This Page publishes 'diary' style individualised entries by Rowan Cahill and Terry Irving on matters relating to the theory, practice, and living, of radical history, and radical scholarship. Each entry is dated, and attributed to its respective author. Neither author necessarily agrees with, nor necessarily endorses, the views expressed by his fellow ruminant.
As Australia gears up to commemorate/celebrate the state orchestrated Anzac Day 2017 (April 25th), a few dissident thoughts: War is a political act
initiated/manufactured by a few people who have the power to
order/coerce/manipulate many others with little or no power, to engage in
barbaric acts of violence with tools that intensify violence and destruction.
All the while, those who have created the situation operate in relative safety
away from the face-to-face realities of hands-on violence. The reasons for the
War-event will be multifarious. Those who engage in a hands-on way and whose
energies fuel the act, will be given one set of reasons, usually emotive and
spurious, while the reasons of the planners/initiators will be cold-blooded
ones, rooted in the geopolitical and economic, perhaps even the mad. It will be
the task of future historians to bring the War-event planners and initiators to
account and to interrogate their reasonings and justifications, if that is they do not themselves
become dancers to the martial tunes of the paymasters and sell their souls to
the martial spirit, doing their bit as unblooded intellectual warriors to
assist repetitions of histories. [Opposite: Australian WW1 anti-conscription poster attributed to IWW organiser Tom Barker (1887-1970), in its day worth significant imprisonment].
As I strolled this Summer’s day by the side of a local
waterway, I looked beyond the overwhelming greenness of the vista and sought within
the myriad shades of greens, the diversity of foliage and shapes, and the riot
of colours, within and beneath the green hegemony - the reds, yellows, whites,
reds, pinks, purples, orange and black, of berries and blooms, wilds and
exotics, natives and weeds. And as I ‘saw’ the colours and diversities of shape
and form, my mind turned to social protest and resistance movements. They can
have names and labels and titles in history and in political discourse, like
the anti-war movement of the 1960s of which I was part, Chartism of the
nineteenth century, the French Resistance of World War II, developing anti-Trumpism.
'THE FATAL LURE OF POLITICS'
After many years of scholarship, teaching in the academy,
and activism, colleague Terry Irving is putting together what he envisages
being the definitive account of the life and politics of Australian-born
leftist archaeologist and prehistorian Vere Gordon Childe (1892-1957). Best
known in Australia for his pioneering, seminal critical account of the
Australian labour movement in and out of Parliament, How Labour Governs (1923), Childe is more widely known
internationally for his pioneering work in prehistory, author of 26 books on
archaeology and history, and at the time of his suicide in 1957 in the Blue Mountains
(NSW), probably Australia’s most translated author.
As you say, the anti-Trump demonstrations in
the US are heartening, but in a sense, for they are happening in a comparatively safe
environment in the twilight hours of the Obama administration. There is a long
way to go, and the new rulers will be organised and will leave nothing to
chance; they are hard and ruthless people, and to act against them will be
punishing and terrible, with militarised policing, incarcerations, loyalty
tests in the offing, and civil liberties out the window. And if the highest US courts are purged of
liberal legalists…..well, the fascists will have carte blanche. To protest then
will take courage and guts and, in a sense, people as hard as those they oppose,
and these don’t grow on trees. I reckon that is the shape of the future, and
Australia will not be immune, since we have developed as one of the largest US
military bases in the world, and Pine Gap is key to the US nuclear military
capacity. So we can expect Australian governments to fall in line behind Trump,
we having already pioneered Trumpism in many ways.
Behind the photo in front of me,
on the third shelf of the chaotic bookshelf of my chaotic desk, of her and me
together, snapped some twenty years ago when we were still teaching, is a faded
green-covered Everyman’s edition of Leaves of Grass by American poet Walt Whitman
(1819-1892), which according to the notation on the fly-leaf has been with me since
8 December 1962, a book I purchased from caddying money during my last years as
a Cold War schoolboy, courtesy of tippled afternoon tipsters at the Pymble Golf Club, just a couple of years before
Menzies and his war-lovers duplicitously plunged me and my generation into the
turmoil and wastes and lies and traumas of the Vietnam War and Conscription,
plucking me from obscurity in the roll of a birthday-based lottery system, November
3rd one of the marbles conscripted in 1965.
At the recent Historical Materialism Australasia Conference
(Sydney, July 2015), the keynote address was delivered by veteran scholars
Terry Irving and Raewyn Connell. The subject was their seminal book Class Structure in Australian History (CSAH), the first edition of which was
published by Longman Cheshire in 1980, followed by a second edition in 1992. Whilst
in print the book sold at least 12,000 copies, a significant figure at the time
for an Australian book, still a figure to set a publisher’s lips drooling, and
in terms of international academic/scholarly publishing, where print runs of
200 copies struggle to sell, a runaway success. As they say in the classics, CSAH ‘walked off the shelves’.
++++++
TALE OF A MANUSCRIPT: A recent culling of my papers
yielded a battered foolscap folder containing a yellowing 147-page typescript,
its front page titled ‘The Seamen’s Union of Australia: A Short History’ by
Brian Fitzpatrick. Produced during the early years of the Cold War in
Australia, it is a pioneering excursion into what much later would become the
academic speciality of ‘Labour History”. Author Brian Fitzpatrick (1905-1965)
was an independent leftist scholar and a dogged and very effective guardian of,
and advocate for, civil liberties.
The manuscript begins with the
formation of the Seamen’s Union of Australia (SUA) in 1872, and takes the
union’s history through to the end of World War 11. The period from then until
the early 1950s is dealt with in an eight-page ‘Epilogue’ titled ‘The Union
after the War’. Writing in 1979, Fitzpatrick’s biographer Don Watson, not
having access to the manuscript, described it as an “apparently undistinguished
work”, a sentiment echoed subsequently by others. Well, it was and it
wasn’t.
The ‘Short History’ was
commissioned by the SUA in 1949, in part as a way of helping finance
Fitzpatrick’s independent leftist
scholarship and his vigorous and effective civil libertarian activism, a
financial arrangement later joined by other sympathetic unions. The plan was to
publish the work during the 1950s, and
an ‘Introduction’ for the proposed book by the union’s leader national E. V.
Elliott dated 1956 was prepared for publication. While the book did not
eventuate, excerpts were variously published contemporaneously in Fitzpatrick’s
news commentary Australian Democrat
and in the Seamen’s Journal.
By his own admission, in a letter
to SUA leader E. V. Elliott (8 April 1958), Fitzpatrick completed the project
“in haste”. Which is understandable. As the Cold War in Australia intensified
during the late 40s, early 50s, and especially during the attempt by the Menzies’
government to ban the Communist Party of Australia and during the Petrov Affair
(1954-1955), Fitzpatrick engaged vigorously and heroically in high profile ways
as an intellectual activist and advocate combatting the Cold War and its
concerted attacks on the left, on the militant communist-led trade unions, and
upon civil liberties generally.
In 1970, with a newly minted BA
(Hons), I was hired by the SUA for two-years on a journalist’s wage, to
complete the Fitzpatrick account for the Centenary of the union in 1972,
Fitzpatrick’s account forming Part 1 of an envisaged book. I had been
introduced to the SUA and the project by Sydney University economic historian
and civil libertarian Ken Buckley. Ken was friends with E.V. and Della Elliott,
and I had forged a friendship with Ken in the anti-Vietnam War movement and in
my own jousting with prevailing censorship laws. An offer by Ken of his
editorial services to the union, free of charge, to overcome the deficiencies
of the Fitzpatrick text, was rejected; E. V. Elliott was sentimentally attached
to the manuscript.
I completed my task on time, but
for a variety of reasons, explained elsewhere, including a printery fire which
destroyed the letterpress setting of the book as galleys were being corrected
(see R Cahill, ‘Reflections’, Seamen’s
Journal, July/August 1983, p. 183), the book was not published until 1981
(as Brian Fitzpatrick and Rowan J Cahill, The
Seamen’s Union of Australia 1872-1972: A History). I also wrote a potted
serialised version of the union’s history and this was published in the Seamen’s Journal during 1972,
culminating in an enlarged, glossy, and magnificently illustrated Centenary
edition of the journal.
The Cahill manuscript of 1972,
covering the period 1935 to 1972, was ahead of the time in many ways, noting
the absence of mariners and the maritime from Australian history, and detailing
the international/transnational aspects of the SUA’s history, all of which
would become scholarly commonplace well down the track. As it was, this pioneering
sortie tended to get overlooked by academic historiographers. [ Rowan Cahill, 31 May 2019.]
++++++
ON GRAND PLANS AND
ALLEN KEYS
As I engage with my seventh
decade, I am variously approached by researchers and others for details of and
information about my life of dissidence and activism on the left, beginning in
1965 when I was amongst the one in twelve Australian males selectively chosen
by the recently introduced conscription lottery for a two-year stint as part of
the Australian Army and the Vietnam War. The lottery cynically targeted males
on the cusp of their twentieth birthday, before they gained the right to vote,
which in those days was accorded upon reaching the age of 21. I was amongst the
few at the time who said no, and the rest is history.
Some questioners and seekers ask
big questions, along the lines of ‘what do we do to change a world where
violence and authoritarianism and disregard for human rights and social
injustice and environmental degradation are rampant, a world in which the
individual seems so powerless against a status quo hell bent on preserving the
abhorrent?’ It is a valid and important line of questioning, but the phrasing
tends to come in a way suggesting the expected answer will be like an Ikea flat
pack – all that needs to be done is to open the pack, lay out the contents,
follow instructions, and with the aid of an allen key and screwdriver, assemble
a specific item of furniture.
For me there is no flatpack, no
grand plan. What it comes down to is that each individual does the best
possible, with whatever abilities and skills s/he is endowed with or has
gained, to attempt to bring about a better, more equitable, and just, world for
all, one in which the notion of the redistribution of wealth is neither a
stranger nor unimaginable. This can be done as individuals, or as part of
collectives; some will work on small canvasses, others on large ones; and there
will be many ways of going about it, understanding that contexts and
circumstances ameliorate all.
Some individuals will find
themselves plucked by fate to take on roles they had not foreseen, to make
decisions they did not plan. Which is what happened to me in 1965, when my
ambition in life was simple – to write poetry, work, and one day be able to
afford a small yacht and cruise the Northern waters of Australia, the Whitsunday
Passage in particular; I had in mind a 22’ plywood Bluebird, like the one I had
crewed and raced on out of Middle Harbour (Sydney) during the previous last
couple of years. However, conscription changed all that, and I became instead a
rebel, and according to my subsequently compiled ASIO file, a bona fide enemy
of the state.
From my reading of history,
individuals have agency; what counts is their compliance/complicity or
otherwise. The greatest evils and abnormalities in history come down, in the
end, to the decisions individuals make. In an existential sense, the importance
of resisting, of protesting, of working for a better world, one underpinned by
equity and social justice, is that the acts of doing, successful or otherwise, are what is important. Because if
these acts cease, if they are no more, then we enter a night of pitch darkness,
unbroken by comforting stars or light of any kind.
Finally this: history is not
scripted; it is made. And history surprises.
[Rowan Cahill, 22 November 2018]
++++++
REBEL ROOTS
1966 was my last year as a cleanskin – the year
I destroyed my death lottery call-up papers*, the year my rebellions went
public, the year Special Branch (the political police unit of the NSW Police Force)
started tailing and photographing me as they complied my Dossier, and not long
before the anal-retentives in the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation
(ASIO) deemed I warranted a file†. Sorting through my papers recently I came
across an old orange covered Penguin edition of Romain Gary’s novel The Roots of Heaven (1960). According to
a note I had made on the flyleaf, I bought the book on Monday 21 February 1966,
and finished reading it five days later, at 1.20 AM to be precise, on Saturday
February 27. The book was a source of my discontent.
How I chanced upon it in 1966 I can’t recall. Perhaps it was
because Colin Wilson and his minority view reckoned it was one of the classic
novels of the twentieth century, and I had earlier been influenced mightily by
his literary study of alienation and rebellion The Outsider (1956); or maybe it was via the Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard
de Chardin whose radical cosmological theology I was reading at the time and
which had exercised a profound influence on Gary’s Roots of Heaven; or maybe it was Errol Flynn, battling alcoholism, who stared
in John Huston’s 1958 film of the book and reckoned it was his favourite film
of those he had played in, Flynn who decades earlier had delivered the
memorable line as Robin Hood, when Maid Marian, not yet his lover, turns to him
in rebuke early in the film, Robin in the halls of governmental power, an
uninvited banquet guest of the corrupt, opportunist and powerful, ‘Why, you
speak treason’, to which Robin replies with a wry hint of a smile, “Fluently”.
Roots of Heaven was Green decades
before the colour became political, telling of a French Resistance veteran and
concentration camp survivor who goes to Africa to save elephants from slaughter
and extinction at the hands of the ivory-and-trophy set, elephants for him the
symbol of humanity and hope, of all that is decent, majestic and just, a
personal symbol that had brought him through WW11, now victims of human greed,
corrupt and compromised politics, and capitalism. He begins his quixotic
campaign peacefully with petitions and representation and the gamut of traditional
avenues of peaceful persuasion, in the process gathering around him a small
band of outcasts variously wounded by the twentieth century. But he finds he cannot
beat wealth and power and corruption with these methods, and so, unwilling to
compromise or retreat, he resorts to more violent measures.
Roots of Heaven is about resistance
and rebellion and the value of pursuing seeming lost causes in the face of the intractable. In 1966 the book spoke to
me, and helped shape my future – profoundly.
_________________
*From 1965-72 a selective system of conscription (National
Service) was in force in Australia, operating through a lottery-ballot system
and applying to all males on the cusp of them turning 20 years old. The
one-in-twelve who ‘won’ the lottery and were called-up were in the Australian
army for the next two years, many seeing service in the frontlines of the
Vietnam War. At the time, adult status and the right to vote were not attained
in Australia until the age of 21. I was conscripted in November 1965.
† Special Branch was unceremoniously disbanded in 1997
following a Royal Commission into the NSW Police Service. ASIO opened its file
on me in 1967.
[Rowan Cahill, 21 April 2018]
++++++
A BRUSH WITH WEIMAR: Forty-eight years ago tonight, it was
the night before Pam (1948-2015) and I married, and we were amongst the small
number of guests invited to a function to farewell Associate Professor Ernest K.
Bramsted (1901-1978) as he retired from Sydney University and prepared to
return to the UK where he had citizenship. He had come to Sydney University in
1952, but was now deemed to have reached his use-by date. As it turned out, he still had a couple of
books in him, and some teaching gigs.
 |
| Ernest K Bramsted |
Bramsted had been one of my teachers during my undergraduate
years at Sydney University (1964-68), and had helped supervise my Honours work
in 1968. We had become close during this time, and had had many discussions.…..about
history, socialism, utopias, propaganda, rebellion, dissent, my own radical activities,
morality, responsibility…
Born in Germany into a liberal Jewish tradition, Bramsted
had contributed to the socialist press in the early years of the Weimer
Republic, gained a doctorate from the University of Berlin (1926), and a second
at the University of London (1936), this latter thesis, with its mix of
sociology, history, and literature, published in 1937 as Aristocracy and the Middle-Classes
in Germany: Social Types in German Literature 1830-1900 (republished in 1964). Bramsted’s academic
mentor and influence was the pioneer sociologist Karl Mannheim (1893-1947), and
he later co-edited a collection of Mannheim’s last writings, Freedom, Power, and Democratic Planning (1951).
A victim of, and refugee from, the anti-semitism unleashed
by Hitler’s 1933 Enabling Act, Bramsted moved to Holland, then Britain, and
during WW11 worked in counter-propaganda for the BBC, and later in secret war
work for the Foreign Office in ‘political intelligence’. Post-war he worked in
Berlin on the transfer of Nazi documents into the public realm, and gained an
international reputation as a critical authority on propaganda and its coercive
and shaping roles through the close case study of Joseph Goebbels, whose work he
had monitored as part of his war work. Bramsted was a religious person and part of
the Unitarian Church, his theological strand rejecting the notion of ‘original
sin’, locating the genesis of evil/sin within the human being and the choices each
one of us makes.
From tutorials and one-to-one discussions, through the haze
of his yellow stained fingers chain smoking and quietly pointed challenging
Germanic accented English, I absorbed a lot from Bramsted…..about the history
of ideas, about the roles of intellectuals in society and history, about the
roles of fear and intimidation in controlling society, about the legitimacy of
revolution, about events like the advent of Nazism and the Holocaust not being
historical abnormalities but the results of human actions and inactions, with
the emphasis on the latter, and that mass society is always about individuals,
and at any time, individuals can have agency and it is compliance/complicity or
otherwise that counts. Metaphysically/historically, Evil is something each of
us helps along, or counters.
There was only a handful of us young people at Bramsted’s
function, and Pam and I left early, returning to our respective parental homes.
On the morrow we would marry and begin a new life together…..there was
conscription and a related war to end; authorities with significant jail-time
in mind for me to be thwarted; and a world to win….and the individual had
agency, particularly if organised…….for better or for worse, and until death
did us part, chances were that life was probably always going to be a bit different.
[Rowan Cahill, 16 May 2017]
++++++
FOR THE 25th: A
NOTE FROM INSIDE A NATION IN LOVE WITH WAR
As Australia gears up to commemorate/celebrate the state orchestrated Anzac Day 2017 (April 25th), a few dissident thoughts: War is a political act
initiated/manufactured by a few people who have the power to
order/coerce/manipulate many others with little or no power, to engage in
barbaric acts of violence with tools that intensify violence and destruction.
All the while, those who have created the situation operate in relative safety
away from the face-to-face realities of hands-on violence. The reasons for the
War-event will be multifarious. Those who engage in a hands-on way and whose
energies fuel the act, will be given one set of reasons, usually emotive and
spurious, while the reasons of the planners/initiators will be cold-blooded
ones, rooted in the geopolitical and economic, perhaps even the mad. It will be
the task of future historians to bring the War-event planners and initiators to
account and to interrogate their reasonings and justifications, if that is they do not themselves
become dancers to the martial tunes of the paymasters and sell their souls to
the martial spirit, doing their bit as unblooded intellectual warriors to
assist repetitions of histories. [Opposite: Australian WW1 anti-conscription poster attributed to IWW organiser Tom Barker (1887-1970), in its day worth significant imprisonment].
[Rowan Cahill, 24 April 2017]
++++++
STROLLING METAPHORS
The name/title/label, however, is really only a convenience,
a way of simplifying complexities, just as my waterway panorama appears at
first sight overwhelmingly green. Within that green there are manifold
varieties of colours and forms, diversities of difference, unique in their own
ways, with their own agendas if you will, sometimes mutually competing for
space, even antagonistically, but overall constituting a green hegemony.
Alternatively, consider the hegemonic green as symbolic of the
status quo, the repressive rule that is opposed, and the same applies. Beneath,
and despite the system’s hegemony, there is a riot of challenge from below. Indeed,
sometimes, a label obscures the actuality of what is taking place below, obscuring
manifold resistances and dissidence, short changing traditions of protest and
resistance, and in a way robbing the future.
