David Roberts and the ‘Eleventh Thesis’

Abstract

Thesis Eleven – the idea, and the name for a journal – was bequeathed to us by Athol Vitzdamm-Jones. There were three of us, Athol, Julian Triado and me, who were postgraduate students working with Alastair Davidson in Politics at Monash University in the seventies. Athol died of cancer, aged 36, in 1979. He was ten years our senior, and as we later came to joke, by way of excuse, Julian and I were both 26 when we started Thesis Eleven, the same age as Marx when he wrote the Theses on Feuerbach. The folly of youth may be many things, but it is also the elan vital. Julian and I decided, or felt compelled, or obliged, to do what Athol had imagined but was himself unable to bring to fruition, to start a socialist journal of theory called Thesis Eleven. I travelled to Paris in December 1979 to stay with Alastair, and to enlist his support for the project. It took us a year to gather materials and intelligence, to make contacts who knew about typesetting, printing, proofing and editing and publishing. The first issue of Thesis Eleven appeared twenty seven years ago, on the day John Lennon was killed, 8 December 1980. We squeezed a thousand copies of the first issue, all boxed up, into a Renault 16 jokingly referred to as the vanguard of the intellectual proletariat, drove across town to bookshops to put it out there, the rest ending up in Julian’s parental garage. The early days were heady, ideologically intense, excessively given to self-criticism. Alastair quit the journal in 1984. Julian and I decided to add new editors, but not our peers, let alone a younger generation. We asked David Roberts to join, and later Johann Arnason.