Michael Kidron

Michael Kidron (20 September 1930–25 March 2003) was a revolutionary thinker and cartographer. He was one of the early founders of the International Socialists (forerunners of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) through the 1960s and 1970s. He is perhaps best remembered for writing The State Of The World Atlas.

Kidron was born on 20 September 1930, in South Africa to a family of Zionists, but 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.

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