By ideologically fixating one’s politics and ‘seeing’ on the
hegemonic greenness of the vista, and on envisaging its defeat in one dramatic
overthrow, one massive confrontation, one decisive clash, achieved by an all-embracing
organisational structure of some kind, and often envisaged as occurring in some
metropole, much is missed. And what is missed is the actuality of what is happening,
the meek and the dramatic, the gentle and the confrontational, in many places,
in many ways, by many people, often outside the metropole and away from the
‘eyes’ of the media and the celebratory ‘selfie’, at times private, at times very
personal, perhaps no more than a one-to-one conversation or a bit of hacking or
the trickle of a leak.
Resistance to be resistance is not necessarily a media event,
though in these social-media times the notion of ‘dissent events’ is a useful
dissident tool. But when, for instance, World War II Resistance activists variously
destroyed strategic infrastructures in
Nazi occupied Europe, they did not pose for film-shots to post on the non-existent
Facebooks of their time, saying ‘look, here we are; this is what we did, this is where we are’, but
went back to the anonymities of their daily lives, until the next action. It was
the act and its ramifications for the repressive rule that counted, not the “I
did this, therefore I am” approach that seems to inform modernity. And often in resisting oppression, everything
is not on the table and the resister/activist, as Marcuse once pointed out, has
to choose from "what can be chosen", and it becomes a matter then of "what is
chosen".
Failure to understand that resistance is a many flowered
thing, with many shapes and forms, coupled with the ideological fixation/dream of
a culminating big oppositional event that tumbles the oppressive rule, is
conducive to a form of despondency. Thus the feeling that until the occasion/realisation
of the big event, nothing much is happening otherwise, and with this the perception that the despised rule prevails
unchallenged. It is as though we take the David and Goliath story too literally.
Sure, the story of one specially selected smooth stone and one slingshot and
one person, a humble shepherd, bringing down Leviathan is a potent political
story. But it is also mischievous. Mostly
history shows that it is many resistances, by many people over time, many
stones, many slingshots, that tumbles Leviathan. And within this, it is not
only the slingshot and its wielder that matter, but also the stones.
[Rowan Cahill, 16 February 2017]
[Rowan Cahill, 16 February 2017]
++++++
'THE FATAL LURE OF POLITICS'
 |
| .....Childe in the 1930s.... |
Irving’s ‘Childe Project’ is the result of nearly three
decades of research nationally and internationally, undertaken as time
permitted during the conduct of personal life and employment. It is planned in
three parts. Part 1 will treat the period 1892-1927, from Childe’s birth, through
his radicalisation at Sydney and Oxford
universities, the ways this variously played out in the anti-war and socialist
ferment of World War 1, and in the post-war rough and tumble of Australian
labour/Labor politics, to his first academic position in archaeology. Part 2
will examine Childe’s politics, in particular his evolution and formulation of
radical democracy. Part 3 will treat Childe’s long academic career in the UK,
and his end days in Australia, and explore the relationship Childe developed
between scholarship and politics. Irving intends to conclude with reflections
on the important questions Childe’s life and work raise about radical democracy.
Irving frames these thus: “Is there virtue in political life when it is lived apart
from the state? Ought the masses to be self-governing or governed by their
betters? Is it better to release or to tame the savage instincts of democracy?”
 |
| ...Irving, over seven decades later...... |
With the working title The
Fatal Lure of Politics, Irving’s work in progress is taking place publicly,
online and with open access, the chapters posted on Irving’s website, ‘Savage Democracy’ as they are completed. This incremental and public approach is
reminiscent of the way in which Irving and colleague R. Connell developed their
classic study Class Structure in
Australian History (1980) during the 1970s, with typed/roneod chapters
circulated widely prior to eventual publication.
The chapters online to date demonstrate deep familiarity
with the life and work of Childe, and there is much that has not been made
public previously. However Irving has decided to retain control over his
intellectual property by not making the footnotes available at this stage.
Having been privy to these, I can attest to their complexity, depth, and
thoroughness, indicating deep and original research in archives and libraries
in Australia, the UK, and Europe.
Apart from contesting and countering many myths and much
nonsense about the life and times of Childe, what Irving is doing overall is
bringing his own lifetime of activism, work, scholarship, and thought to bear
upon Childe, examining some profound political questions, and modelling the
writing of radical history, demonstrating how a past-life and time, deeply and
radically lived, can offer much to the present and to the future. [Rowan Cahill, 25 January 2017]
++++++
LATE NIGHT WORDS TO A
YOUNG FRIEND
Dear ---------,
But there will be other historic forces
in play…..we are possibly looking at the fall of the US Empire, going the way
of Rome……...there will be major geopolitical shifts as Trumpism rolls through
the world, resistances of all kinds, and things that pollsters and opinion
writers have not countenanced, maybe even the further decline of capitalism, and
all sorts of nasty efforts to stave that off…..indeed, we could, even now, be witnessing the emergence of a new world, a struggling
birth like that of a butterfly struggling from its grub form into the light of
day……it will be a messy, confusing, and probably frightening process………for all of us
ordinaries who have not gone along with the neoliberal madnesses, of which Trump is a mutant product, it will
be and is a time to love and to care for those we are close to, to nourish and
shelter and aid and support and comfort, and to work for social justice in
whatever ways we can, and to recognise the face of evil, and not to yield, nor
grant it normalcy. It is essential too, to not abandon hope, nor the imagining
and dreaming of a better world.
I recently saw some statistics
about the French Resistance during WWII. General de Gaulle, post- war, encouraged
the myth that the Resistance was a popular movement in an effort to help him paper over and rule a
fractured nation and to promote it in a guilty Europe and on the world stage……..well
no, it wasn’t……it was a minority movement , about 1% of the population, and a
significant proportion were women since the bulk of the male population were in
the armed forces, variously dead, in POW camps, in exile fighting to return, or
collaborating/coexisting along with the majority of the population…….part of
the feelings of hopelessness we have in the face of Trumpism is that understandings
of resistance generally and its possibilities have, historically, been
misrepresented, censored, and emasculated…….for ruling class elites it is
best the plebs, we who are ruled, do not understand the possibilities of our agency
and the making of history from below. But for the moment , we are safe, and we
can sleep safely………and there is an old saying, ‘history surprises’…….the future
is not yet written, nor set in stone. [Rowan Cahill, 14 November 2016]
++++++
HISTORY MAN
I have before me a
copy of the latest book by John Tognolini, A
History Man’s Past & Other People’s Stories: A Shared Memoir, Part One:
Other People’s Wars (2015). This is not a
brief title, and had the book come via a mainstream publisher and gone
through the hands of a marketing person, rather than the ebook self-publishing manner in which
John publishes (this is his fourth book), it would no doubt have had a less
cumbersome title, maybe just A History
Man’s Past. But John does not operate this way, and if I was asked to name
a favourite Australian radical/commentator/author, I would probably bypass the
famous and the well-known and nominate ‘John Tognolini’. I’ll return to the
‘why’ of this later.
 |
| John Tognolini |
First, A History Man’s Past. The ‘history man’ of the title is John. He
has a passion for history from a leftist perspective. Employment-wise and
professionally, he is a secondary school history teacher in rural NSW
(Australia). This book is a collection of his writings, and interviews he has
conducted, on the theme of war and militarisation, exploring why it is that Australia
has been at war for much of its time as a nation as the junior partner of
either Britain or the United States. As the reader soon learns, war is part of
the Tognolini’s family. Four of his uncles went to World War 1, the youngest, his namesake ‘John/Jack’, on the Western Front aged
sixteen or seventeen, a boy-soldier who lied about his age to enlist. Gallipoli veteran Andrew Tognolini died shortly after the war.
For author John, war is nothing
to glorify, no height of nobility as currently being evangelised by Australian
war-propagandists bankrolled by multi-millions of dollars of government and
corporate money to commemorate/celebrate World War 1. Rather, Tognolini’s take on war is it is a
human tragedy, not only about carnage and slaughter but also of hardships and
sufferings and traumas for those on the home-front, and later for many of the
front-liners who return home and struggle to live in the aftertime of ‘peace’.
Constantly in Tognolini’s work there are the shadows of the geopolitics of war,
and the politicians who engineer ‘war’, these latter mostly unblooded martial
enthusiasts.
A History Man’s Past is a welcome contribution to the small body of
Australian anti-war writing, a corpus that is overwhelmed by the tsunami of pro-war
literature that flows from the presses of mainstream publishers, helping fuel Australia’s
ongoing participation in other people’s wars and legitimise increasing military budgets and
expenditures. As few Australians seem pause and
question………not enough money for health, education, pensions, but a
bottomless bucket for ‘war’?
However, this does not explain my liking for John Tognolini as a dissident/radical.
His latest book is only part of the answer.
The full reason lies in the way Tognolini operates; in a self-directed
way. He makes his own spaces for dissident interventions and comment,
demonstrating a media savvy that was/is no doubt helped by his academic studies;
he has a First Class Honours degree in Communications from the University of
Technology, Sydney, gained at a time when the institution had a reputation for
producing independent journalists/communicators. Tognolini publishes his own books. Since 2006 he has run
a massive website/blog (Tog’s Place.Com) as a platform for his own writings and
commentaries, and also as an alternative leftist news, information and cultural
site. The site takes its name from the Cobb and Co way-station run by his
Italian grandfather and his Australia-born grandmother (from English/Irish convict parentage) near Castlemaine, Victoria,
during the 19th century. Tognolini has also been involved in
community radio since 1987, and with the socialist newspaper Green Left Weekly since 1990. He has
produced radio documentaries for ABC Radio National/RN.
Tognolini’s independence as an
intellectual/communicator is rooted in his employment background; before becoming a school teacher in 2000, he
variously worked as a labourer, scaffolder, rigger, dogman, railway fettler, and
painter and docker, and whilst in these employments was a trade unionist. This long
and varied employment background means that the language of Tognolini is from
the world of public communication, and not from school-to-academia niche worlds;
his long and deep immersion in the labouring workforce also means he developed
strong self-respect and individuality that have helped him resist/escape the cap-in-hand-defer-to-intellectual-power-elites
mode of conduct that tends to come with professional writer training and with
academia.
Involvement in unionism, militant
unionism in Tognolini’s case, led him to make two documentary films that are worth chasing
down, one (1992) on the deregistration of the Builders Labourers Federation in Victoria, the other (with Frances Kelly) on the three-month occupation/strike by
militant trade unions of Cockatoo Island Dockyard, Sydney, 1989, in which John
was involved. Both substantial films are available on Youtube.
Tognolini does not need peer-
reviewing or permission to speak, nor does he need the approbation of pecking
orders to comment and create his brand of opposition and dissidence. He does
not agonise as to where to act, where to ‘say’. He simply goes out and does/say
it, and as I said earlier, makes his own spaces. There is a valuable message,
and example, here that I regard highly, and respect. [ Rowan Cahill, 10 November 2015]
++++++
TURNING SEVENTY
So I’ve just turned 70, an age I never really
thought I’d get to see way back when I was young. We had planned to have a
party, Pam and I, she reckoning it was a milestone requiring celebration, but
she didn’t get to make it, and the party did not happen, a non sequitur in
respects. Way back when the Beatles
wondered about the nature of love at the age of 64, it all seemed a distant
future, so far away, but a good question nonetheless, but that is in the past.
Seems to me that at least I
should venture some words about the milestone, but since Pam died earlier this
year I realise there is much I do not understand, and much I cannot answer, and
her death has been humbling in many ways.
Behind the photo in front of me,
on the third shelf of the chaotic bookshelf of my chaotic desk, of her and me
together, snapped some twenty years ago when we were still teaching, is a faded
green-covered Everyman’s edition of Leaves of Grass by American poet Walt Whitman
(1819-1892), which according to the notation on the fly-leaf has been with me since
8 December 1962, a book I purchased from caddying money during my last years as
a Cold War schoolboy, courtesy of tippled afternoon tipsters at the Pymble Golf Club, just a couple of years before
Menzies and his war-lovers duplicitously plunged me and my generation into the
turmoil and wastes and lies and traumas of the Vietnam War and Conscription,
plucking me from obscurity in the roll of a birthday-based lottery system, November
3rd one of the marbles conscripted in 1965.
Deflected here, both my life then
and my reflections now, by something that burns within me as a passion, close
to hatred, I recall the words of French writer Romain Rolland (1866-1944) who
observed in October 1914 as Europe was being jollied and herded by a relative
few into the abattoirs of World War 1, that “I find war detestable but those
who praise it without participating in it even more so”.
Whitman was at the start of my writerly
voyage, and approaching 70, he too wondered in his confrontational,
autobiographical, cantankerous, gnarly way in a poem ‘Queries To My Seventieth
Year’, about the milestone and the time ahead, and whether it was an end or an
ongoing proposition, a matter of “life or death”, declining powers, or was it a
matter of simply leaving him “Dull, parrot-like and old, with crack’d voice
harping, screeching?”.
So what is there to say, apart
from admitting that I do not know many things, and there is much that I do not
understand, and that a certainty in my world has been shaken by death? Well, there
are things I do know, do understand, that are constants like the Pole Star the
old mariner and leader of the Seamen’s Union of Australia E. V. Elliott (1902-1984)
talked to me about in the early 1970s when I took my first steps as an
historian with the trade union he led, about staying ‘On Course’, his favourite
refrain.
I began the 21st century
with two quotes on my now non-existent letterhead, one from old cantankerous
himself, Whitman, page 8 of my copy of Leaves,
a line from the brief poem ‘To The States’, a line he stressed in italics, later
taken up and over by another literary rebellious favourite, monkeywrencher
Edward Abbey (1927-1989) - ‘’Resist much, obey little”; and a line from a
letter the Italian Marxist Antonio
Gramsci (1891-1937) wrote from the confines of a fascist prison in December
1929, “I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of
will”. For me, at 70, both say it all.
[Rowan Cahill, 3 November 2015]
[Rowan Cahill, 3 November 2015]
++++++
DENIS KEVANS: POET
News of the forthcoming Denis Kevans Memorial Concert Fundraiser for Chemical Warfare Victims of the Vietnam War (Sydney, 23 August 2015) brought back a few memories, and because Denis was never far away from both the making and study of history, a few notes here seem relevant......
Denis Kevans (1939-2005) was a songwriter, folk singer, public servant, labourer on building
sites, trade unionist, teacher, journalist, but mostly he was a poet. We met in 1965, and I published a couple of his now classic anti-war poems in the Sydney University student newspaper honi soit. Our association continued thereafter until his death from complications arising from heart surgery. I have before me the file of correspondence resulting from this association, capturing the 'driveness' and creativity and always-on-the-go nature of his creativity, a hectic collection of notes scribbled on scraps of paper, photocopies sent of his latest works, hurriedly typed missives with hand corrections announcing his latest anthology (The Great Prawn War and Other Poems, 1982; Ah, White man, have you any sacred sites?, 1985; The Bastard Who Squashed the Grapes in Me Bag, 1991), along with requests for me to review it/them. Self-published, his anthologies were in part financed from royalties resulting from the use by the iconic band 'Midnight Oil' of one of his poems. In 1976 Denis and I planned to publish an anthology of his poems in time for Christmas sales, but we could not get the necessary cash together.
 |
| Denis Kevans |
Denis does not appear in the Australian literary canon, except for passing mention, and he is not one of those poets who make it regularly into Australian anthologies. Yet he and his work have had greater exposure to people, and more people have possibly engaged with his work and been moved by it, than can be said for many other Australian poets. Mostly Denis published in social movement publications, his poetry, much of it satirical and humorous, championing trade union, social justice, anti-war, and environmental causes and issues. He performed his work too, and had a speaking/public voice and knew how to work an audience. For example, at the Palm Sunday anti-nuclear rally in Sydney , 1984, he held an audience of 150, 000 people.
For Denis, poetry was meant to be read, heard, understood. He was not about writing for 'quiet contemplation', or about writing clever stuff for fellow poets, or writing to demonstrate artistry and technique. Which is not to say he was not schooled in the classics, nor that he was unaware of poetic techniques. Indeed he came out of the Catholic school system, and had been a boarder at the prestigious St Joseph's College, Hunters Hill, Sydney, before briefly enrolling in Medicine at Sydney University. But Medicine was not to be his way, and he became instead a public servant, then a labourer, before completing a part-time Arts degree at Sydney University, getting a teaching qualification, and thereafter variously making a living via teaching and journalism. In 1979 Denis successfully completed an MA in English Literature at Sydney University. His subject was the World War 1 Australian anti-war soldier poet Henry Weston Pryce (1891-1963).
Kevan's poetry first took to the streets, so to speak, during the anti-nuclear campaigns of the early 1960s, the Vietnam War later that decade bringing him to prominence. His work is the subject of a paper given by Jefferson Lee at the February 2015 National Australian Labour History Conference in Melbourne. [Rowan Cahill, 9 August 2015]
A LIVING TRADITION
 |
| Raewyn and Terry at the Conference, in front of the !st edition cover of CSAH Photo: Nick Irving www.oneflightup.com.au |
In 1979/80, the book was lucky to make its way into print.
At the last minute the publisher apparently had second thoughts and on the
negative advice of a reader new to Australia, threatened to pull the plug in
the project. Simply the book was eccentric in many respects, too Australian and
non-metropole for a start, and in terms of analysis not in accord with the latest
scholarly/intellectual happenings and trends in the US in particular. However
the young authors refused to back down and stuck to the original commissioning
terms. Hey presto, a best-seller.
Reviewers tended to approach the book as a general history, and
found it wanting, problematic: it took class analysis seriously, was thematic
rather than an extended narrative, was too much of a mix with its blend of documents,
narrative and argument, and it brashly defied traditional discipline
boundaries, the text at once historical, sociological, political. Simply, the
young authors were unwelcome challengers to the masterly likes of Scott,
Hancock, Crawford, and the soon to be iconic Clark. However, despite reviewer
negativities, CSAH sold.
The book emerged from a period of energised Australian
intellectual and social ferment. During the
mid-sixties and through the 1970s,
Australia changed dramatically and significantly, a period some
historians have termed a ‘cultural revolution’ as the skids were put under the
prevailing culture that Donald Horne described as “racist, anglocentric-imperialist,
puritan, sexist, politically genteel acquiescent, capitalist, bureaucratic and
developmentalist”. Granted, in future decades conservative forces would regroup
and variously seek, successfully in some respects, to return to that
conservative utopia, but that was in the future.
CSAH was not a
product of the corporatized ‘knowledge’ factory that universities have become,
where scholars are metaphorically chained to computer screens, generating texts
in a desperate ‘publish or perish’ culture. Rather the Connell/Irving work
emerged slowly, in a collective way modern spin-doctors and box-tickers would
term ‘collegial’. The initial book contact with Longmans was signed in 1971,
but the idea for the book emerged in discussions and projects at the Free University, Sydney (1967-1972), a radical experimental self-managed study and
research outfit, Connell and Irving being two of the founders. Draft chapters
of the future book were circulated for discussion and comment amongst radical
scholars during the 1970s, and the project progressed as the result of a series
of Class Analysis Conferences organised by the authors during 1975-1977.
