Abstract
In the following my concern will be Marxism in relation to the philosophical profession in Australia. I will hence largely ignore professional interest in Marxism outside of philosophy and philosophical interest in Marxism beyond the profession although these would certainly have a place — and arguably a larger one — in a general survey of Marxism in Australian culture.
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References
For example ‘Marxist Philosophy (1935) and ‘Marxist Ethics’ (1937) in John Anderson, Studies in Empirical Philosophy (Sydney: Angus & Robertson 1962).
W.H.C. Eddy, Understanding Marxism (Oxford: Blackwell 1979). This was however written in the 1950s according to S.A. Grave, A History of Philosophy in Australia (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press 1984).
G. Paul, ‘Lenin’s Theory of Perception’, Analysis 5, (August 1938). The information here is from Grave, ibid.
A feature noted by Grave in his chapter ‘Melbourne and Sydney Contrariety’.
Since his ‘The Primitive Ethic of Karl Marx’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy (May 1957), Kamenka has written and edited many books and articles concerning Marxism. His influence however has probably been more pronounced in history, law and the social sciences than in philosophy. Politically he would not be in sympathy with the 1970s Marxists and his own philosophical work on Marxism belongs to an earlier period. His work and that of his History of Ideas Unit at the ANU are discussed in Grave, ibid, p. 162–5, 208. Many overseas Marx scholars have visited the Unit and a lot of Marx-related research has proceeded there, e.g. Margaret A. Rose, Reading the Young Marx and Engels (London: Croom Helm 1978).
Grave considers the degree of politicisation of the profession in Australian quite atypical, ibid p. 2.
Grave, p. 213–217, gives a good summary but does not discuss the dispute at the 1970 conference which preceded it. For this see B.A. Santamaria, Newsweekly, September 9 1970, p. 16.
Grave, p. 212–213, gives 1971 as the year of the revolutionisation of Flinders offerings and 1972 as the year of the introduction of Marxism at Sydney. This was also the year of the first Marxism course at La Trobe University in Melbourne.
All these motives were certainly operative in the 1975 establishment of the Area of Revolutionary Studies at La Trobe University with respect to both an-
This receives a clear expression in general theme of the 17th issue of Intervention: “Beyond Marxism. Interventions after Marx.”
Janna Thompson is probably the most prolific philosopher writing for local journals but her interests are much wider than Marxist theory and she has written on science, feminism, environmental issues and the philosophy of war and peace as well as Marxism in them. The current author published several articles and reviews on Marxist theory in Arena and Intervention, e.g. ‘The Problem of Scientific Marxism’, Arena 37, as well as articles on current Spanish politics.
It should be noted that unlike Markus who is in General Philosophy at Sydney University Heller was in Sociology and not Philosophy at La Trobe University. She had little influence on philosophy or philosophy students. It is also noticeable that Thesis Eleven did not involve philosophers at the editorial level.
The first two numbers contained an article on Marx and Greek democracy and a critical consideration of Marx and Habermas’s views of labour by Janna Thompson.
‘The idea of a value free social science’, Journal of Value Inquiry 9, Summer 1975, p. 95–117.
‘A critique of Roemer, Hodgson and Cohen on Marxian exploitation’, Social Theory and Practice 12, Summer 1986, p. 121–171; (With Chris Starrs) ‘The Dynamics of Class and the New Middle Class’, Social Theory and Practice 1983. Also various articles on Marxian economics.
Grave, p. 165–168, discusses their joint production Paper Tigers.
The effects of this evolution in Sydney can be seen in the journal Intervention which started with a sociology/political economy slant in Melbourne and ended with a semiotic one in Sydney. The later issues are spectacular in appearance but hardly accessible. The trend towards obscurity in Sydney was already criticised by Teresa Brennan in ‘On academic marxists’, Intervention 10/11, p. 69–75. (Wal Suchting had prophesised it even earlier — see note 20 below.) The sociologist Robert Connell criticised the fashionable dismissal of Marxism in ‘Marxists and Anti-marxists’, Intervention 18.
Necessity and Freedom in Hegel and Marx, MA Melbourne University 1953 (Special Collection, Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne).
