Alex Callinicos

Biography

Callinicos's mother, the Honorable Ædgyth Bertha Milburg Mary Antonia Frances Lyon-Dalberg-Acton, was the daughter of the 2nd Lord Acton, descended from the 19th century English historian Lord Acton. Callinicos's Greek father was active in the Greek Resistance to Nazi occupation during World War II.

Callinicos was educated at St George's College, Salisbury (now Harare).

He became involved in revolutionary politics as a student at Balliol College, Oxford, where he read for his 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.

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 retains this position.

In January 2013, in the context of a serious crisis inside the UK Socialist Workers Party (SWP) associated with the party's response to an allegation of rape against a leading member of the party, known as Comrade Delta, and with the demand for changes to the existing form of the system of democratic centralism within the SWP, he wrote a defence of Leninism and Democratic Centralism. Callinicos disagreed with those who argued for the need to change the existing system. He called the rape allegation of rape a "difficult disciplinary case", a comment for which socialist feminist Laurie Penny thought he "[mistook] a plea for some basic respect for women's sexual autonomy as an attempt to undermine the revolution from within."

Callinicos also took a prominent position on another issue which had divided the Socialist Workers Party (SWP): the use of the Internet in disagreements about confidential party issues. He complained about "the dark side of the Internet" in which individuals have "used blogs and social media to launch a campaign within the SWP".

In order to disentangle a conference organised by the Historical Materialism journal in Delhi during 2013 from the SWP crisis, his invitation to the conference was withdrawn in March 2013.

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