So why bother with CSAH
in 2015? Well, in some quarters it is regarded as a seminal work, and a bit
of internet searching indicates it has been a well cited text, continues to be
cited, and arguably fulfils some sort of ‘need’. But for me that is not the
point. Rather, the book’s existence, its reception, its longevity, point to
something intellectual gatekeepers of all kinds either ignore, play-down,
and/or dissemble about. There is in the Australian intellectual culture a
strong tradition of Marxist and class analysis, going back to the 19th
century and continuing today. It is robust, diversified, and exists both inside
and outside the academy, something other intellectual traditions often fail to achieve.
Its practitioners and exponents are variously academics and non-academics; its
outlets and modes of dissemination are
variously academic and non-academic. The nature and extent of the tradition is
outlined by Rick Kuhn, winner of the 2007 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial
Prize, in his essay “The History of Class Analysis in Australia” (2005). In a
micro/qualitative study, Thomas Barnes and Damien Cahill have demonstrated the
extent and diversity of this tradition during the period since the 1970s in
their article “Marxist Class Analysis: A Living Tradition in Australian Scholarship” (Journal of Australian Political Economy, Issue 70, 2012).
So yes, there is an Australian Marxist/class analysis
scholarly tradition, and CSAH is a
significant part of this. While the tradition might not be touted as being
obvious, or encouraged and/or welcomed by scholarly/academic gatekeepers, it steadfastly
streams through Australian intellectual life as surely as an ocean current. [Rowan Cahill, 30 July 2015]
++++++
The cause of her death was an unexpected and unforgiving brain aneurysm.
++++++
MISSING IN ACTION?
These publications tended to have their own preferred
styles, genres, and content ranges, their editors/editorial boards in effect
acting as intellectual conditioners and gatekeepers. In the affluent world, in whatever
country, in whatever institution, as this process gathered pace the role of
academic/scholar as ‘researcher’ and ‘thinker’ became that of vassal labourer,
reliant on the multinational-billion-dollar scholarly publishing empires for
employment/career advancement.
Mostly
funded by public monies, the items the vassals produced as part of their labour
were handed over for free to private enterprise where, with the development of
cyber technologies, they were locked up behind the paywalls and liberated on a
user-pay basis, a one-way financial process that totally excluded/excludes the original
creator/producer. The scale and extent of this sort of intellectual production
is immense. While reliable figures are difficult to come by, estimates of the
number of peer-reviewed papers published globally place the figure at around
1.5 million items annually.
BEYOND LUMINARIES: E.P. Thompson, AND Jack Lindsay and V.G. Childe
++++++
WORDS FOR PAM
Words spoken by Rowan
Cahill during the funeral service for his wife, Pamela Anne Cahill (1948-2015),
Wednesday, 24 June 2015
Pam was born
in Melbourne in January 1948.
She was variously
my friend, partner, and wife since 1966. 
The cause of her death was an unexpected and unforgiving brain aneurysm.
Pam was a remarkable
person, and a teacher since 1970 in Sydney, and in the Southern Highlands of
NSW, one whose skills and care and personality and modesty touched the lives of
many.
For her it
was not a matter of building a CV or of attaining promotion or power. She had
seen too many inappropriate ‘achievers’ and ‘wielders’, and reckoned that
‘awarded’ and ‘official’ status all too often masked ineptitude and was a meaningless
charade.
In many
ways, and you have to understand this in a considered, classical and
philosophical way, Pam was a gentle anarchist.
For her what
mattered were the actualities of doing and teaching and caring, for in these meaning was to be found, and worth
created. Leadership was about ‘showing’ how it was done, not ‘telling’ how it
was done.
We met at
Sydney University in 1966 in the days of the anti-war and anti-conscription
movements. She accepted my proposal of marriage on the then open top-deck of
Fisher Library one night in 1968, and we married in 1969.
When the
state sought to incarcerate me for political offences for at least four years,
she stood by me and supported the need to speak truth to power and not back
down. For Christmas 1968 I gave her the Beatle’s Sgt Pepper’s album, and she gave me Che Guevara’s collection of speeches
and writings Venceremos. Such were
the times.
Pam was a person
of great inner strength and resilience, courage, love, and humility. Her love
was unconditional, and in her teaching she had the ability to develop in
students self-confidence, self-belief, and the desire to keep trying.
She had an
incisive reflective intellect with the ability to see through what I would call
‘bullshit’, but what she would more carefully and correctly call ‘pretence and
falsity’. This was an ability that came with a huge vocabulary, after all her
favourite book was ‘Mr Oxford’ as she called the Oxford Dictionary, and she hardly ever finished the day without
completing the Sydney Morning Herald’s
Quick and Cryptic crosswords.
Pam called a
spade a spade, and did so with a quiet unquavering forthrightness, because a
spade was, and is, a spade. And ‘quiet’ was the name of the game, because hers
was a strength that did not need proving.
She had an intellect,
a reflective calmness, and a problem solving ability that I have benefited from
over the years. My life and work are all the better for it.
Pam loved
her family and was proud of the clan we helped create together, and this brought
her great joy.
We were
soulmates; we complemented each other and I am a better person for our nearly
fifty years of voyaging together.
I am diminished
by her not being here.
The world seems
a darker place. [Rowan Cahill, 27 June 2015]MISSING IN ACTION?
‘Marxist scholarship, already on the defensive for political
reasons inside university economics faculties, often retreated into scholastic
debates over texts or into abstruse mathematical calculations as remote from
the real world as those of their mainstream colleagues.’ So wrote Chris Harman
in Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and
the Relevance of Marx (Bookmarks Publications, 2009). It was not just in
economics that the radicals retreated; it happened in all the social sciences
and humanities. And not just because of political timidity; they had been
outflanked. Knowledge production had changed in ways that disadvantaged
radicals.
This happened as universities ceased being elite
institutions variously producing educated and research elites. They transformed
and morphed to become business institutions producing masses of highly educated
graduates for an ever increasing array of employment situations, and specialist
researchers for their own use, conducting their operations and accountability
processes on models adapted/adopted from the corporate and business worlds.
While the numbers of academics needed to service these institutions
dramatically expanded, this did not lead to the democratisation of knowledge
and research, nor to the creation of an intellectual commons. Instead, academic
jobs and career advancement, particularly in the humanities and social sciences,
came to rely on knowledge production in specified quantities (amounts varying
between and within institutions) gifted to and published in a hierarchy of journals
of varying status and prestige, some more preferred than others, most of which ultimately
were, or came, under the control and/or ownership of huge multi-billion-dollar
global publishing empires.
These publications tended to have their own preferred
styles, genres, and content ranges, their editors/editorial boards in effect
acting as intellectual conditioners and gatekeepers. In the affluent world, in whatever
country, in whatever institution, as this process gathered pace the role of
academic/scholar as ‘researcher’ and ‘thinker’ became that of vassal labourer,
reliant on the multinational-billion-dollar scholarly publishing empires for
employment/career advancement.
The cost per download of an article under this system, often
approximates to the cost of a mass-marketed paperback book, hence the huge
profits generated by academic publishers, it being a necessary part of the academic
research model to mine and trawl within the relevant empires of published
research. Scientific scholarly/academic
publisher Elsevier, for example, reported revenue of $US3.5 billion, and a
profit of $US1.5 billion, in 2013.
Further, the accountability processes adopted in the
business model of university tended to demand not only production as quantity, and as publication, but also evidence
that this material had been used/utilised, which came to rely on referencing
and citation and use in the same or related outlets as the original material
appeared in. This in turn was conducive to the creation of gated intellectual
communities, encouraging and perpetuating discussions and the framing of ideas
in genres of writing and language that could only be understood by, and therefore
attract the interest of, niche and specialised audiences of similar ilk. The success of a piece of academic/scholarly
came to be measured in terms of its circulation within the larger world of
gated intellectual communities, that being the audience sought, it never being the aim of the process to engage in
a democratic way with the public in general, to reach beyond the niche.
What we have, in effect, is the colonisation of scholarship
and research and the creation by the coloniser,
the academic publishers, of metropoles of
learning/knowledge, within which there is enough room for creative manoeuvre
and difference, but only within the metropole.
It is a mode of intellectual work and production that is not inclusive, but
parallel to and compounding for example, what Raewyn Connell drew attention to
in the pioneering Southern Theory: The
global dynamics of knowledge in the social
sciences (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2007): the systematic historical
neglect by the affluent intellectual worlds of Europe and North America of the
richness of social science understandings and insights from Africa, Latin
America, Asia, and within these their alternative modes of intellectual
activity and production.
For the radical/dissident scholar/academic with a passion
for social justice, or with the evils of capitalism in her/his sites, the
career questions have not been of the kind ‘what social justice problem has
your work been used to address?; what social movements, picket lines,
barricades, revolts, insurrections, etc, etc, has your work helped
inspire/inform?’; not ‘what public forums, outlets has your work been
referenced/appeared in?’, but rather ‘in what journal, what scholarly book
(with a very small print-run, say 200 copies, and a huge price tag) has your
work appeared in?, in which part of what multi-billion-dollar scholarly/academic
publishing empire has your work been drawn upon/cited/referenced?’
Moreover, when it came/comes to the actual physical
presence/participation of the scholar/academic in public affairs, forums, and events
outside of the academy, there were and are constraints. Workloads are such that
after teaching and administrative/bureaucratic responsibilities, including the
huge bureaucratic process associated with the career prerequisite of competitively
seeking funding and grants, have been attended to, and after research has taken
place, there is little time for public affairs, especially if a personal life
and rest and recreation are also the rights of the academic/scholar. Add to
this the imperative to write and publish, and the work of the academic that has emerged in the modern business university is one conducive to life
spent as an inhabitant of an institutional and intellectual enclosure. It was
and is a working/creative environment where the radical/dissident intellectual
worker could come to view the production of a published scholarly/academic
piece as a political act and as the engagement in
struggle/contestation. The mode of intellectual production and its related
publishing model in turn shaped the political/public behaviour of the
university based intellectual worker.
Given all this, it is
easy, perhaps ‘natural’, to think that this is the intellectual/scholarly model, that this is the way
academics/scholars behave, and should behave. No matter that a cursory glance
backwards shows that considerable thinking and ideas and understandings of
great intellectual significance in the humanities and social sciences were
given birth away from the academy, often in publications/formats that today
would be regarded ‘off limits’ so far as academic/scholarly career prospects
and advancement are concerned, and one only has to mention in regard to Europe,
Gramsci and Benjamin to see the point.
Too often, university based intellectual workers, and
those they train to be their future replacements, see themselves as idea makers and not idea users as well. The notion that there
is more to ideas than just thinking them and putting them in journals or
whatever in academic formats, that they have to also be part of life, has to be
said and said and said again and again, so the idea makers actually
accept as part of their brief and
role that ideas and action and social transformations are all part of the one
dimension, and are not afraid of or guilty or tainted by the thought.
A key part of this 'action' is seeking ways to go beyond the academic/scholarly format and conceiving of intellectual work as engaging democratically with more than niche audiences. It is not impossible. In Barcelona in 2012, trained historians and ‘historytellers, historical agitators, artists, independent archivists, history groups, political archaeologists etc’ came together to set up the International History From Below Network. As the document for its recent meeting in Manchester explains, the network aims to create a ‘self-organized, do-it-yourself practice’, an historical sub-culture of ‘commoning and levelling, promoting the sharing of resources and countering the idea that history is solely the province of professional historians. We aim to find new practices and arenas for radical history beyond the austere mood and sensibility of the academic lecture and conference.’
A key part of this 'action' is seeking ways to go beyond the academic/scholarly format and conceiving of intellectual work as engaging democratically with more than niche audiences. It is not impossible. In Barcelona in 2012, trained historians and ‘historytellers, historical agitators, artists, independent archivists, history groups, political archaeologists etc’ came together to set up the International History From Below Network. As the document for its recent meeting in Manchester explains, the network aims to create a ‘self-organized, do-it-yourself practice’, an historical sub-culture of ‘commoning and levelling, promoting the sharing of resources and countering the idea that history is solely the province of professional historians. We aim to find new practices and arenas for radical history beyond the austere mood and sensibility of the academic lecture and conference.’
If intellectual workers keep perpetuating the idea that
writing a scholarly article is the political act and therefore the end of
the matter, then they defraud themselves, disempowering and emasculating both
themselves as idea makers and the possibilities for change.
[Rowan Cahill and Terry Irving, 19 May 2015]
++++++
BEYOND LUMINARIES: E.P. Thompson, AND Jack Lindsay and V.G. Childe
As I was reviewing a
new book on E.P. Thompson edited by Cal Winslow (E.P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays and Polemics,
Monthly Review Press, 2014) I remembered a small, invitation-only meeting in
London in 1945 to hear a paper by Jack Lindsay. The memory was triggered by the
similarity of ideas put forward by Thompson in 1957 and with those in Lindsay’s
account of what he said at that meeting.
 |
| Jack Lindsay |
Jack Lindsay was an
expatriate Australian, as was Gordon Childe. They had met in Brisbane’s
socialist circles in 1919, but they were not in touch with each other again until
1945. By this time they were Marxists, and Lindsay had joined the British
Communist Party. Childe – whose What
Happened in History, 1942, was a best-seller for Penguin Books - was about
to take up his appointment as Director of the London Institute of Archaeology.
Lindsay – a well-known writer and publisher – was devoting himself to
strengthening the progressive cultural upsurge of the 1940s.
Thompson in
later years would be famous as the author of The Making of the English Working Class (1963). He was also, as Cal
Winslow reminds us “a poet, tank
commander, Communist, teacher, historian, founder of the New Left, public
intellectual, spokesperson for European Nuclear Disarmament, and active
socialist for over fifty years”. He wrote a novel and published several
collections of his polemical essays in the 1970s and 80s.
Thompson’s
‘essays and polemics’ of the late 1950s and early 1960s remained unpublished
until Winslow collected thirteen of them and wrote a thoughtful and sympathetic
essay introducing them for his book. Winslow, an American union activist and
historian, studied under Thompson at the University of Warwick, and took part
in the 1970 occupation of the Vice Chancellor’s office where files were found
revealing the close ties between local industry and the university. Thompson
documented this in his book, Warwick
University Limited (1971).
Winslow produced
an excellent book. The essays hang together as proposals for, and responses to,
the first New Left and as evidence of the intimate connection between
Thompson’s historical writing and his politics. They provide a twofold
intellectual history of those dramatic years. Thompson is powerful and elegant;
Winslow is as passionate about intellectuals in socialist politics as Thompson
was when he wrote these indispensable essays. But we need to understand what
they built on.
It is now pretty well
understood that Edward Thompson wrote The
Making of the English Working Class (1963) in the grip of disgust with the
mechanical materialism of ‘orthodox’ Marxism’. He was not the first to feel
that way. The meeting in 1945 was organized by the British Communist Party’s
Cultural Committee, and Jack Lindsay’s paper was a documented rejection of
Stalin’s concept of ‘reflection’ in cultural matters (as in the formula that
the ‘superstructure’ of ideas and art in a society simply reflected its
economic ‘base’).
Lindsay argued that
base and superstructure interacted, and that ‘spirit and consciousness were a
necessary element in productive activity’. He prefaced his paper with a quote
from Gordon Childe’s What Happened in
History (1942): “The reckoning may be long postponed. An obsolete ideology
can hamper an economy and impede its change for longer than Marxists admit.” Lindsay
had sent Childe a copy of the paper; they corresponded about it; and before the
meeting they had dinner together.
There was a
furious attack on Lindsay at the meeting by the party’s Stalinists. The only
person to support Lindsay was a young history student: Edward Thompson. Childe,
who was not a member of the party and attended as Lindsay’s guest,
diplomatically said nothing, but in History
(1947) he would write: ‘a superstructure – institutions, faiths, ideals – is
actually indispensable for the productive process itself. … Relations of production
must … be lubricated with sentiment. To provide motives for action they have to
be transformed in the human mind into ideas and ideals.’ Lindsay expanded his
1945 argument into a book, published in 1949 as Marxism and Contemporary Science, an attack on the vulgarization of
Marxism by both Stalinists and anti-Marxists.
A notable feature of the book is its attention to the question of
Marxist morality, which would also become a theme in Thompson’s essays. A
decade before the first New Left, Lindsay and Childe had breached the walls of
‘orthodox’ Marxism.
(There is a
glimpse of this key moment of Marxist ideological rift and shared intellectual
biography in Sally Green, Prehistorian –
A Biography of V. Gordon Childe, 1981, pp xii-xiv.)
Twelve years
after he had defended Jack Lindsay, Thompson published a long essay in The New Reasoner, the journal of
dissident British Communists. Ten thousand of them had exited the party,
appalled by Khruschev’s ‘secret speech’ and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and
Edward Thompson was their most eloquent leader. In this essay, ‘Socialist
Humanism’, Thompson demolished the distortions of Stalinism, especially its
over-simplified version of economic determinism in history that belittled “the
part played by men’s ideas and moral attitudes in the making of history.” It
was the nearest the New Left got to a manifesto, exposing Stalinism as an
ideology of a bureaucratic elite, insisting that Marxism must have an ‘ethical
sensibility’, and reintroducing its ‘lost vocabulary’ of agency and moral
choice. According to Winslow, ‘Socialist Humanism’ is “still the most discussed
(and criticised) of his contributions in these years”. It contains no mention
of either Lindsay or Childe.
 |
| V. G. Childe |
Writing
about Lindsay ideas in the 1940s, Victor N. Paananen says: ‘Publication of his
theoretical work proved difficult at times, and small press runs and lack of an
academic platform meant it was overlooked’ (British
Marxist Criticism, 2014, p. 56.) But Thompson was present in 1945. And it
is simply impossible to believe that Thompson was unaware of Childe’s
popularising of a non-orthodox Marxist theory of history as a creative process in
the forties. Why did he fail to acknowledge them? Lindsay was unwilling to join
the revolt in the British Communist Party, and Childe, who was not a member,
was unable to. In 1957 he retired to Australia to commit suicide. His body was
found at the bottom of a cliff in the Blue Mountains, just a few months after
Thompson’s essay on ‘Socialist Humanism’ appeared. Yesterday’s men of the Old
Left, they could be ignored.
I am not the
first person to make this argument. In 1984, Robert Mackie wrote: ‘The current,
and deserved, acclaim for E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams, for example,
obscures the ways in which Jack Lindsay helped establish, a generation before,
the foundations of the British new left.’ (Robert Mackie, ed., Jack Lindsay – The Thirties and Forties,
p. 14)
Back to
Thompson: it is perhaps not well understood that he did not write The Making for scholars of labour
history. As well as struggling with problems of Marxist theory he was actively
engaged in working class politics in the West Riding of Yorkshire, where he
lived, and in the peace movement nationally. He wrote this great 900 page book
for the students in his workers’ education classes and for the activists of the
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the New Left. Like his ‘William Morris – Romantic to Revolutionary
(1955), it was the product of his belief that it was the duty of socialist
intellectuals ‘to make socialists’. All the more reason then to wonder at his
indifference to the work of Lindsay and Childe, who shared this belief. Childe
in particular: like the barefoot historians of Germany or the early History
Workshop movement in Britain, Childe wanted to democratise archaeology to
encourage working-class history-making.