‘Marx and Hannah Arendt’s “The Human Condition” ‘, Ethics 73 (1962), p. 47–55.
Whilst he knew Lukacs did! — ‘A plea for the English language’, Arena 25 1971, p. 76.
‘Marx, Popper, and “Historicism” ‘, Inquiry 15, 1972, p. 235–66 (citation at note 43). This article effectively unites Suchting’s Marx-philological and philosophy of science backgrounds in a solid and readable analytical rebuttal of Popper’s well-known attack. It is interesting to note that Suchting had already protested this in the notes to his MA and takes up the question again in a later article. It should also be noted that whilst rejecting Popper’s views on Marx and, presumably, Hegel, Suchting has a fairly positive relation to his philosophy of science.
Inquiry 20, 1977, pages 247–371. I will discuss this at length as the major writing of the ‘crusading’ period; later work by Suchting and others has a more purely Marxological interest.
Cf. their references to Moscow collections on the subject. It is probably fair to say that the only thing some Marxists know about anarchism is that anarchists have to be shot.
Inquiry 20, 1977, p. 372–397.
Grundrisse (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1973), p. 101–2. It should be noted that Marx’s position is quite clearly empiricist in this passage in both a Curthoys-Suchting and a historical sense.
They do offer a distinction which is allegedly Marxian between the particular and the social form of a process but this is quite unrelated in their usage of it. (p. 292)
Their anti-prescriptivism is also bound up with this since if one does not consider the actual labour process there is no point in making rules for it. Presumably they do not really believe that capitalist — or for that matter socialist — production proceeds in the absence of work rules, accounting norms, investment rules and the like! Some indeed have believed that the rationalisation of the economy and society generally is of the essence of capitalism. Now would it be stupid for a writer who believed capitalism was a rational economy to urge refinements of these rules or different ones to the agents of the economy? Clearly not, this is done and it is part of the process by which industrial organisation evolves. Why then in terms of this analogy should it be so crass and vulgar for writers in the philosophy of science — as opposed to the philosophy of manufactures — to do the same? Anti-prescriptivism is of course itself prescriptive. Even if it were a fact that there was nothing solid in common between the various scientific ‘practices’ this would not show that there could not be at another time or that useful results might not be obtained by attempts at methodological cross-fertilisation or even methodological imperialism.
What is this thing called science? (ST. Lucia: University of Queensland Press 1976), p. 140. This of course antedates the Inquiry article and is referred to approvingly therein.
He gives examples of this, ibid, p. 107.
Ibid (Second edition 1982) p. xiii. In Curthoys-Suchting terms this amounts to a rehabilitation of ‘anarchism’ and seems part of a more general trend in Sydney at that time.
Indeed a background in ‘Australian materialism’ or philosophy of science would appear fairly typical except for philosophers from outside Australia such as Janna Thompson or G. Markus or persons radicalised outside Australia like Rodney Allen. Janna Thompson has suggested to me that central state materialism with its rejection of the notion of an autonomous self might have served as Wal Suchting’s bridge to Althusser.
Dialectic and empiricism in the Marxism of Karl Korsch, Phd La Trobe 1981. A summary statement is in ‘Dialektik und Empirismus’, Zur Aktualität von Karl Korsch, Herausgegeben von Michael Buckmiller (Frankfurt a. M.: Europaische Verlagsanstalt 1981). A paper ‘A materialistic theory of thought’ delivered at the Research Symposium on Critical or Radical theories of Science, Morpeth, 1983, discusses Korsch’s approach to the problem of characterising science.
‘Objectless Activity: Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” ‘, Inquiry 28.
Again most notably Wal Suchting who has produced together with numerous articles a good introductory text on marxism — Marx, An Introduction (Brighton (U.K): Wheatsheaf Books 1983) — and more recently Marx and Philosophy, Three Studies (New York: New York University Press 1986).
Such as Ross Poole or John Burnheim in Sydney or again Janna Thompson in Melbourne.
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Giles-Peters, A.R. (1992). The Marxist Tradition. In: Srzednicki, J.T.J., Wood, D. (eds) Essays on Philosophy in Australia. Nijhoff International Philosophy Series, vol 46. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8006-9_8
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