Alex Callinicos

Alex Callinicos (Alexander Theodore Callinicos, born in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, in 1950) is a British Marxist political theorist and professor of political theory at King's College London. He belongs to the Trotskyist tradition and has been a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), serving as its International Secretary.

He became interested in revolutionary politics as a student at Balliol College, Oxford, where he later took his doctorate. His early writing dealt with the student movement, southern Africa and the work of the structuralist Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, whose Marxism he examined in his first book, published in 1976. Among his best-known works are The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx (1983), Making History (1988), Against Postmodernism (1991), Social Theory (1999), An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto (2003) and The New Mandarins of American Power (2003). His thought joins social theory with the analysis of imperialism and political economy, and he has insisted on human agency against purely structural explanations.

For years he edited the theoretical journal International Socialism. His influence is felt chiefly in British Marxist debate and in his critiques of postmodernism and of the Third Way social democracy.