Winslow’s
collection includes Thompson’s 1959 address on ‘The Communism of William
Morris’. It is invaluable as a revelation of the sources of Thompson’s
Communism - in Britain’s long socialist
tradition - and of his vision of the New Left becoming a movement that would
enlist the people at every level of power. At a time when there were up to 40
New Left Clubs, Thompson celebrated Morris’s aim “to make Socialists … [and] cover the country with a network of
associations composed of men who feel their antagonism to the dominant classes,
and have no temptation to waste their time in the thousand follies of party
politics”.
These essays
were written while Thompson was working on The
Making, and there are signs of its emphases and argument everywhere. This
is from ‘Revolution’ (1960): “The kind
of revolution which we can make today is different from that envisaged by Marx
or Morris … Nor is there only one
kind of revolution which can be made in any one context. A revolution does not
‘happen’; it must be made by men’s
actions and choices”. Another essay, ‘Homage to Tom Maguire’ (1960), is
Thompson’s riposte to the national and institutional focus of labour history as
it entered its professionalized stage. He said: the customary national focus of
histories of the breakthrough of the Independent Labour Party (in the West
Riding) “implies an appalling attitude of condescension towards these
provincial folk who are credited with every virtue except the capital human
virtue of conscious action in a conscious historical role”.
And if you
have been baffled by Raymond Williams – unable to read more than a page of his
books before nodding off – there is an essay that shows Thompson is on your
side. In ‘The Long Revolution’ (1961) he damns Williams’s writing style –
impersonal and passive – and criticises his liking for abstractions. This
produces an argument about culture that obscures class conflict and denies the
need for sustained historical, anthropological and archaeological (guess who!)
research. Like the advice offered by the iconic fictional anthropologist,
Indiana Jones (Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, 2008), Thompson says Williams would do better to read the works of
Gordon Childe before announcing a general theory of culture.
Which brings
us back to Marxism. I was surprised to find, in Winslow’s introduction to his
book, statements that at the end of his life Thompson was not “really a Marxist
at all”, and that he claimed only “to work within the Marxist tradition”. As to
the first statement, we should consider Theodore Koditschek’s discovery in
Thompson’s later work of a ‘Gramscian turn’ that signalled that he was moving
towards a more sophisticated Marxism (see his chapter in Roger Fieldhouse and
Richard Taylor, eds. E.P. Thompson and
English Radicalism, 2014). As for the second, surely in the absence
(thankfully) of a Marxism whose orthodoxy is guaranteed by Stalinist political
power, the tradition of Marxism is all there is. And if we are going to study
Marxism as a tradition (which I acknowledge Winslow was not trying to do) it
would be a good idea to look beyond its luminaries.
[Terry Irving, 5 March 2015]
RADICAL HISTORY AND LABOUR HISTORY
In 1967 Gareth Stedman Jones advised socialist
historians that they ‘should not retreat into the safe pastures of labour
history’ – advice taken to heart by Australian historian Humphrey McQueen in
1970 when he set out to write A New
Britannia.
But the message largely went unheeded; labour history in Britain as well as Australia continued to attract radical historians. This was understandable. Labour history had begun in the institutions of the labour and socialist movement, drawing strength from its political vision, so at least in its early days it could bring academic and movement historians together.
By the late 1990s, labour historians were isolated, fenced off in antiquarian and/or
academic paddocks, where they were susceptible to new bovine diseases –
mutations of philosophical idealism - or befuddled into thinking work was
labour. Meanwhile, the movement dynamic in labour's intellectual life was weakening.
Work
is not labour. Labour is a term in political economy, an idea, and an economic
relationship that exploits and oppresses working people. Using this idea to
challenge these experiences a labour movement was formed almost two centuries
ago. Later the idea of labour as an exploitative relationship was a catalyst
for others, for example radical feminists and their movement.
Today
there is a change in the air, and the political heritage of labour is part of
the new energy among radical historians who are flexing their muscles in
various parts of the world.
Indicative of this is the final timetable for the
postgraduate-led Radical History Conference in London (at Birkbeck, on 24 March
2015), which has just been released. Perusal
of this indicates the energies and interests of a new generation of historians,
their conceptions of radicalism/radical history, and where and how they find
radicalism in the past, and how it relates to the present.
Some eighteen papers are scheduled, culminating in a
roundtable discussion led by Becky Taylor, Robbie Shilliam and Mike Jackson to
close the day. Labour historians are catered for in a session on ‘Urban and
Rural Workers’. Other sessions show how radical history is breaking the mould
that labour historians in the last decade or so have constructed for
themselves. A session on ‘The State and Authority’ offers papers on ‘big
management’ (Michael Weatherburn), the growth of surveillance in UK public
order policing in the 1970s and 1980s (Ben Taylor), and the argument that the
modern ‘war on terror’ has its parallels in Victorian era colonial conflict (Jacob
Ramsay Smith). In the session on ‘Social Movements and Protest’ a paper on
‘what time is radical history?’ promises something different (Garikoitz Gomez
Alfaro). There is a whole session devoted to ‘Radical Education’, both in the
past and as it is practised by feminists now.
And papers on the general question that inspired the
organizers, ‘What is radical history?’ will be eagerly awaited by the growing networks
of radical historians in other locations. These papers include a comparison of
British and Irish historiography (David Convery), a study of ‘the histories of
radical history’ (Amy Tobin and Hannah Proctor), and of ‘the crisis of purpose
in history’ (George Stevenson).
On this blog we have taken as our mantra for radical
history, ‘history that makes people want to act’. We have insisted that working
at radical history is political. So we look forward especially to reading the
papers on ‘criticism as resistance: a methodology for the activist-academic’
(Dominic Davies), and ‘History Acts’ (Ben Bethell, Barbara Warnock and Guy
Beckett).
[Terry Irving and Rowan Cahill, 19 February 2015]
++++++
MULLEN’S CHOICES
In late November 2014, illness claimed the life of Geoff
Mullen, long-time letter writer to the ‘Letters to the Editor’ page of the
Sydney Morning Herald. For years the ‘Letters to the Editor’ section of
newspapers had been his public forum, and the Herald published his ‘last
hurrah’ the day before his death, a letter about wealth and income inequality,
ending with the caution: “Remember that the enemies of progress are always on
the attack”.
 |
| Anti-conscription poster featuring Mullen, 1971 |
Courtesy of six years in the late 1960s, early
1970s, Geoff Mullen became part of Australian history. He did not seek to do so,
but once forced to engage with history, courageously and at times with
satirical flair took the historic processes to task.
Born in 1947, Mullen was one of the thousands of
voteless 20-year Australian males netted by the system of conscription for military service
introduced by the Menzies government in 1964/65, which subsequently fuelled Australia’s
involvement in the Vietnam War. Being ‘called-up’(ie conscripted) depended on
your ‘luck/misfortune’ in a lottery marble system. Mullen was amongst the minority
of young males whose marble was selected.
Having registered by force of law in January 1967,
in November 1967 Mullen informed the responsible department, the Department of
Labour and National Service, that he would no longer comply with the
conscription process. Accordingly, in 1968 he refused to attend two compulsory
medical examinations that serviced conscription and, as the result, served two
short terms in prison, of 16 days and 29 days.
In 1969 he ran as an anti-war/anti-conscription
candidate in the Federal Elections, contesting the seat held by the Minister
for Labour and National Service. Mullen secured 1300 votes; his reason for standing,
he explained, was to demonstrate “the corruption of democratic ideals that our
government represents”.
A warrant for the arrest of Mullen was issued in
October 1970, and he was arrested by Commonwealth police in February 1971.
Police claimed he had been hard to find; Mullen countered, saying that he had
been living publicly and that his name plate was on his front door.
Mullen was sentenced to imprisonment for
non-compliance with the National Service Act, and joined a small and growing
contingent of other anti-conscriptionists in prison, part of a successful
campaign to embarrass an increasingly beleaguered government. He served eleven
months.
A widely distributed poster issued by the Draft Resisters
Union in 1971 shows Mullen satirically garbed in a ‘Goon Show’-type military
uniform, complete with medals and sabre, posing outside the Hyde Park War
Memorial. The accompanying text urges the repeal of conscription.
Throughout his anti-conscription campaigning, Mullen
wrote and published letters and articles in whatever forums were available, and
articulated a thoughtful, rational, complex, and resolute anarchist position.
On the eve of going to prison in 1971, he said: “Whenever I do something, I
like to think that I have a sufficient and rational reason for my action”.
Mullen’s politics did not mesh easily with the
anti-war/anti-conscription movement, as his opposition was resolutely
individualist, uncompromising. He eschewed martyrdom and hero worship; amongst
formative influences were the writings of Bertrand Russell and George Orwell. A
self-described “chronic non-joiner”, Mullen was sceptical of the
developing protest movement: “…conventional (protest) marches might provide
their participants with an emotional pleasure, but to think that is enough is
insane”. The pacifist journal The
Peacemaker (1939-1971) commented that even to those closely associated with
him, he was “a partial mystery, difficult to get close to”.
Prison authorities shipped Mullen around in a prison
hop-scotch, trying to minimise the publicity that followed him, and solidarity demonstrations
outside the prison walls. This meant he finally ended up in rural prison system
in NSW, away from the metropole. From one of his incarcerations, Mullen explained
something of his politics: “I am in gaol and I suppose all the official records
will say I am a criminal. I might, of course, plead that I have a moral duty to
oppose conscription while at the same time the government has the legal duty to
imprison me. In this way I might see myself, and be seen, as a moral young man
who takes gaol and suffering upon himself to forge a way to a better Australia.
But this is not so. I don’t really give a bugger about moral or legal systems,
governments, religion, better worlds, 'pie in the sky' or anything like that. I
want solely to live my life without interference or interfering, now. And to
my mind, conscription is always an unreasonable interference with any man’s
life. Not even ‘freedom and democracy’ can justify the taking of a conscript’s
freedom.
“It may seem unreasonable that any man, myself least
of all, should make pretensions to morality in these times. I am no saint nor
would-be martyr and I live as I have to live. Yet I am convinced that life is
not worth living if one is not, at least on the important issues, the master of
one’s own decisions. If others can make me kill and maim against conscience, I
am less a man, a beast to be used and manipulated. Thus I could fight in Vietnam
only if I considered it a just cause.”
The majority of the Australian people, including the
Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the trade union movement, had to be metaphorically
dragged, kicking and screaming to opposing the Vietnam War and
conscription, and away from the hegemony of deceits, fabrications and
distortions that characterised the era of Menzies and his heirs. The ALP took
until October 1969 to promise to bring Australian troops home from Vietnam, and
not until 1971 to commit to ending conscription. Historians and history credit Mullen and his
choices as amongst significant factors in helping make conscription an election
issue in 1972.
A time well seized; lest we forget.
For a discussion of Mullen’s 1960s/70s views see
http://www.takver.com/history/matteson.htm#mullen
[Rowan Cahill, 8 December 2014]
++++++
HISTORY
AS EMBARRASSMENT, AMNESIA, AND OUTLAW
Former Australian Prime
Minister John Howard, the PM (1996-2007) who took Australia to war in Iraq (2003)
in the bloody search-and-destroy mission against the non-existent and mythical Weapons
of Mass Destruction (WMD) in the hands of the anti-Christ Saddam Hussein, a
mission that variously morphed and dragged on officially until 2011, recently confessed
to being a little embarrassed.
On the September 2014 eve
of the release of his tribute book of hero worship, an apprentice’s view of his
master, The Menzies Era (
HarperCollins), about conservative Australian PM Sir Robert Menzies (1949-1966),
Howard told an interviewer that when it became public knowledge the US
intelligence reports he based his decision on regarding WMD were faulty/
bodgey, well he was embarrassed. Not
ashamed mind you, not distraught…..which might be expected since he has a huge
amount of civilian and children’s blood on his hands, and in another
jurisdiction might well find himself facing charges of war crimes……no, just
embarrassed.
According to Howard, the
WMD reports, their language and authority, seemed so authentic at the time. No
matter there was authoritative and expert material and data in the public
domain at the time that said the WMD ‘intelligence data’ was flawed, unreliable,
and basically a work of the imagination of toady security ‘experts’, the sort
who tailor evidence to demand. As for the current imbroglio in Iraq and Syria
and the ISIS menace, well according to Howard, the rise of militant Islamic
fundamentalism was/is a local thing, and in no way related to the events, and
the conduct, of the Second Gulf War; to argue it is, is a “false reading of
history”. And if Howard had been back in Menzies’ shoes in 1965, he too would
have committed troops to the Vietnam War, based on the information and understanding
available at the time, no matter that also in the public domain at the time was
the material and data that authoritatively advised otherwise.
So what seems to be 'real'
history in the world of John Howard? Well, for starers it is not about
accountability, or understanding why; it is not about linking the present with
the past in any critical way. Like the WMD reports, it is about the appearance
of authority, and about packaging, and seemliness. Like his new book on
Menzies, an overblown tribute and fan letter about a conservative Australian icon,
an over-700-page doorstopper from HarperCollins, a tentacle of the Murdoch
Empire, a book praised and lauded in the Murdoch press, but not much more than
a hugely inflated undergraduate essay hugely reliant on secondary sources,
self-indulgently hitching Howard to the coat-tails of Menzies the ‘statesman’,
and variously reflecting on the 'genius' of a conservative era of government.
 |
| Campaign leaflet against the attempt by Menzies to ban the Communist Party of Australia, 1951. |
Now, as Australia becomes
involved in yet another ill-advised US imperial feat of arms, in Iraq, maybe
later in Syria, courtesy of the conservative government of PM Tony Abbott, the
Australian parliament intensifies domestic powers of surveillance and control.
For those who can look back on the past, much is familiar: the disrespect for
history, historical amnesia if you like; the refusal/inability to learn from
the disastrous military past; a blinkered vision that has characterised Australia’s
decisions to follow the US since the 1950s.
If the current
manipulation of the fear of terrorism by the government seems familiar, along
with the hysteria of much journalism about the ‘terrorist threat’, well it is,
a re-run of the Cold War, with ‘communism’ replaced by ‘terrorism’. And why not?,
after all, the Abbott government is one that thinks like Howard does, that the
Menzies Era of Australian politics was the golden era of conservative rule….not
government, but rule, and the more authoritarian and fear-filled, the better.
And not a ‘lucky’ country either, but a ‘lackey’ country.
Over at the National
Archives of Australia (NAA), researchers report increased restrictive
practices. The NAA is the repository of the records and papers generated by the
agencies of the state. In the vaults of the NAA are important keys to
understanding the nation’s past, including the lies, perfidies and the secrets
that are part of ‘government’. Access to NAA records has been traditionally restricted
by the 30-year-rule, meaning the records can be legally accessed after the
passage of 30 years. A previous Labor government reduced this to 20 years. It
is understood the Abbott government is looking to review this and increase the
period of restriction, and 70 years has apparently been mooted. Current
researchers are reporting difficulties: long delays in the processing of
applications for documents; the heavy culling of released material; the closure
of some historical records previously open; and the cutting down of hours the
NAA reading room is open to researchers. Distinguished Canberra historian and
journalist Gregory Pemberton has described a government policy aimed at
producing “a partial lobotomy of the Australian mind”.
Seems to me the
preferred and official and encouraged approach to history for some time to
come, will be that of the amnesic kind. In this current era of extraordinary
restrictive and coercive ‘national security’ legislation, which at the time of
writing has cleared the way for criminalising some forms of journalism,
reporting and comment, and enabled long prison sentences for
transgressing journalists and whistleblowers, it is not fanciful to imagine
that at some time in the foreseeable future, some historians and some forms of
critical or radical history, might too, be outlawed. [Rowan Cahill, 29 September 2014]
++++++
COMMONS
AND OUTLAWS
Two historians: Peter Linebaugh,
and Marcus Rediker. Together they gave us The
Many-Headed Hydra (Beacon Press, 2000), a robust, at times poetic, scholarly
history of the origins of radical thinking in the eighteenth century that
eventually led to the American Revolution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man,
and the Age of Revolution on both sides of the Atlantic.
In this account, the
radical impetus and the ideas that spun the web of dissent and revolt during
the period did not solely originate in the coffee houses and libraries and salons
of the wealthy and the well-to-do and their circles, not from the lawyers, politicians,
reformers, rebel colonial statesmen, intellectuals, the mainstay of traditional
accounts of the period and era. Instead the egalitarian and revolutionary
impetus came out of the taverns, the waterfronts, off the heaving decks of
ships, out of the island refuges of pirates and escapees from slavery, courtesy
of the outcasts of the Atlantic world and the Americas, the seamen, pirates, rebel
slaves, indentured workers, and maritime workers of all kinds. In this account,
the sea, ships, and seamen, the necessary components in the accumulation of
capital in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were the disseminating
agencies. Overall, a brilliant tour de force.
Linebaugh and Rediker
deployed a vast, diverse and rich tapestry of sources in the weaving of their
history, and rounded it off with a marvellously radical and refreshing discussion
of the poet William Blake (1757-1827), tapping his poem The Tyger and letting its revolutionary sentiment flow. As
Linebaugh recently commented regarding the anti-capitalist resistance, “our
movement needs poetry”.
Two new books by these
authors draw my attention. First up Linebaugh’s Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures and Resistance (PM Press, 2014),
since this made it onto the shelves first.
Stop, Thief! is a collection of mostly previously published essays on the
idea of ‘commons’, the subjects eclectically ranging through the “U. K.” and the
“U.S.A.”, from Karl Marx, to the poet Shelley, to William Morris, to E. P.
Thompson, to Thomas Paine, the Levellers, the Luddites, through to the modern
Occupy Wall Street Movement…and the ways in which the enclosure process was/has
been variously resisted over time.
Eclecticism is to be
expected in Linebaugh, so too Rediker. It was a feature of the sources/material
in their Hydra study. ‘Eclecticism’
in their case should be qualified by use of ‘informed’ and ‘learned’, for their
respective familiarity with, and understanding of, their sources and subjects are
deep and expert.
Traditionally ‘the
commons’ and their destruction/enclosure refers to a time/specific Western European
historical process from the twelfth century through to the nineteenth century, related
to traditional common spaces/common lands. In Linebaugh’s treatment it is this,
in Britain and in America, but it is also more. The author conceptualises the
destruction of ‘commons’ as “a universality of expropriation” that transcends
time and space, continuing today in processes like the privatisation of
utilities, diminishing public places/spaces, to the ways life itself is being commodified
and manipulated by racism, militarism, and consumerism.
Linebaugh’s essay collection is not only an historian’s reading of history, but intended also as a spiritual uplifting for modern dissidents and activists, a writing of history that liberates and encourages radical possibilities, the ‘resistance’ in his title not only referring to the subject matter of his text, but to the present and to the future. For Linebaugh, we are “losing the ground of our subsistence to the privileged and the mighty. With the theft of our pensions, houses, universities, and land, people all over the world cry, Stop Thief! and start to think about the commons and act in its name”. This acting, be it protecting or imagining/creating ‘commons’, is termed ‘commoning’ by Linebaugh. It is this historical vision, intent, and inspiration, that is at the core of radical history.
