Alexander Theodore Callinicos (born 24 July 1950, Southern Rhodesia - now Zimbabwe) is a Trotskyist political theorist, a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers Party and its International Secretary, and is Director of the Centre for European Studies at King's College London. He is also editor of International Socialism, the SWP's theoretical journal.
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.
Callinicos himself first became involved in revolutionary politics as a student at Balliol College, Oxford, from which he received his BA. His first writings for the International Socialists (forerunners of the SWP) was 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 writings soon established him in socialist and academic circles as an expert on southern Africa and the French structuralist-Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. In the early 1980s Callinicos, who is regarded as a talented public speaker, was elected to the central committee of the SWP, a position he still retains. In recent years he has been responsible for the SWP’s international work, but he has seen a number of splits in the International Socialist Tendency’s affiliated groups.
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 a number of articles in New Left Review. Callinicos has also been a scathing critic of postmodernism.
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. A prolific writer for both the revolutionary and the academic presses, he succeeded the late Chris Harman as editor of International Socialism in January 2010 and is a British correspondent for Actuel Marx.
