Michael Kidron

Michael Kidron studied at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Balliol College. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is cartography, socialism and economy. Works named in the authority record are The State of the World Atlas.

• Born — 20 September 1930 • Birthplace — Union of South Africa • Died — 25 March 2003 • Children — 5, including Adam Kidron and Beeban Kidron • Occupation — Cartographer • Education — Hebrew University of Jerusalem • Notable Works — The State of the World Atlas

Kidron was born on 20 September 1930 in the Union of South Africa to a family of Jewish Zionists. He joined his parents in Palestine just after the Second World War, and soon rejected Zionism. After schooling in Tel Aviv, he studied economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Following emigration to the United Kingdom, he was accepted for doctoral studies at Balliol College, Oxford in 1955 under the supervision of Thomas Balogh. Kidron became a theoretician in the Socialist Review Group (SRG) and was to be found in the extended family of Tony Cliff, who had married Kidron's sister Chanie Rosenberg, which was the informal core of the group. He would also serve as editor and writer on various group publications through these early years. It is Kidron's name that appears as publisher of the first public edition of Cliff's work State Capitalism in Russia, which was published in 1955. A small pamphlet on automation appeared in 1956, which although not dissimilar to the ideas of the Johnson-Forest Tendency or Socialisme ou Barbarie did not simply dismiss existing workers organisations as these tended to do. From then on, Kidron was a major source of theoretical writing within the SRG and later the Socialist Workers Party.

Kidron's last major articles in the journal International Socialism cast doubt on his own earlier work, but without renouncing Marxism as so many former revolutionaries would during the downturn of class struggle that marked the 1980s. Yet following a debate in the pages of International Socialism with Chris Harman, who defended what is now the traditional IS position, Kidron was to leave active revolutionary politics. He was closely associated with Pluto Press since the early 1970s (IS had helped set up the company in its first period), and his talents were expended on works such as The State of the World Atlas (As of 2013 in its 9th edition), and The War Atlas (As of 2003 in its 4th edition), both with Dan Smith. Kidron remained a Marxist committed to changing the world and therefore understood the necessity of developing a theoretical understanding of how the world works precisely in order to change it. His final article appeared in the Autumn 2002 issue of International Socialism on "The Decline of Capitalism", and spoke of a sure and certain knowledge that another world is not just possible but demanded. As ever, the revolutionary role of the working class in the core countries of capitalism was reasserted and the goal of a communist society reaffirmed. Mike Kidron had five children; Adam, Beeban, Cassia, Petra and Ruby. Kidron died on 25 March 2003 at the age of 72. In 2018, Haymarket Books published Capitalism and theory: Selected Writings of Michael Kidron, edited and with an introduction by Richard Kuper.