Rediker’s new book is Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and
Motley Crews in the Age of Sail (Beacon Press, 2014). Its aim is to
challenge what Rediker terms terracentric
history, where the sea is regarded as an empty place, and ships and mariners
are essentially dismissable presences of little consequence, the land and
land-bound people and their institutions the makers and shapers of history.
Rediker regards seamen
as global vectors of communication, and sets out to restore to history the
unacknowledged contributions and agency of a multiethnic (“motley”) mix of
seamen, indentured servants, slaves, pirates, and other outlaws of their time
who, from ships and waterfronts of the Atlantic and Caribbean during the
late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, variously affected “the lofty
histories of philosophy, political thought, drama, poetry, and literature”, helping
“inaugurate a broader age of revolution throughout the world”. In Rediker’s
telling, this motley crew profoundly contributed to the shaping of the American
Revolution and to the abolition of slavery.
As with Linebaugh’s Stop, Thief!, Rediker’s account is
distinguished by the accessibility of the language, and an enjoyable
narrative/discussion. Both authors, in the books discussed, model scholarship
that is meant to be read and understood by more than niche audiences, and also
model scholarly writing that is authoritative and convincing, free from the
suffocating shackles and swaddling of obscure/confusing terminologies, and free
from theoretical perambulations that often choke the meaning and intent of
scholarly writing. Again, aspects of the art of writing radical history.
Rediker has been writing
the histories of rebels and outlaws for all of his career as a historian, and
readers who have followed his work will be familiar with aspects of his new
book. But this is possibly the most forthright and political of his works, the
author making the case that his Atlantic Outlaws have much to offer us in our
era of capitalist globalisation. The outlaws of Rediker’s Atlantic are rebels,
and criminalised, in the context of the emergence of modern capitalism, key
factors in which were ships, exploited and disposable maritime labour, and
slavery.
The import of Rediker’s
study is that the rebellions and protests and alternative social structures and
alternative cultures these outlaws variously engaged in, conceived, created,
dreamed, well they mattered. In short, the outlaws had agency. And it is this
affirmation by Rediker, that their rebellions mattered, and matter, that they
had impacts on the cause and course of egalitarianism and social justice, that
is the radical message. If Rediker is right, then rebellion and protest by
ordinary people in today’s world against the injustices, austerities, and
rapacious greed of the 1% that is part and parcel of the globalised capitalist
juggernaut of today, are not without point. According to Rediker’s reading of
outlaw history, the dispossessed and the marginal can have agency, indeed,
mightily so.
[Rowan
Cahill, 15 September 2014]
CONFRONTING ANZACKERY
2014 has seen the beginning of the Centenary replay
of World War 1 (1914-18) by the Australian government and vested martial interests,
gearing up for the commemoration-fest of the ill-fated but ‘glorious’, because
‘that was where our nation was born’, Gallipoli campaign of 1915/2015. Millions
of tax-payer and private investment dollars have been committed to the
Centenary commemoration project.
As I write, the unhistorical, anti-historical
nonsense involved in the commemoration is neatly seen in the electorate of
Oxley, west of Brisbane, where an RSL Sub-Branch has been awarded $45,000 of
Commonwealth money to erect a statue of Simpson and his Donkey in a local War Memorial
Garden, despite the historical record showing that the claims made about the ‘legendary’and
iconic saviour of wounded soldiers in the face of enemy fire are largely based on false, faulty, embellished data. Unfortunately, when it comes to Australia at war and the way this
is fostered by martial enthusiasts in government propaganda departments, myth
and legend take precedence over the realities of history.
Simply, the WW1/Anzac commemoration process, with all its war-porn and militarised confectionery, has little to do with remembering the tragedy of WW1, little to do with the abattoir and carnage that it was, little to do with the maimings and the cripplings and the traumas that dogged its survivors, little to do with ‘learning from history’, little to do with ‘it must never happen again’, for it is a psychological grooming, an ideological massaging of the national consciousness, the inducement of a martial state, a zombification of the citizenry — let this happen again, let the nation be ready for more wars, groom the youth of the future to rush into uniform should the need arise, cultivate the citizenry to accept war as a normal part of life and because of this, accept even more and larger budget allocations to ‘defence’ and martial expenditures, and groom the citizenry and the media to uncritically acknowledge the glory and necessity of going to war and accept future military adventures wherever and whatever these be. Unleash the dogs of war, because war is good for the national soul.
Brothers by John Tognolini is the first of a projected quartet of novellas dealing with the war experiences of four of Tognolini’s uncles during WW1, beginning with those of Stephen and Andrew Tognolini, working-class men in their early twenties, at Gallipoli. In many ways the book breaks from the dominant narrative enshrined in popular retellings of the Anzac/Gallipoli experience, beginning with the Tognolini brothers, city-industrial workers, not bushmen, and of Italian and English/Irish descent, not pure Anglos. Indeed, the Gallipoli of Tognolini’s account is peopled with ‘others’: the Allied invaders fighting the Turks are not just Australians and New Zealanders (ANZACS), but also British, French, Canadian Newfoundlanders, Canadians, British Indians (from the future India, Pakistan, Bangladesh), while in the Australian ranks are people of Aboriginal, Chinese, Japanese, German, Italian, West Indian descent--not only the pure Anglos who tend to people populist accounts.
Simply, the WW1/Anzac commemoration process, with all its war-porn and militarised confectionery, has little to do with remembering the tragedy of WW1, little to do with the abattoir and carnage that it was, little to do with the maimings and the cripplings and the traumas that dogged its survivors, little to do with ‘learning from history’, little to do with ‘it must never happen again’, for it is a psychological grooming, an ideological massaging of the national consciousness, the inducement of a martial state, a zombification of the citizenry — let this happen again, let the nation be ready for more wars, groom the youth of the future to rush into uniform should the need arise, cultivate the citizenry to accept war as a normal part of life and because of this, accept even more and larger budget allocations to ‘defence’ and martial expenditures, and groom the citizenry and the media to uncritically acknowledge the glory and necessity of going to war and accept future military adventures wherever and whatever these be. Unleash the dogs of war, because war is good for the national soul.
Brothers by John Tognolini is the first of a projected quartet of novellas dealing with the war experiences of four of Tognolini’s uncles during WW1, beginning with those of Stephen and Andrew Tognolini, working-class men in their early twenties, at Gallipoli. In many ways the book breaks from the dominant narrative enshrined in popular retellings of the Anzac/Gallipoli experience, beginning with the Tognolini brothers, city-industrial workers, not bushmen, and of Italian and English/Irish descent, not pure Anglos. Indeed, the Gallipoli of Tognolini’s account is peopled with ‘others’: the Allied invaders fighting the Turks are not just Australians and New Zealanders (ANZACS), but also British, French, Canadian Newfoundlanders, Canadians, British Indians (from the future India, Pakistan, Bangladesh), while in the Australian ranks are people of Aboriginal, Chinese, Japanese, German, Italian, West Indian descent--not only the pure Anglos who tend to people populist accounts.
The experience of war
as told by Tognolini is not about ideology or ‘freedom’ or ‘nobility’ or
whatever else it is the politicians and propagandists put into the mouths of
the dead for the purposes of Anzackery, but an account of survival, of young men, enlisting
in a war they had little understanding of,
and once embroiled in the carnage, struggling to survive against huge
and awful odds, including mismanagement, rotten water and poor food, rampant dysentery
and disease, locking into the daily necessity of ‘do’ and/or ‘die’, of killing and/or
be killed, basically doing a job, part of which was to stay alive. Tognolini
leaves the reader overwhelmed by the awfulness and pointlessness of it all,
with some 100, 000 dead at the end from both sides of the Gallipoli campaign, invaders and
defenders.
Is there a point to something
modest and individual like Tognolini’s protest against the militarist
juggernaut? Yes, there is. The idea of a non-militarised future, the conception
of a society in which war is a stranger and the martial spirit an
undesirable/unwelcome presence, are only thinkable because individuals like
Tognolini, former labourer, scaffolder, rigger, dogman, now a history teacher, keep these concepts and visions alive. Every individual voice raised
in criticism of war, of the martial spirit, of the misuse of history to serve
martial ends, every rejection of these represents a stumbling block for and a
failure by the martial juggernaut, and extends a measure of hope to, and for, a
future where war and blood sacrifices will not continue to be foisted on people
by parasitic martial vested interests, the leaders of which, ever so willing
and able to commit peoples and nations to martial outings and engagements of
varying lengths and ferocity, mostly never follow anyone into the front lines
and ‘trenches’.
The book can be purchased
($20 paperback; $5 ebook) via WritersandeBooks at www.writersandebooks.com. For
further details see John Tognolini’s site at http://togsplace.blogspot.com.au.
[Rowan
Cahill, 6 September 2014]
++++++
MATERIALIST HISTORY.
John Tully writes in the Preface to his new book, Silvertown – The Lost Story of a Strike that Shook London and Helped Launch the Modern Labour Movement, (Monthly Review Press, 2014), that ‘Conservatives have attacked some of my previous work as being partisan, and this book should upset them again.’ Radical historians, however, will welcome it for precisely that reason. And treasure it, because this is a way of writing labour history – or any history – that academic historians usually run a mile from. Radical historians know that it is impossible to be non-partisan. As Tully explains, ‘Historians must always be scrupulous with the facts, but we should be deeply suspicious of claims that studies of human society can be “value free”.’
The Silvertown strike occurred in 1889, so Tully illustrates his argument by considering the historical debates about the social impacts of industrialisation: ‘Historians have established that the Victorian era was a time of endless pain for the British working class. … Incredibly, there are some today who deny the undeniable, just as there were many at the time who ignored the conditions that created their wealth.’
So, this is what he is saying: there was a class struggle then and there is a class struggle now. The historian writing about ‘then’ has to be partisan ‘now’, if she wants to be scrupulous with the facts (about that pain and the struggle waged against its sources); the partisan historian writing ‘now’ commits to continuing that struggle by bringing the past into the present. Tully refuses to apologise for having written back into history the labourers of Silvertown, and he finishes his book with the wish that ‘Those who today resist what is in effect the declaration of class war by a feral ruling class may find inspiration in the story of these forgotten labourers over 120 years ago.’
I have just written a review of John Tully’s book for Recorder. It is a brilliant book about a strike that, although lost, was part of a struggle that ensured that class and socialism would be central to the British labour movement. He tells the story at a cracking pace and seductive changes of voice. He takes the trouble to justify his partisan position and choice of method. And underpinning the story is his meticulous research.
John Tully deliberately sets out to make his book ‘as accessible to a wide readership as possible’, and this may be as upsetting to conservatives as his approach to his subject. In an interview on the Monthly Review Press website, he explains:
I guess that stems from my agreement with Marx in his “Theses on Feuerbach” that “philosophers have hitherto interpreted history, the point, however, is to change it”. For an academic like myself, ideas are intrinsically interesting things, but as a socialist academic, I hope that my writing can help change the world.
Changing the world: that is the key to why John Tully writes materialist history. Materialists are routinely accused of being old fashioned by fellow academics. This accusation was directed at me recently. We are charged with being ignorant of the latest epistemological thinking that has made materialism obsolete, and treated with distain for not engaging with the latest idealist ways of doing history.
You can always tell an idealist historian by this test: their analyses of ideas, representations, individual lives or even movements are never connected to analyses of social power. In effect what is going on when idealist historians make these charges is a move to sidestep the issue of power as an irreducible element in any historical situation, and hence the issue of historians taking sides in the ideological battles arising from the relationships of power in their situation. John Tully, socialist, historian, political scientist and novelist, a rigger in his youth, knows a thing or two about power, and what he knows frames everything he writes.
[Terry Irving, 10 August 2014]
++++++
FROM THE
BOTTOM UP.
.jpg) |
| Jesse Lemisch: On active service |
Passionate, strident, scholarly and forensic, the Lemisch
paper detailed the ways leading and doyen American historians variously claimed
political neutrality while at the same time deeply engaged variously as conservatives
or as liberals in the politics of post-war USA
The paper was a hit amongst a young generation of historians
struggling to make sense of their times and seeking ways to be both scholarly and
committed as social movement participants. The Lemisch paper was an armoury of
ideas, arguments, and pointers to scholarly possibilities. However, when
submitted to the leading historical journals of the day it met with serial
rejection, accused of being ill-mannered, and of constituting unwarranted
attacks on doyen intellectuals.
.jpg)
Being sent to
Now nearly 80 years old, Lemisch is still active,
very much a public historian. Recently his classic On Active Service in War
and Peace broke free from the restraints of libraries and the dusty shelves
of the 1970s and went online—free, and ‘open access’ Despite the decades since it first rocked the US-history profession, the study
still packs a punch, an energising historiographical ride, as relevant today as
it was in 1969/75, challenging a profession then at the dawn of the creation of
the modern corporate university, a profession busily insinuating itself into fabric
of the military-industrial-knowledge factories of the contemporary capitalist
state and the culture of consumerism, with Lemisch and his colleagues throwing
themselves into social movements,
arguing that history was not finished, that there was a long way to go, and
that history was about the making of an
inclusive and democratic world in which everyday people, not elites, were the
shaping forces. For those who have come in late, as they say in comic books, and
seek an introduction to the work of Lemisch, I recommend the essay by Marcus Rediker,
“Jesse Lemisch and History from the Bottom Up” .Enjoy. [Rowan Cahill, 28 March 2014]
Terry and I were delighted to address an audience of students
and staff on the  |
| Terry leads the charge... |
 |
| Rowan tells it the way it was.... |
This event was a part of the campaign by Sydney University
students to mobilise in support of the National Rally for Education Rights
planned for March 26, protesting against education funding cuts and
anti-student initiatives planned, and/or already in hand, by the conservative
and reactionary Commonwealth government of Tony Abbott. It was a delight and a
privilege to meet with a new generation of idealistic, committed, students, and
as radical historians to help connect the past with the present.
(Photos courtesy of the Sydney University Education Action Group)
(Photos courtesy of the Sydney University Education Action Group)
[Rowan Cahill, 19 March 2014]
++++++
A GRADUATE RESPONDS
I was asked to be the Graduate Speaker on the night of my recent PhD graduation at the University of Wollongong (NSW, Australia), 19 December 2013. I agreed, and was allocated the traditional and fleeting five minutes. There were a few necessities/formalities to be observed, but the bulk of the brief time comprised my reflections. This is what I said. I have posted my words here simply because there were subsequent and numerous requests for copies; my words seemed to have 'spoken' to many about the nature of 'education', something that has been at the core of my being since the 1960s:
 |
| On stage, on the night |
"Chancellor, members of the university, distinguished guests, fellow graduates, ladies and gentlemen, and children:-
On behalf of my fellow graduates, thank you for being with us this evening and sharing this occasion with us.
Within this general thanks, recognition too of the roles and contributions over time and leading up to this ‘graduation’ of parents, grandparents, partners, children, indeed the various involvements of families in all their configurations and extensions, and friends, teachers, fellow students, and other members of the university community.
Thank you too to this evening’s Guest Speaker, Mr. Glenn Barkley, late of the Museum of Contemporary Art, for your very personal, reflective, and inspirational words. Best wishes for what you described as your 'risky' future.
PAUSE
Over the years, my wife and I have been part of six of these ceremonies at the University of Wollongong as our two sons and daughter have variously graduated, first with Bachelor degrees, then with Doctorates.
As a consequence I have often thought about what this event means, with its ceremony rooted in the medieval European past of the 11th century, with the diversity of people and degrees and specialisations evident in the award of degrees, in this theatre packed with people, and the mass of others outside viewing the screens…with the cameras, the phones, the photos, the flowers, the gifts, the hugs, the laughter, the joy, and have come to realise that there is no one story in all of this, no one narrative that joins it all together and has the same meaning for everyone.
For the reality is, tonight is about many things, probably as many things as there are people here tonight.
If we could get inside the heads of those present we would understand tonight is about diversity….it is about hope and aspirations, it is about variously engaging with realms of knowledge and research and understandings, about tenacity and staying the course, it is about material rewards---or the hope thereof, it is about incurring financial debt, it is about sacrifice, it is about ‘easy’, it is about ‘hard’, it is about perpetuating the status quo, it is about challenging the status quo, it is about application, about work done….for some it is ‘work done’ as in ‘now let’s get on with life’, it is about future scholarly work, it is about no longer wanting to be part of academic enterprise, and for some present it is possibly even a mystery, another world……as I said, there is no single narrative here, no single emotion, no single story…
Yet in all this difference, in all this diversity, I discern a common thread, and something wondrous.
In a world riven with conflict, uncertainties, injustices and inequalities, with the media tending to parade on a daily basis the worst in human behaviours, where pessimism and fear are easy options, we gather this evening to actually celebrate ‘education’, not a thing, certainly not a political football, but rather, as legions of thinkers and dreamers have long argued, a core component and source of civil and humane society, in reality a social process involving people, and the invisibilities of knowledge and ideas, requiring those involved to engage, no matter how deeply or superficially, with accumulated past and developing bodies of knowledge and understandings, and to make of these something personal with a mix of individual capabilities, aspirations, ambitions, hopes and dreams.
In essence, this evening we are celebrating something at once personal, creative, transformative, and, hopeful….and in this day and age this is no small wonder.
So again this evening, thank you everyone who has been part of this process, and thank you too, all who have come tonight to share and celebrate what is both an end, and a beginning."
[Rowan Cahill, 22 December 2013]
++++++
MOLECULAR IMAGININGS: MANSELL, MANION, AND ME
Among radical historians Ken Mansell’s research on Australian student radicalism in the 1960s is legendary. I met him in 1995 when he borrowed my files on the Free University; some years later, when Rowan and I were writing Radical Sydney (2010), he sent us, unsolicited, a thirty-page extract about the Humphreys Affair and the Free U from his unpublished manuscript. That’s the sort of guy he is: comradely, unassuming but dedicated to preserving the documents of the student movement and understanding its history. This year, as I was preparing a paper on student radicalism at Sydney University, I looked at his extract again – and we began to correspond. We exchanged books, and that is how I acquired his elegant, 103-page publication, co-authored with Emily Floyd, Disobedience: The University as a Site of Political Potential (Monash University Museum of Art, 2013).
.jpg)
Disobedience.....is the catalogue of an art installation. Emily Floyd, a sculptor, was commissioned by the Monash University Museum of Art to create an artwork inaugurating the Ian Potter Sculpture Court at the University. Across the courtyard she randomly distributed large brightly coloured cubes and rectangular boxes, each with a side removed to give access to the books and pamphlets within. She describes the work, called This place will always be open, as ‘an outdoor sculpture housing a library of student dissent and a program of discussions and student activities’. Her inspiration came from Ken Mansell’s collection of ephemera of the student movement, which included the leaflets and publications of the Monash Labor Club in its heyday. Many of these are reproduced in this book, as is Ken’s 80 page study, based on his 1994 thesis, ‘The Yeast is Red – A History of The Bakery, Off-Campus Centre of the Monash Labor Club, 1968-71’.
