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John Holloway and Alex Callinicos debate strategies for changing the world

redletter | 08.07.2008 17:26 | Analysis | Social Struggles | Zapatista

John Holloway and Alex Callinicos debate strategies for changing the world at the marxism 2008 event.


 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2liVjkA30T4

John Holloway (born 1947) is a lawyer, Marxist-oriented sociologist and philosopher, whose work is closely associated with the Zapatista movement in Mexico, his home since 1991. It has also been taken up by some intellectuals associated with the piqueteros in Argentina; Abahlali baseMjondolo movement in South Africa and the Anti-Globalization Movement in Europe and North America.

He was born in Dublin, Ireland, and has a Ph.D in Political Science from the University of Edinburgh. He is currently a teacher at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at the Autonomous University of Puebla.

His 2002 book, Change the World Without Taking Power, has been the subject of much debate in Marxist circles, and contends that the possibility of revolution resides not in the seizure of state apparatuses, but in day-to-day acts of abject refusal of capitalist society – so-called anti-power, or 'the scream' as he puts it repeatedly. He is considered by supporters and critics to be broadly Autonomist in outlook, and his work is often compared and contrasted with that of figures such as Antonio Negri.

He is brother to writer and academic David Holloway, and first cousin to Canadian political activist Kate Holloway and Canadian entertainer Maureen Holloway.


Alex Callinicos received his BA and DPhil from the University of Oxford, and 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 is a member of the editorial board of International Socialism and is a British correspondent of Actuel Marx. A prolific writer for both the revolutionary and the academic presses, he is a descendant of the famous historian Lord Acton. During World War II his father was active in the Greek Resistance to Nazi occupation, and his mother was a member of the British aristocracy. In 1977 he married Joanna Seddon,[1] a fellow Oxford doctoral student and communist researcher who introduced him to key ideas in Utopian Socialism.[citation needed]
Callinicos first became involved in revolutionary politics as a student at Balliol College, Oxford, and his first writings for the International Socialists (forerunners of the SWP) was an analysis of the student movement of the period. His later writings soon established him in socialist and academic circles as an expert on southern Africa and the French philosopher Louis Althusser. A talented writer and speaker, by the early 1980s he was elected to the Central Committee of the SWP, a position he retains today. 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.
He 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 is a contributor to J. Bidet and E. Kouvelakis, eds., Dictionnaire Marx Contemporain (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001), and has written a number of articles in New Left Review. In Redemption, Tariq Ali's Trotskyist satire, he is depicted as the redundant intellectual "Alex Mango".
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Comments

Display the following 2 comments

  1. great debate — waltzing matilda
  2. Typo, or What! — Harold Hamlet