Ken Mansell was part of the yeast, or - at the risk of offending him by adapting a Deleuzian term - a militant molecule - a thinker and observer as well as an activist (as his new ‘Introduction’ to the thesis shows). If he worked in a molecular way, there were others, the Labor Club’s leaders, who performed like molars. One of them, Michael Hyde, recently published a kind of fictional memoir, All Along the Watchtower – a Memoir of a Sixties Revolutionary (Vulgar Press, 2010), which Ken has subjected to a well-deserved critique. He showed that Hyde’s book will confuse the reader, shifting from historical ‘truth’ to fiction and back again, grinding up the truth with the fiction. The reader can’t tell that the chronology is wrong, that the characters have false names or are composed out of several real persons, and that events are made up or embellished by the author. Ken’s 20-page review, drawing on recent defences of history against the trend to ‘novelize’ it, can be read on the ‘Reason in Revolt’ website.
Rowan’s forthcoming review of Disobedience in Recorder (Melbourne ASSLH) also catches the molecular mode of action in Ken’s history, linking its study to what Rowan calls the left’s ‘tsunami of ephemera’. Mansell’s study demonstrates (in Rowan’s words) that ‘much of the intellectual, creative and challenging endeavour and action took place away from the glare of media attention, the media tending to target set-piece dramatics, like demonstrations, marches, protests and the like.’ I agree; too many so-called experts have distorted the history of student radicalism by concentrating on these dramatics, which, because they were commonly produced for the television news and the capitalist press, were framed by the ruling ideology of top-down persuasion. Meanwhile, in the New Left’s underground press, leaflets, newsletters, posters, graffiti and theoretical magazines a new culture of empowering communication was being created using the duplicating machine, the off-set printer, the white wash and brushes. This is the kind of participant culture that Mansell focuses on; it makes his study unique.
When I was preparing my study of the Free U I remembered that Geoffrey Manion had also used my files while writing a BA Honours thesis in Education in 1979. So I went to the catalogue of the Sydney University Library but there was no entry for it. By talking to former members of the University’s Department of Education I discovered that its library of theses had been dispersed when the Faculty of Education moved into its new building; my friends surmised that Manion’s thesis disappeared when the University Library decided not to preserve BA theses. It was the only thesis dedicated to the study of the Free U, and if I could find the whereabouts of its author there was a chance that I could still refer to it. Eventually I tracked Geoff Manion to the School of Law and Justice at Southern Cross University. But the story here too was frustrating. Geoff’s son became interested in alternative education, Geoff lent him the thesis, the son lived in Brisbane, the deluge of January 2011 rivalled the great flood of ’74 – and the thesis, along with all the son’s artworks, library and belongings now lies buried in the mud of the Brisbane River. Imperious nature imitating the art of bureaucratic rationality … ?
By this time I was working with Ken Mansell’s thirty-page extract from his research into the Humphreys affair and the Free U, and realised that Ken was quoting from Manion’s thesis. Was there a chance that a copy survived in Mansell’s archive? So I contacted Ken, and yes it had, and we are now arranging to scan Geoff’s thesis. I will deposit the scanned version with the papers of the Free University in the University of Sydney archives.
Unforced acknowledgment: I borrowed the molecular and molar metaphors from Mark Fisher and Jeremy Gilbert, ‘Capitalist Realism and Neoliberal Hegemony: A Dialogue’, in New Formations, numbers 80/81, November 2013, pp. 89-101. So it’s not “Gotta rip …” (as the pollies say and do); rather, let us praise the barefoot historians, their files and their mode of radical communication.
++++++
WITNESSING AGAINST THE BEAST.
I published the following piece in the Winter 2000 issue of The Hummer, journal of the Sydney Branch of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History. Having recently revisited Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, I also revisited this piece. It summarises many of my views on dissent, rebellion, and radical history, then, and now:
"I read Witness
Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge University Press) soon
after it was published in 1993, and following the death that same year of its
author, veteran radical historian and anti-nuclear campaigner E. P. Thompson.
I found the book a source of strength because it dealt with
themes and issues I was grappling with as the Greedy 1980s gave way to the
Economic Rationalism of the 1990s, corporate banditry, and as post-Cold War
intellectuals heaped scorn on anyone who still took socialism and/or Marxism
seriously. For me Thompson’s book was a statement of radical affirmation: it
was about the passing on of radical faith across generations and centuries; it
was about how the no-names of history, those people and outfits not listed
amongst history’s winners, may, in a sense, be the real winners.
 |
| William Blake (1757-1827): Radical, and poet. |
Rather it is an attempt to place Blake ‘in the intellectual
and social life of London between 1780 and 1820’ and identify ‘what particular
traditions were at work in his mind’. In particular Thompson seeks to link
Blake to the Christian tradition of antinomianism, specifically the
Muggletonian tradition, and to reconstruct his eclectic mode of thought and
learning, largely inaccessible now, according to Thompson, in times where
education institutions, hierarchies and orthodoxies shape and define
disciplines and intellectual accomplishment.
It is an eccentric book in the best sense of that term, and
modestly prefaced with an apology for its existence. Thompson describes his
book as a ‘voyage’ and welcomes the reader ‘aboard’; he creates an atmosphere
of intimacy, relaxation, adventure, and discovery, ranging easily through a
galaxy of styles, at times relaxed, conversational, colloquial, then
argumentative and polemical, other times scholarly. Experiencing the book is
akin to being the Wedding Guest cornered and enthralled by the Ancient Mariner.
Thompson thinks aloud as he considers the intellectual
options and alternatives his material presents; he fantasizes about what he
wishes his data could prove, before settling for what it does support. In some
ways Witness Against the
Beast is also a portrait of
a historian at work.
Obviously this Blake book meant a great deal to Thompson.
Its roots are in his classic The
Making of the English Working Class (1963);
in 1968 he gave a lecture on Blake at Columbia
University University
of Toronto
Muggletonians are central to Thompson’s study. Originating
in the seventeenth century English revolution with the London tailor Ludowick Muggleton, the obscure Protestant sect
survived for 300 years, never more than a few hundred members at most.
Muggletonians rejected the laws of the Church and the State as oppressive, were
fiercely anti-clerical, and opposed tithes, oaths and the bearing of arms; they
met in private homes and taverns, singing ‘divine songs’ to the popular and
patriotic tunes of the day; they conducted their affairs in secrecy, by
correspondence, and often in the form of hand copied literature and tracts.
The sect was thought to have died out in the nineteenth
century; their arduously preserved records were available for historical
scrutiny until the 1860s, after which they disappeared. Thompson’s patient
sleuthing rediscovered them in Kent in 1975, some 80 apple boxes full of
records dating from the seventeenth century, in the possession of 70 year old
apple farmer Philip Noakes, the last Muggletonian, who had saved the records
from the German bombing of London in 1940-41. The archive is now in the British
Library.
Little is known about William Blake’s intellectual evolution,
though there is much conjectural history of ideas. Initially Thompson hoped to
show that Blake was a Muggletonian, since so much of Blake is resonant of
Muggletonian conduct, symbolism, debate, attitudes, and processes. However in
spite of his literary and historical sleuthing, and massive archival
endeavours, Thompson could only conclude that Blake was deeply influenced by
the Muggletonian tradition.
So why did Thompson bother to produce this book? No matter
what was intended at the outset of his project, by the time the mature Thompson
got around to actually writing his book it had turned into a personal political
allegory. ‘I like these Muggletonians’, says Thompson, even though ‘they were
not among history’s winners’. Many things about the Muggletonians appeal to
him: their tenacity, and survival; their contribution to the late
seventeenth/eighteenth century vortex of ideas which was disproportionate to
their actual numbers; their confident intellectualising ‘from below’ without
reference to official education and religious hierarchies; their preparedness
to tackle the great issues of Good and Evil and wrestle with the antagonisms
between the Law of Moses and the Gospel of Jesus; their cantankerousness; their
resistance to the State; their mode of operation; the richness and complexity
of their symbolism which enabled them to conceptualise and debate all aspects
of the human condition; and so on. Most of all Thompson seems to like them for
the way they ‘struggled to define their own sense of system’.
Thompson admires William Blake. The poet never submitted to
the State. And when radical compatriots turned to conservatism and Toryism in
despair, as they recoiled from the shambles the French Revolution became, Blake
remained a lifelong radical. According to Thompson this constancy drew strength
from Blake’s belief system, at the core of which was the affirmation of Thou
Shalt Love and Thou Shalt Forgive, and with this the ability to live with
‘constellations of related attitudes and images’ and connected insights rather
than a coherent intellectual system. Further, Blake understood that human
nature is not finally perfectible and that reason alone is not all there is to
life; that there is a ‘kingdom within’ each one of us that needs to be touched
and liberated. In the Thompson analysis Blake can provide us with ‘a plank in
the floor upon which the future must walk’.
With ‘the plank’ reference to Blake the allegorical nature
of the book is apparent. Witness
Against the Beast is Edward
Thompson’s message to the future. There is hope for dissenters, and a point to
dissent, in the post-modern world, in spite of the end of ideology and the
apparent global dominance of market materialism. In other times, in other
uphill struggles against triumphant materialism backed by a ruthless state, the
Muggletonians, and Blake, remained rebellious and dissentingly on task, keeping
alive alternatives, other expectations, and the possibility for human renewal.
More than a study of a Protestant sect and William Blake, Witness Against the Beast is about maintaining radical
perspectives and faith when the pressure is on to variously recant, compromise,
give up, opt out. It is also about the nature of the sort of radical intellect
and faith that survives. Biographically it can be seen as the final personal
summative statement by a major radical intellectual, about being a radical
intellectual.
In a couple of senses Witness
Against the Beast brought
Thompson full circle: the son of tough liberal, religious non-conformists (his
parents had been Methodist missionaries in India, his father a critic of
British imperialism) rounded his life with a book about religious and political
non-conformity; the academic who cut his teeth on a major study of William
Morris (1955), concluded his career with a study of another radical and
original literary figure.
For those of us who think of ourselves as socialists, and
if we are serious about taking our great visionary, humane, and combative
tradition into the twenty first century, Witness
Against the Beast is worth
reading; a book to be reflected upon rather than filleted for footnotes." [Rowan Cahill, 15 September 2013]
++++++
EDUARDO GALEANO: RADICAL HISTORIAN.
Uruguayan
left-wing journalist and writer Eduardo Galeano was born in Montevideo
in 1940. After various odd jobs he worked as a journalist and editor until
imprisonment in 1973 following a right-wing coup. Later fleeing, he lived in Argentina
until the death squads of another right-wing coup targeted him. Post-Franco Spain
provided refuge until he returned to his homeland in 1985 following the
collapse of the Uruguayan dictatorship.
.jpg)
Generally
described as an author/journalist/writer, all of which he is, he is also a
radical historian. Historian because he deals with time, its shaping forces,
and their relationships with the present; radical because he enables the
dispossessed, the exploited, the marginalised, to be seen and heard in their
struggles against, and at the hands of, the rich, powerful, oppressive, and
dispossessive. Much of the focus of his work are the peoples and histories of
Time
for Galeano is not a daunting matter; the first of his works I read was Mirrors:
Stories of Almost Everyone (2009), no less than the history of the world--nearly 600 stories/vignettes in some 360 pages. His classic work, Open Veins of Latin America: Five
Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (1971), once banned by a
number of right-wing Latin American governments, is exactly what it claims to
be.
++++++
INTELLECTUALS: TAME OR OTHERWISE
 |
| Emile Zola's Open Letter to the French President, 1898. A seminal intellectual intervention. |
++++++
THE
AGENCY OF REVOLT
Published
in November 2012 by Viking-Penguin, The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic
Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom is the latest ‘history from below’ from
radical scholar Marcus Rediker (
++++++
A SHADOW AND A PORTENT
Robert Bollard’s In the Shadow of Gallipoli:The Hidden History of Australia in World War 1 has just arrived from NewSouth Books, a new imprint of University of New South Wales Press. It was great to get it – because if ever radical history needed a bulwark against the militarized nationalist mud that liberal and conservative historians threaten to sink us in it is now, as the centenary of World War 1 approaches. Rob’s book has two wonderful defenses against this muck. First, it documents and passionately argues that ‘under the shadow of Gallipoli lies the real truth about World War 1’ – that in opposition to the militarist and imperialist patriotism of the ruling class another Australia was born, an Australia of ‘militant and politicized workers’ whose significance was ‘unparalleled in the English-speaking world’. Second, it was born out of real grievances, expressed as real anger at unemployment, the failure of parliamentary representation, and the sense of having been deceived about the impact of the war, as its horrific casualties became known. Although this is a book about ‘the home front’ it has no mind-numbing accounts of sock-knitting, mourning, and recruiting marches as forms of representation. Instead, in eight action-filled chapters it takes the reader on a materialist journey from the impact of unemployment on recruiting, through the beginnings of the strike wave, the strengthening of class-consciousness among Irish workers after the Easter Uprising of 1916, the anti-conscription victories, the ‘Great Strike’ of 1917, to the concluding chapter on the political violence of 1918-19. The final sentences carry a message: ‘The class division and political polarization of Australia, as it emerged, scarred and battered from the shadow of World War I, appears not so much an exception to egalitarian Australia as the rule. It might be history, but it is also a premonition.’
Rob Bollard is a radical historian, well known for his path-breaking articles establishing that the ‘Great Strike’ of 1917 was driven from below, and that it was defeated not by the irresolution of the workers but by government-organised scabbing. The innovative UNSW Press is the publisher of Radical Sydney,(Irving/Cahill, 2010) which it keeps in print. Let’s hope their publication of Rob’s book is a sign that the market for radical history is growing. [Terry Irving, 10 March 2013]
++++++
RADICAL SIXTIES
Due for release in April is A Cultural History of the Radical Sixties in the San Francisco Bay Area (Pickering and Chatto,
++++++
CONTESTED REDUNDANCY
++++++
VIOLENCE, SYRACUSE AND THE FUTURE PROFESSORIATE
According to the American Historical Association (AHA), historians with new PhDs have about a 50% chance of academic employment at the time of their graduation. Is that good or bad? Well, it’s bad, for what the AHA report fails to say is that the ‘lucky’ half will be exploited as temporary adjuncts, without tenure or health benefits, working twice as many hours as the tenured professors for half the salary. A favoured few will manage to move into the tenure track; the rest will labour in this academic underworld all their working lives - or until they join the underpaid in some other industry. As one of the adjuncts explained recently, their situation is not unique; it’s par for the American way of life. They are as expendable as other workers, suffering because of the conquest of academic life by
So I got a bit of a jolt when I came across a conference call from the
Is the program a bad joke, I wondered, or just another example of elite arrogance and market ideology? And is its linguistic cleverness self-deception or deliberate? And if the ruling professoriate can get away with misnaming their school in this way, are the courses they offer tailored to produce a similarly false view of the world and its history?
The reason the Syracuse announcement caught my eye was that the conference’s theme was ‘Violence and Resistance’, described thus: ‘These have become increasingly central to scholarship and have been a palpable presence both on the news and in our classrooms’ – in the latter presumably as matters for discussion rather than as results of an actual struggle to democratize education. The assumption at
Then follows a short list of topics: ‘Memory, religion, gender, military, community identity, popular culture, family, imperialism/colonial experiences, landscape, the self, politics.’ My guess is that they reflect the theses that the students in the school are writing. Culture, experience, identity, memory: these are the organizing ideas of a history profession still in retreat from the radical materialist scholarship of the late twentieth century. Look at what the list ignores: the structures of race and class, surely among the main arenas of violence and resistance; periodisation, a concept that holds out the possibility of another period of progressive action against oppression and its supporting violence; and the social structuring of power and thus the crucial insight for a study of this kind that the state, as the sphere of legitimate violence, is responsible for spreading the very idea of violence as a way of settling conflict.
In the
One of the most encouraging recent developments in the practice of radical history is the renewal of the materialist understanding of history as a creative and collective process. This has occurred as millions of people have shown what that means right now, on the streets and in the squares of hundreds of cities across the globe. If violence and resistance are part of historical analyses today it is because of this movement. It reminds historians of violence and resistance that they have to contextualize them, to consider their material causes and effects, to see them as actions as well as experiences, to analyze their economic and political reality as well as their representations.
The graduate students of
++++++
.jpg) |
| Bonhoeffer, July 1939. |
As I said, two strands intertwined…what is the point, I asked
myself rhetorically, of holding out against great wealth, great power, great
injustices, in the name of principles, for what is right, when the end is
almost the certainty of getting rolled, of sticking to your guns and ending up
like Bonhoeffer and Dohnanyi in the hangman’s noose, real or metaphorical? Granted,
Bonhoeffer ‘survives’ today, well known because of his actions and his stand; the Nazi
machine could not delete him from history as he had significant international
theological and intellectual clout and repute before he took his stand. But
that does not apply to the coal seam blockaders, nor to the locals, for
example, in New Guinea, in Africa, in the Amazon region, variously struggling
to protect their habitats and livelihoods from the depredations of logging,
mining, and oil operations, or to countless others all over the world variously
opposing those who would otherwise walk over them in the name of the State, corporate gains, austerity, or whatever….
While protest actions and dissenting activities do succeed,
particularly when they are part of social movements or linked with mass
movements and class struggles, and let us not be deceived by the silences of
history, over time there have been victories a plenty, like the grains of sand
on a beach, too numerous to count; however, the point is that protest actions,
acts of resistance, of saying-No, do not require success to be
validated; they are their own validation.
Ideally there is a receptive and sympathetic audience, ideally a mass movement
of some kind, but in the end the No-saying boils down to an individual
act, irrespective of the context; it is something only the individual can do,
being at core an individual ethical, moral, political response to a circumstance/situation.
And it counts, no matter the audience, no matter the chance
of success. Every declaration of No, every act of resistance is a hurdle
for those who seek and prefer an acquiescent roll-over-me world, a level
playing field in which there is no opposition. It is the act of resistance that
is crucial, not necessarily its success or otherwise. Resistance and the saying of No is
what darkens the days and haunts the nights of those who envisage the well-tended
compliance of acquiescent playing fields. And the act of saying No, the
act of resistance, is what frustrates and prevents the realisation of those playing
fields, both now and in the future.
++++++
ROBIN HOOD: In a 'bargain' bin at the local supermarket I recently found episodes of childhood television fare...a British series my brother and I loved....The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955-1959), starring Richard Greene. Episodes of this were written under a pseudonym by blacklisted American leftist screenwriter, Ring Lardner Jr. (1915-2000), a victim of the anti-communist hysteria of the late 1940s, 1950s, who found work in England until he could again freely work in his homeland. A matter of politics and popular culture seamlessly mixing, and arguably a subtle part of my early political formation. Nice one Ring, and Robin...and thank you. [Rowan Cahill, 19 August 2012]
++++++
“WORKERS OF THE WORLD”, subtitled the International Journal on Strikes and Social Conflict, is a new, and free, online journal. It aims “ to stimulate global studies on labour and social conflicts in an interdisciplinary, global, long term historical and non Eurocentric perspective. It intends to move away from traditional forms of methodological nationalism and conjectural studies, adopting an explicitly critical and interdisciplinary perspective”. The journal is an initiative arising out of the Lisbon Labour Conference in March 2011. The editorial board draws researchers from
++++++
Titled Neoliberalism, Development, and Aid Volunteering,
the book however was not intended by its author to simply become a library
shelf-dweller, career brownie-point earner, academic footnote-quarry, though it
will become the latter, such is the quality of the work, its breadth of scholarship, its insights and
challenges. As to how to classify it, it is probably best described as
interdisciplinary, bringing together history, politics, sociology, and social
anthropology.
As Georgeou explains at the start of her book, the gestation
of her study were her experiences and
immersion in the field of aid volunteering in Japan
and North Vietnam .
This was during the early 1990s, when she was in her early twenties. As she
explains, they were experiences that left her asking huge moral, ethical,
political questions about volunteering. It was a questioning that brought her
back to Australia ,
and eventually to academia. This book is the result of her facing down these demons,
unpacking them intellectually to find answers and solutions. In the process she
validates the work of NGOs and on-the-ground civilian volunteers, and seriously
questions the aims and priorities of state led aid initiatives.
A dynamic aspect of Georgeou’s study is data sourced from
interviews she conducted in 2006-2009 with civilian volunteers with international experience
of working in sites of civil unrest. Such data does not grow on trees, and Georgeou’s
sensitive and nuanced treatment of this material reflects her concerns for the safety
and the broad welfare, including psychological aspects, of volunteers. But not
only this. Georgeou’s study is also concerned with the human, cultural,
psychological, political welfare of the participants/recipients or targets of aid/volunteering.
Georgeou’s text avoids the coded and cold impenetrability of
much academic writing; it is at once scholarly, personal, nuanced, and
accessible to non-specialists. The author intended her work to be used, to
challenge and to help formulate aid/volunteering approaches and policies at
individual and organisational levels, in what is globally a multi-billion
dollar economic sector, one which makes claims to altruism and humanitarianism,
utilises the input of growing numbers of volunteers, but is increasingly volatile,
conditional, militarised, privatised, and politically riven.
So what makes Georgeou’s book radical? Well, for starters,
she understands matters pertaining to class and hegemony. Then there is her
stance as a scholar. Biographically, she came to academia late, and did not
take the well-beaten path of swapping school for campus; thus she avoided the institutional
grooming and timidification that often ensnares those who travel this path. Rather
she models engaged scholarship. The scholar is not some sort of seminarian, cocooned
in the academy, mixing almost exclusively with coteries of self-referential
fellow specialists and elitistly dealing with ‘higher things’; rather, the
scholar seeks to engage with the wider world beyond the academy, which in Georgeou’s
case is the world of human dignity, human rights, social justice.
Add to this her forensic account of the ways in which
neoliberalism is embedded in modern aid/development programs, which, along with
‘new managerialism’, comprises a form of
imperialism, tying aid/volunteering recipients to the economic and strategic
imperatives of donor states, the managerialism both facilitating and camouflaging
the ideological and the political.
Radical too is Georgeou’s conception and vision of civil
society, which is at the heart of her thinking, and advocacy. Civil society is
a social construct, a social space, at once democratic and participatory, in
which individuals variously clash, struggle, argue, agree. It is a space in
which the individual is empowered to act publicly. Civil society is about
people, individuals, human beings, and not about units to be manipulated for state
imperatives, or conceived of as footsoldiers for economic growth.
From my reading of Georgeou’s
book, I sense much anger and passion guiding her text. But instead of the mailed
fist, which is there, she builds her case with velvet gloves. She is a pleasure
to read, and her book is a significant contribution to the growing literature
on the embeddeness of neoliberalism.
Order a copy for your library. And while you are at it, place an order for another impressive newcomer with Australian origins, Neoliberalism: Beyond the Free Market, edited by Damien Cahill, Lindy Edwards and Frank Stilwell, from the Edward Elgar Publishing stable. This book comprises essays from an international array of scholars on the topic of neoliberalism, including robust discussion/analysis of the embeddedness of neoliberalism. [Rowan Cahill, 24 July 2012]
++++++
WISE AFTER THE EVENT: Hard on the heels of my previous post about McQueen, my attention was grabbed by an article in the latest issue of Australian Historical Studies (43, 2012, pp. 287-301), authoured by young historian Nathan Wise from the University of New England (NSW). Wise has made a speciality of radically challenging traditional histories of the Australian martial experience during World War 1, histories which arguably serve to condition and martial future generations of young Australians to uncritically enter bloodbaths overseas.
Wise explains in his article's Abstract, "The Myth of Classlessness in the Australian Imperial Force'',
"The issue of class remains strikingly absent from much of the historical literature on the
Australian Imperial Force (AIF) during the First World War. This article briefly explores
the pre-war class backgrounds of soldiers, the traces of class in their writings and their
experiences, the class-based selection processes of soldiers’ writing by post-war archives,
and how key historians of the AIF have paid insufficient attention to class. It argues that
as a result of middle-class hegemony, before, during and after the war, the memory of the
First World War in Australian popular culture and much historical writing is largely a
memory based upon skewed sources and a lack of recognition of class in the AIF."
Wise's article is a scholarly strike against the way many Australian historians and the populists who have followed, have deliberately or otherwise variously misrepresented the Australian martial experience of World War 1. A significant piece of historical research and writing, and a useful contribution to the class analysis of Australian history. [Rowan Cahill, 6 July 2012]
++++++
HUMPHREY McQUEEN ON WikiLeaks: Over on the Overland website, the Coombs Lecture Theatre (Australian National University) talk given by Australian radical historian Humphrey McQueen on 27 June 2012 to the Canberra Friends of WikiLeaks has been posted. Titled Yes, Virginia, there are Conspiracies, this is a marvellous, erudite defence of Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks project, and is a masterful demonstration of radical history. McQueen touches upon many things, including the nature of journalism, class analysis of history, and the ways great power and wealth operate to the confusion of the masses. Enjoyable also is his Wildean contempt for the ALP. McQueen's conclusion is the rallying/oppositional essence of radical history:
Let me spell out the strategic lesson from my comments about conspiracy facts. In the battles that we shall face, governments will continue to conspire, they will deploy anti-conspiracy laws and push their black propaganda. We can’t beat them at their game. We will win by following the example of the unionists in the 1830s – by mounting the broadest campaign to organise, to educate and to agitate. Our success will come from the open conspiracy of mass participation that inspired Julian Assange to set up WikiLeaks, and that brought us here tonight.
[Rowan Cahill, 6 July 2012]
[To read the whole talk, click here]
++++++
TERRY EAGLETON AND TAKING BACK EDUCATION:
Terry Eagleton speaking at the 'Take Back Education' teach-in, Kings College London, 27 February 2010.
++++++
NOBBLING INFORMATION COMMODIFICATION: ACADEMIC PRODUCTION, JOURNALS, AND OPEN ACCESS: Once upon a time the academic production of writing and research was characterised by networks, professional societies, collegial informalities, and a certain democratic haphazardness. It was part of general cultural discourse, contributing to the idea of cultural/scientific intellectual commons. Now, however, academic production has largely become privatised. Many academic/scholarly journals have become the property of corporate owners. Scholarship has become a commodity, locked up in repositories, requiring exorbitant payments by universities, libraries, individuals to unlock and access. Instead of the idea of commons, we have the privatisation of academic/scholarly production.
The ‘once upon a time’ never was a level playing field. Some research and journals had greater clout/exposure than others, with factors like the names of people and institutions associated with publications influencing exposure and visibility. But the ‘professionalisation’ and growth of academic journals since the 1970s, and their gradual concentration in the hands of global mega-publishers, has created another uneven playing field, one ruled by money and the generation of huge profits. For example, Amsterdam-based Elsevier, the leading publisher of science and health information/research, with some 2000 titles in its portfolio, reported a profit of £768 million in 2011, an increase of £44 million over that of the previous year.
The costs of accessing journals can be prohibitive, especially for small tertiary outfits; but even major institutions like Harvard, are feeling the pinch. Further, the marketing tactic adopted by the mega-publishers is to bundle titles; access to desired journals also involves accepting titles less requested by researchers, if sought at all – journals with a readership close to nil.
Overall, it is a process in which academics perform an alchemic role. They edit and write academic journals for free, handing their endeavours over to publishers, who then generate huge profits by publishing, then hiring-out these endeavours to libraries and individuals. Because most academics are financed by the public purse, academic production by this process involves the transmutation of public monies into private wealth.
At the same time, promotion within academia is reliant to a great extent upon quantification—the quantity of an academic’s output and the number of citations of this output in these same scholarly journals. Quality, and the existence or otherwise of readerships beyond niche academic/scholarly audiences, tend to be non-sequiturs. Which has led to another spawning of the mega-publishers: the creation of highly specialist and esoteric journals. As Guy Rundle acidly observed in a recent Crikey piece, these are publications where the number of contributors tend to outnumber the readership.
The overall process is incestuous, one in which quality is not necessarily a factor, and in which proven ability in teaching tends to play second fiddle, if at all, when applying for academic jobs. Which is why the mega-publishers of academic/scholarly journals have power, and why academics so willingly function as their unpaid labourers. Which is sadly ironic, since few universities, and academic scholarship specifically, would survive into the future if there were no students. And there are no students without teachers and teaching. Indeed, future scholars begin as students – they do not spring fully formed into the world.
Simply, students and teaching are the bricks and mortar of tertiary education. To think otherwise is nonsense. Unless, of course, universities are to become little more than think-tanks, and producers of targeted research, for the global big-money of military/industrial/security interests, chemical/drug/medical corporations, energy combines, and other corporate bottomless wells.
But it doesn’t have to be. And the mantra should be “OPEN ACCESS”. Which means publishing in ways that do not play into the hands of mega-publishers. Which means working towards the creation of an intellectual/scholarly commons. How to achieve Open Access however, is a work in progress. There is no single answer, no single strategy. Since 2008, for example, the idea of ‘guerrilla open access’ has become a searchable term on the web; a simple search will take the reader to a plethora of sites, information, about guerrilla campaigning to free information and research from the monopoly control of the mega-publishers. Warning however: there are metaphoric corpses along the way. Governments, publishers and lawyers, have gone after guerrilla campaigners with a vengeance.
The Cost of Knowledge petition which began circulating in January this year is of interest. Originating from a blog protest by eminent Cambridge mathematician Timothy Gowers, it has gained international support from thousands of scientists who pledge not to publish in, or otherwise assist, Elsevier journals, in protest against policies which the petition claims restricts access to work that should be readily available. In the UK, the media has been quick to dub the mounting protest, the Academic Spring.
The British government is currently exploring Open Access to all research that has received public funding with the intention of making it available online on the basis of Open Access within the next two years. A worry here: governments have a habit these days of privatising and selling off public assets/ventures like this.
For a good working example of an individual scholar's Open Access site, check out that of Australian sociologist (Professor) Brian Martin, a long-time Open Access advocate and practitioner.
For a good working example of an individual scholar's Open Access site, check out that of Australian sociologist (Professor) Brian Martin, a long-time Open Access advocate and practitioner.
And there is always the alternative of setting up an Open Access and online scholarly/academic journal. It is a relatively simple thing to do; reputable editorial boards/collectives, peer reviewing, scholarly rigour, need not be the sole preserves of paper based titles and mega-publishers. In the end, it all ends up online anyway, except one method involves commodification, the other the commons. [Rowan Cahill, 16 May 2012]
++++++
VIOLENCE - IN OZ HISTORY WE'D RATHER NOT KNOW ABOUT IT. It is to radical social history, which my generation discovered in the 1970s, that we owe the acceptance among history workers that subordinate peoples, however defined, have historical agency. Duly acknowledged, this idea became the frame for a sprinkling of more general histories of Australia that appeared in the 1980s and 90s, the best of them enriched by feminist theory.
Agency is not enough. Relations between dominant and subordinate classes, races, sexes, generations, regions, faiths and so on, are also characterised by violence, real or threatened, direct or indirect, and from below as well as above. The rulers of the society in which these structured relationships exist develop ways to suppress, contain or dissipate its propensity for violence, and the subordinate groups counter-strategise to use their violence creatively.
Decades after social history’s moment, I’m still waiting for violence to become as common as agency in the thinking of my radical history colleagues.
The historical actors in these fraught relationships were not so reticent; they knew the terror and named the cause. Here’s an example. Jennie Scott Griffiths was part of the migration of radicals to Queensland in 1918. A revolutionary feminist, she spent two years in Brisbane, lecturing, writing, lobbying – and fighting. Her son recalls that during the notorious red flag procession in Brisbane in March 1919, Jennie, although only 4 ft 6 inches high, was seen beating a tattoo on the chest of a policeman, yelling ‘Give me back my flag!’ She saw the proto-fascist violence that followed and had to suffer an invasion of her own house by armed soldiers. Afterwards she predicted ‘successive strikes, lock-outs and riots’ because Australian workers would not ‘allow themselves to be batoned by police without hitting back.’
A few months later the Labor politicians, union officials and the arbitration judge who were suppressing a working class uprising in Townsville were congratulating Queenslanders on their rejection of violence and their loyalty to constitutional principles. The minds of both sides were obsessed by the violence.
Confronted by these opposing views why should the historian choose to construct their narrative around the view that delegitimizes violence – the view of state officials and those complicit in their project – rather than the view of Jennie and her comrades?
Perhaps there was not much revolutionary violence anyway? This is the standard line of history texts. Australians – A Historical Dictionary (1987) has no entry for violence, and nor does The Oxford Companion to Australian History (1998). The truth is that there is very little research on violence in Australian history. Even when scholars – radicals for the most part – do discuss violent moments they seem to be too fastidious to use the term or specify the violent means. Example: I like Stuart Macintyre’s The Succeeding Age (1986) because it links lives and events with structures, and the pages describing the 1919 strike wave are particularly good. But he avoids the word ‘violence’. Instead we get references to ‘an atmosphere of disorder’, and conflicts ‘that flared up’, and returned soldiers who ‘lashed out’ at workers, socialists, do-gooders and policemen. Another example: Terrence Cutler’s study of the 1918-19 meat workers’ strike in Townsville is excellent on the context and the drama but his distaste for revolutionary violence is plain. He dismisses it as ‘anarchism’, and as bound to fail. (Terrence Cutler, 'Sunday, Bloody Sunday: the Townsville Meat Strike of 1918-19' in J. Iremonger et al (eds), Strikes, 1973, pp 81-102)
Startled by Jennie Scott Griffiths’ blasé attitude to violence I decided to see how much of it I could find in 1918 and 1919. Some years ago I undertook the same task for the 1840s, and surprised myself at how often incidents of political contention took a violent turn, and how many riots there were. (I give a short account of this research in ‘To revolutionise Australia – The Surprising History of Early Working Class Politics’.) So I sampled the daily press in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane for the years Jennie was in Brisbane, and discovered that her attitude was understandable. I logged almost 100 incidents of actual or threatened violence, and I’m sure there are many that I missed and that the reporters often failed to distinguish separate incidents.
Proto-fascist violence by returned soldiers contributed the greatest number of cases, but there were also incidents when soldiers made common cause with ‘revolutionists’. Workers on strike routinely roughed up scabs, while unemployed workers fought with police in Brisbane, Melbourne and Townsville. In Darwin, Kalgoorlie, Broken Hill, Townsville and Fremantle there were times, often lasting several days, when rebellious workers controlled the streets. Sabotage was common, and workers in Sydney, Darwin, Melbourne and Townsville stole guns. Workers used firearms to defend themselves in Kalgoorlie, Townsville, and Brisbane. Two men died; hundreds were injured, some shot in the back by police.
Calling this situation disorderly or tumultuous; pigeon-holing it as a strike wave: such words are inadequate both descriptively and analytically. Class, gender and ethnicity were organising forces in these events. Coercion by military means was ultimately decisive in controlling a pre-revolutionary situation. The descriptive term we need here is violence; the idea we need is the place of organised violence in social relationships. [Terry Irving, 24 April 2012].
++++++
“TALK OF MANY THINGS….” There is a resurgence of scholarly interest in the history of popular protest and collective action in Britain and Ireland. This is taking place at the same time collective action is a global phenomenon, particularly, so far as the mass media is concerned, in the Arab world and in parts of Europe. Two recent papers by Katrina Navickas are of interest: “What Happened to Class? New Histories of Labour and Collective Action in Britain”, Social History, Vol. 36, No. 2, May 2011; and “Protest History or the History of Protest?”, History Workshop Journal, Issue 73, March 2012. There is much to ponder in these thoughtful and provocative pieces; the 2011 essay in particular, is a robust historiographical discussion of recent developments in British labour and collective action history.
While scholarly interest in protest and rebellion was generally distracted and deconstructed by postmodernist dreaming in many parts of the world during the 1980s and 1990s, beyond the cloisters of academe protest and rebellion remained alive and well. Arguably too, offstage, in the world of realpolitik, in the wings where Pilate intellectuals and thugs merge seamlessly in intelligence and secret police roles, interest and concern was not sidetracked. Take China for example, where away from television cameras, minus access by journalists, and despite intense policing of the social media, protest surged, and continues to surge. With a tendency to be ‘invisible’ both within and outside China, "mass incidents" as riots, demonstrations, protests are collectively and euphemistically termed by Chinese authorities, have grown from about 10,000 incidents in 1993, to some 180,000 in 2010. “Mass incidents” can involve small numbers of people to many thousands. Many of the “incidents” are localised, small, and focused on specific issues/concerns. Protest actions specifically involving working people and industrial issues are on the increase. In 2010, China's spending on internal policing outstripped its national defence budget.
Which brings me to the neoliberal nonsense which simplistically equates markets with political freedom. As Naomi Klein demonstrated in The Shock Doctrine (2007), the implementation of neoliberal policies in the 1970s and 1980s in developing countries went hand-in-hand with military seizures of power, the establishment of authoritarian regimes, and lashings of terror, torture, and the ‘disappearance’ of opponents and critics. Capitalism, corporations, and untrammelled profiteering coexist easily with authoritarian governments. To my way of thinking, the significance of the ongoing experiment of the marriage between capitalism and the Chinese communist state, is its modelling of the one-party capitalist state, a model I reckon will eventually attract the sort of intellectual vandals who helped introduce us to neoliberalism in the 1970s via Chile.
My argument is that if in our ‘democracies’, capitalism variously finds itself stymied/curtailed by popular protests, trade unionism, and by the return of the political will to ensure greater wealth and profit sharing via taxation and welfare reforms, recognition that authoritarian control facilitated by the one-party state, and its associated greater discipline, may follow. From the outside this seems a possible way to protect markets and capital, albeit not as sure as the lived reality, but certainly producing all the outward trappings of capitalist heartlands, complete with rampant consumerism, political/economic corruption, and vast and growing wealth, social and political inequalities.
P. S. Soon after writing the previous paragraphs, I was notified by a friendly online monitoring outfit that a co-authored article of mine published in 2006 had recently been downloaded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The subject of the article is the imposition of a form of martial-law on a small semi-rural Australian town in 1978, following what now appears to have been a bogus terrorist threat emanating from within
++++++
OLIVER VILLAR & DREW COTTLE, AND THE NARCO-POLITICS OF IMPERIALISM: Drew Cottle (University of Western Sydney) is an Australian radical historian, and one of those who contributed chapters to the Irving/Cahill Radical Sydney (UNSW Press, 2010). During his academic career he resisted the siren calls of post-modernism, and pursued class analysis as he targeted the hydra-heads of capitalism. Amongst his scholarly production were two major studies, variously circulating and cited in their dissertation formats long before they appeared as published books. Life Can Be Oh So Sweet On The Sunny Side Of The Street (Minerva Press, London, 1998), a micro-study of Sydney’s suburban wealthy during the Great Depression (1928-1934), challenged the general Australian historical version of the Depression which portrayed great general suffering and hardship. In Cottle’s account, rich ruling class enclaves tenaciously clung to their wealth, enjoyed extravagance and privilege, emerging from the period largely unscathed. The Brisbane Line: A Reappraisal (Upfront Publishing, Leicestershire, 2002) examined aspects of Japanese imperialism during the inter-war period, with special attention to the possibility of collaboration with Japan by prominent sections of the Australian ruling class. While there were exceptions, amongst which I was numbered, this well-documented and tightly argued study tended to be cold-shouldered in Australia.
It is a pleasure to see Cottle in the lists again, this time with co-author Oliver Villar (Charles Sturt University) and their book Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror: U.S. Imperialism and Class Struggle in Colombia (Monthly Review Press, New York, 2011). This is a well-written, readable volume, a mix of radical political economy, radical history, and Marxist analysis. Their study is built on extensive and excellent research, much of it based on Villar’s related PhD dissertation (2008).
Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror examines the U.S. war against the Colombian drug trade and state-designated terror organisations, a maelstrom of violence that to date has cost U.S. taxpayers some $US 7 billion. The authors expose the hypocrisy and duplicity of this conflict, demonstrating U.S. support for a narco-state and a narco-bourgeoisie, enabling paramilitaries, wealthy elites, business interests favourable to U.S. interests to dominate the drug trade at the expense of rivals. As the authors argue, it is not a war against drugs and terror, but a war to entrench and protect U.S. endorsed drug cartels and sources of terror. In the wash, the U.S. garners significant strategic and economic benefits and advantages.
Overall a brave and vital book. For a Counterpunch review click here. [Rowan Cahill, 2 April 2012].
++++++
IN GRANGER MODE: I recently took umbrage with regard to the use of the terms retirement/retiree when asked to describe myself in a question posed in a fraternal organisation’s questionnaire. I responded: “I am 66, work as a part-time casual, am studying, and writing. In current circumstances I regard use of ‘retired/retirement’ as a capitalist ploy to commodify people, and in part too as an attempt by the state to control a section of the population—all of which I reject.” Sure, I parted company with my long-time employer on less than amicable/favourable personal and financial terms in 2000, but that did not mean I opted out of life, or turned myself over to the old-person-farmers, my term of abuse for the investment sector that has tried to convince people over the age of 50 to enter ‘lifestyle villages/communities’. Nor do I subscribe to the footloose docility and hedonism implicit in the term ‘Grey Nomad’. Rather, I prefer a term I’ve invented, and describe myself as a ‘Granger’, the word formed from ‘grey’ and ‘anger’. Angry, not Grumpy, and still in the business of working against the sick-old-world of capitalism and its hydra-headed plurality of evilness. It was refreshing, therefore, to catch up with this recent brief glimpse of historian Eric Hobsbawm (“Revolution Springs Eternal for Eric Hobsbawm”), alive and well at 94, in In These Times. For a detailed and recent intellectual encounter with Hobsbawm, see his New Left Review interview (NLR No. 61, January-February 2010). By way of an aside, NLR has, over the years, refined the extended critical interview genre; some of these interviews have been packaged by Verso as Lives on the Left: A Group Portrait (2011). For my own foray in this genre see my 2005 Overland interview with American radical historian Marcus Rediker. [Rowan Cahill, 19 March 2012].
++++++
DIGITISING THE RADICAL PRESS: AN OUTRAGEOUS NEGLECT: The headline read, ‘New Dawn for Historic Suffragette Journal’. It was International Women’s Day, and this was a ‘hot topic’ on the ABC News website. A real feel-good story, it told how the only complete print copy of Louisa Lawson’s pioneering feminist journal, The Dawn, was digitised by the National Library. Wonderful, and even more wonderful (at least for the government) was the fact that the money - $7,000 - for the digitisation came out of the pockets of one woman and a few of her friends!
No, that’s not wonderful; it’s an indictment of the bias in the national publicly funded program for digitising rare and valuable printed material. The headline should have read: ‘Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program neglects historic feminist journal while pouring millions into digitising the anti-woman, anti-worker capitalist press.’
There are other feminist journals. I have been reading The Australian Woman’s Weekly – no, not the Packer–Buttrose slave-comforting fairyfloss – but the magazine edited by the feisty, socialist-feminist Jenny Scott Griffiths before she was sacked for opposing conscription in 1916. When will it be digitised? Or Vida Goldstein’s periodicals, Australian Women’s Sphere, and The Woman Voter? The academic contingent of whatever is left of the women’s movement might be more usefully engaged in lobbying the National Library to make these oppositional journals digitally accessible rather than chasing the will-o-the-wisp of women’s ‘leadership’ (?) as part of this country’s ruling, masculinist historical narrative.
First wave feminism never produced as many periodicals as first wave labourism/socialism, so what’s the digitisation score for the labour press? Before we do the count let’s look at the field. I have the 1975 monograph, Labor in Print, compiled by H.J. Gibbney, in front of me. Jim Gibbney identified 488 newspapers or periodicals with a connection to the labour movement between 1850 and 1939. Among them are daily newspapers published in Sydney, Brisbane, Broken Hill, Adelaide, Ballarat and Hobart; trade union journals from key industries; and party newspapers. How many of these have been digitised? Just one – the Queensland Worker – although the Clipper, from Hobart, is set to appear soon, but it is worth noticing that the Clipper, like The Dawn, is ‘contributed content’, that is, its digitisation will not be paid for by the National Library.
So what is going on in the Digitisation Program? If you look at the list of digitised papers on Trove you will find a lot of insignificant stuff - papers for children, for tiny bush communities, and Melbourne suburbs. I guess an argument can be made for this stuff, but does anybody really believe that the Australian Children’s Newspaper that ran for about a year is more important than the Labor Daily that appeared for almost twenty years, or than The Daily Standard that ran for 24 years? Or for that matter, any of the other 486 papers that made the labour movement the oldest source of citizenship training for ordinary people in this country, as well as producing the oldest political party, which currently holds office in the national government? Is political bias at work, or is it that the staff of the newspaper digitisation program are just ignorant of their field? Whatever the answer, the situation is outrageous.
It is also surprising that the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History and its seven branches seem uninterested in this matter, but they get very excited if their flagship journal is threatened with downgrading in the international scholarly pecking order. Perhaps their members have stopped doing research that draws on the labour press, but don’t they feel any responsibility to ensure that the labour press is fairly represented in Australia’s digitisation program? It is not as if they lack clout, as some of the country’s most published and rewarded academics are among their members. About thirty years ago one professor of literature ensured that rare periodicals from the 1840s were microfilmed and digitised. Surely a dozen or so labour history professors today could put enough pressure on the National Library to rectify this outrageous neglect of the labour press. [Terry Irving, 10 March 2012].
OCCUPY HISTORY. The Occupy Movement is a creative and energetic international social protest movement targeting the global growth of economic and social injustices and inequalities. The movement began in North America in September 2011, specifically targeting Wall Street. Since then it has spread to 82 countries and more than 2800 occupy sites/communities. In December 2011, Terry participated in classes organised by the Sydney (Australia) occupiers in Martin Place, iconic and symbolic heart of the Sydney CBD. In support of the movement, we have added our names to the Occupy History site. This site seeks to encourage historians to build discussions about inequality and injustice to include the histories of struggles against these, and the changes needed. [Irving/Cahill, 21 February 2012].
No, that’s not wonderful; it’s an indictment of the bias in the national publicly funded program for digitising rare and valuable printed material. The headline should have read: ‘Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program neglects historic feminist journal while pouring millions into digitising the anti-woman, anti-worker capitalist press.’
There are other feminist journals. I have been reading The Australian Woman’s Weekly – no, not the Packer–Buttrose slave-comforting fairyfloss – but the magazine edited by the feisty, socialist-feminist Jenny Scott Griffiths before she was sacked for opposing conscription in 1916. When will it be digitised? Or Vida Goldstein’s periodicals, Australian Women’s Sphere, and The Woman Voter? The academic contingent of whatever is left of the women’s movement might be more usefully engaged in lobbying the National Library to make these oppositional journals digitally accessible rather than chasing the will-o-the-wisp of women’s ‘leadership’ (?) as part of this country’s ruling, masculinist historical narrative.
First wave feminism never produced as many periodicals as first wave labourism/socialism, so what’s the digitisation score for the labour press? Before we do the count let’s look at the field. I have the 1975 monograph, Labor in Print, compiled by H.J. Gibbney, in front of me. Jim Gibbney identified 488 newspapers or periodicals with a connection to the labour movement between 1850 and 1939. Among them are daily newspapers published in Sydney, Brisbane, Broken Hill, Adelaide, Ballarat and Hobart; trade union journals from key industries; and party newspapers. How many of these have been digitised? Just one – the Queensland Worker – although the Clipper, from Hobart, is set to appear soon, but it is worth noticing that the Clipper, like The Dawn, is ‘contributed content’, that is, its digitisation will not be paid for by the National Library.
So what is going on in the Digitisation Program? If you look at the list of digitised papers on Trove you will find a lot of insignificant stuff - papers for children, for tiny bush communities, and Melbourne suburbs. I guess an argument can be made for this stuff, but does anybody really believe that the Australian Children’s Newspaper that ran for about a year is more important than the Labor Daily that appeared for almost twenty years, or than The Daily Standard that ran for 24 years? Or for that matter, any of the other 486 papers that made the labour movement the oldest source of citizenship training for ordinary people in this country, as well as producing the oldest political party, which currently holds office in the national government? Is political bias at work, or is it that the staff of the newspaper digitisation program are just ignorant of their field? Whatever the answer, the situation is outrageous.
It is also surprising that the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History and its seven branches seem uninterested in this matter, but they get very excited if their flagship journal is threatened with downgrading in the international scholarly pecking order. Perhaps their members have stopped doing research that draws on the labour press, but don’t they feel any responsibility to ensure that the labour press is fairly represented in Australia’s digitisation program? It is not as if they lack clout, as some of the country’s most published and rewarded academics are among their members. About thirty years ago one professor of literature ensured that rare periodicals from the 1840s were microfilmed and digitised. Surely a dozen or so labour history professors today could put enough pressure on the National Library to rectify this outrageous neglect of the labour press. [Terry Irving, 10 March 2012].
++++++
OCCUPY HISTORY. The Occupy Movement is a creative and energetic international social protest movement targeting the global growth of economic and social injustices and inequalities. The movement began in North America in September 2011, specifically targeting Wall Street. Since then it has spread to 82 countries and more than 2800 occupy sites/communities. In December 2011, Terry participated in classes organised by the Sydney (Australia) occupiers in Martin Place, iconic and symbolic heart of the Sydney CBD. In support of the movement, we have added our names to the Occupy History site. This site seeks to encourage historians to build discussions about inequality and injustice to include the histories of struggles against these, and the changes needed. [Irving/Cahill, 21 February 2012].
++++++
CLASSROOM IRRELEVANCY? The lives of Australian historians Eric Fry (1922-2007) and Jim Hagan (1929-2009) were deservedly celebrated by fellow academics following their respective deaths. Much of the memoir, obituary, scholastic material generated focussed on their significant contributions to the development of labour history as a scholastic/academic sub-discipline in Australia during, and since, the 1960s. On the radical involvement of both men as secondary school teachers during the 1950s and early 60s, before they morphed into academics, the accounts were virtually silent, their early classroom careers apparently considered irrelevant/inconsequential in the light of their later development and achievements as academic historians. Or maybe this aspect of their lives was just too hard to get a handle on. Whatever, it was an omission requiring rectification; simply, in the 1950s, at the height and the worst of the Cold War in Australia, these academics-in-waiting were, appropriating Gramsci, full-blown and courageous organic intellectuals; nor were they alone.
Fry came to school teaching via World War 2 Air Force service, university study/degree, work as a Commonwealth public servant, then teacher training; the younger Hagan, via school, university, and teacher training. As trainee teachers they were prominently and militantly involved in the newly formed Trainee Teachers Association. Fry was a member of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA); the jury is still out as to whether Hagan was a member. Threading through their lives was another communist, R.D. (Bob) Walshe.
Born in 1923, Walshe had left school at 14, worked in factories, did wartime military service, and matriculated in 1946, a beneficiary of the post-war Reconstruction Training Scheme. University, and teacher training followed. With others in 1946, notably fellow communist Alan Cross, later a prominent and long serving activist-leader within the NSW Teachers Federation, Walshe formed the union-like Reconstruction Trainees Association to assist and advance the interests of fellow Reconstruction Scheme beneficiaries.
In 1951, Cross, Fry, Hagan, Walshe were prominent in the leadership of the historic, and successful, strike by trainee teachers in pursuit of improved living allowances. Earlier in 1950, Walshe and Cross had gate-crashed a reception for delegates to the British Commonwealth Conference on Aid to South-East Asia to remonstrate with delegates about “the colonial war against the Malayans” and to call for national independence generally for the peoples of South-East Asia.
Fry’s classroom stint was brief; he left after winning won a PhD scholarship in 1952. Hagan and Walshe stayed longer, and were prominent in the creation and leadership of the History Teachers Association (HTA) in 1954. This was formed to enable secondary school teachers of history to meet and discuss the teaching of history and related matters. Significant education change was in the air in NSW with the Wyndham Scheme around the corner; part of sweeping changes soon to be ushered in was the freeing of history teaching in schools from the deadhand of Sydney University historian Sir Stephen Roberts, whose decades long influence over the curriculum had basically reduced secondary school history to rote learning for a public examination. The HTA challenged this hegemony, and sought to give teachers a voice in curriculum matters, as well as to help them develop and foster approaches to the teaching of history which emphasised thought and understanding. The driving force behind the HTA’s foundation was Renée Erdos, an inspirational educationist and skilled organiser with a Socratic approach to teaching; she had been prominent in the education of Reconstruction Scheme ex-service personnel, including Walshe. Erdos has all but dropped though the cracks of history, but has been rescued in a significant essay by Paul Kiem (“Renée Fauvette Erdos (1911-1997): Educator & Founder of the History Teachers’ Association of NSW”, Teaching History, June 2008); her papers are in the National Library of Australia.
Walshe and Hagan both produced school history texts that became standards, remaining in print for decades. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Walshe was a pioneer of history teaching techniques, and a conduit of these into the teaching profession, which encouraged students to be individual researchers and to approach writing as a form of thinking. Surviving evidence indicates that in the late 1950s Hagan was innovative in his classroom teaching of history with methods that were ahead of contemporary practice. Students remember both Walshe and Hagan as charismatic and influential classroom teachers.
In 1956, along with fellow communist Jim Staples, later Mr. Justice Staples of the Industrial Court, Walshe was responsible for the distribution within the CPA of the watershed Kruschev’s “Secret” Speech (1956), an act which saw him expelled from the party. Walshe quit the classroom during 1964 for a lifetime of writing, editing, publishing, activism; he started his own successful publishing company (Martindale Press: Sydney), became a significant and influential independent educationist, was joint founder in 1972 of the Total Environment Centre (Sydney), and still, in his late 80s, is politically active, heading up numerous community action groups. His scholarly work on Eureka Stockade produced in the early 1950s is still cited by historians.
Scholars interested in the milieu that produced Fry, Hagan, Walshe and company, will find Alan Barcan, Radical Students: The Old Left at Sydney University (Melbourne University Press, 2002), useful. [Rowan Cahill, 16 February 2012].
++++++
LEARNING FROM FOLEY: During the recent Sydney Festival, a significant radical history event took place: a run of performances of Gary Foley’s 100-minute one-man show Foley (Opera House, 24-29 January). At 61 Foley is a veteran Aboriginal activist, actor, writer, and academic; his website The Koori History Website is a vital and rich radical historical initiative. Foley, the show, was conceived with educational intent, basically a talk/lecture about Australian Aboriginal history and struggle, with the emphasis on struggle, aimed at informing, explaining, and changing perceptions. It is a history that Foley has had a significant role in making/shaping since the late 1960s. But it was more than a talk-cum-lecture; it was lecture as theatre. The combination of a skilled teacher with theatrical skills, as in the case of Foley, can be dynamite, producing the best sort of teaching. Foley mixed script with graphics, film, photographs, in the context of a simple cardboard set of archive boxes, the whole concoction informed by scholarship and activism, held together by a single powerful personality. Foley, the lecturer/activist, was variously passionate, anecdotal, humorous, as he detailed the often hidden history of Aboriginal struggle for justice since Federation, hidden in the sense that much of Foley’s material is not currently part of the general understanding of the Australian Story. Judging from published reviews, Foley/Foley was successful. Radical historians can learn a lot from Foley regarding the ways in which radical history can be made accessible beyond academia with its rounds of conferences, publication in small circulation specialist journals, experts talking to experts, a seductive process which tends to institutionally confine knowledge and understandings that should have more democratic constituencies. [Rowan Cahill, 1 February 2012].
++++
RADICAL HISTORY, SOCIAL HISTORY, & POLITICAL HISTORY: Frank Bongiorno (‘ “Real Solemn History” and its Discontents: Australian Political History and the Challenge of Social History’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, Vol. 56, No. 1, 2010, pp 6-20) has written a very valuable survey of the revival of political history since the 1980s. He argues that the cause of the revival is the ‘challenge’ of social history, and he discusses several important contributions from radical historians: Connell, Irving, Scalmer et al. Not only radicals contributed of course; on the other hand his emphasis on the radicalising potential of social history suggests a connection between radical historians and social history. We seem to be at the centre of his argument – if not of his survey. All very flattering, yet I’ve got misgivings. I’ve never thought of myself as a writer of social history, at least not in the way Frank means.
He writes of social history’s ‘democratic impulse’ to recover the voices of the poor, the powerless, the marginalised etc. That’s only part of what I do. I not only want to hear their voices, I want to see them act. The point is to return their agency to them.
I agree with Stuart Macintyre (‘The Rebirth of Political History’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, Vol. 56, No. 1, 2010, pp. 1-5): Frank’s survey places too much emphasis on ‘history from below’. This was surely influential but it led to a concentration on experience and identity and thus to the current dominance of cultural history, with its apparently never-ending discovery of discursive ‘anxieties’ – anxiety having become a puny surrogate in post-structuralism for the material grievances of real people taking action, as revealed in the analyses of radical historians. Stuart points out that another route followed by certain social historians was to draw on the social sciences to study classes and class relationships. He probably had his own early work in mind, but it perfectly describes what Connell, McQueen, Burgmann and I did as well – and many others besides, and we have continued to explore the strengths and weaknesses of class analysis.
What is missing from Frank’s discussion of the ‘social history of politics’ is any sense of the structure of power that produces rich and poor, powerful and powerless, elites and masses, public and counter-publics, the one percent and the ninety nine percent – ie of domination and subordination, of ruling and being ruled, which in turn is the setting for resistance to oppression, and the struggle and violence of political life. This is the perspective of class analysis. The social structuring of power is an absolutely essential element for radical historians, and it makes us into social and political historians of a different kind. [Terry Irving, 1 February 2012].
