Humphrey McQueen's complex intellectual development and his prodigious literary activity

For about the last 35 years, McQueen has been a self-employed writer, historian and Marxist intellectual, almost entirely outside both the advantages, fashions and restraints of the academic environment. In this he somewhat resembles Isaac Deutscher in a previous generation and another country, who produced his major work outside universities. In Australian intellectual life, McQueen occupies a niche a bit like that currently occupied in the UK by the impressive Marxist intellectual Terry Eagleton. In the sense that, like Eagleton, McQueen has remained grandly and effectively independent of the lunatic and transitory intellectual fashion of postmodernism and, again, like Eagleton, he has not tried at all (unlike many retreating Marxist intellectuals) to make concessions to the idiom, style or method of these bourgeois academic fashions. He and Eagleton have done something completely different. They have both developed and deepened classical Marxism in particular ways. In Humphrey's case, as part of his own intellectual evolution, he has explored and developed the Marxist method of Antonio Gramsci, without putting Gramsci to the crude opportunist uses that many Eurocommunist intellectuals do as part of their generalised shift to the political right.

In his first major intellectual transmogrification, his early Maoist phase, McQueen established his intellectual presence as a major labour and social historian with a sharp critique, from a rather ultraleft standpoint, of the previous generation of labour historians, Russell Ward, Ian Turner, Bob Gollan and others. His initial standpoint, expressed mainly in the long article from The New Left in Australia, was to make a sweeping distinction between a "petty bourgeois group of unions" and a "socialist proletarian group of unions", and this critique was given some verisimilitude by his already quite extraordinary reading and erudition.

Shortly afterwards, he published A New Britannia, in which he questioned the notion that a proletariat, in a broadly Marxist sense, had emerged at all in 19th century Australia. Methodologically, he advanced this view by mechanically associating the development of a proletariat with the necessity of such a proletariat having a proletarian consciousness. He was, of course, wrong about that. Nevertheless, despite this organic methodological error, which he quite frankly acknowledged later, in the Afterword to the 1986 revised edition of A New Britannia, the book had an extraordinary impact ideologically.

This was because of the robust and iconoclastic social history used by McQueen to demystify the evolution of class relations in Australia, in which he demonstrated a discursive, knowledgeable and witty eye. Typical of this new eye was his chapter about pianos, and the social function of pianos in Australian colonial society became a recurring motif in McQueen's social history. This importance of the piano in Australian social history has been taken up since by many others, but it was McQueen who first, in recent times, discovered and popularised the piano as a major artifact in Australian social history.

A New Britannia as bestseller

A New Britannia was the first Australian-written book that caught the wave of the cultural sea change in the 1960s and the 1970s, and for a serious book of history, it was a very major publishing success, and has since sold about 40,000 copies. The only two other books of Australian leftist history or sociology that ever approached it numerically, were Miriam Dixson's book, The Real Matilda: Woman and Identity in Australia, 1788-1975 (Pelican, Melbourne, 1976), and Keith Windschuttle's book, Unemployment, a Social and Political Analysis of the Economic Crisis in Australia, (Penguin Books, Melbourne, 1980) . But they came later.

McQueen was subsequently joined in his critique of the traditional Australian Marxist historians by the young Stuart Macintyre. But Macintyre, as it developed, was evolving in a somewhat different direction, into an almost stereotypically moderate social democratic disagreement with the Old Left historians. The debate about Australian labour history that developed around A New Britannia; was robust on all sides. From where I sit, it had an altogether healthy outcome. A kind of dialectical reconciliation eventually evolved. McQueen quietly, but quite clearly, relinquished the methodological standpoint of A New Britannia, and began to incorporate in his subsequent historical work the methodologically obvious: that, in objective terms, a proletariat did emerge in Australia in the 19th century, although it had a limited reformist consciousness.

For their part, the Old Left historians, with whom he had been arguing, accepted the limitations of their earlier work, in relation to sexism and racism in particular, to which McQueen had drawn attention so vigorously. The late Russell Ward, in particular, went on to write rounded socialist and populist histories of Australia, which remedied the defects to which McQueen had pointed, and took up something of McQueen's robust social history.

Having established his forte and major piece of intellectual territory as Australian social history, McQueen went on to produce several more wonderful, funny and interesting books of Australian social history, published by Penguin, which took advantage of the new technology of book production, with lots of illustrations, photos and pen drawings (partly designed for a high-school market) and these books became set texts in school history courses in many states, and sold extremely well. Again, the piano motif recurs in these books. For all this period, Humphrey did a bit of teaching, but the modest returns from his rather successful books enabled him to have a reasonable existence as an independent author and intellectual.

Humphrey McQueen and the visual arts

After this, McQueen's interest in the visual arts developed rapidly, and his next major sphere of intellectual activity turned him into one of Australia's important art historians -- in my view, up there even with Bernard Smith. McQueen's most significant work of art history is a breathtaking and comprehensive overview, with an implicit Marxist eye, of the evolution of Australian art, The Black Swan of Trespass. He had difficulty finding a publisher for this book, and it was eventually published by Apcol, a small socialist co-operative publisher. Apcol, however, didn't have much of a distribution network, and its resources didn't run to colour printing of the rich works of Australian art that pepper this important book. Black Swan of Trespass is an extremely important piece of Australian intellectual history, and it never got either the distribution or the presentation it deserves. It is an excellent candidate for some publisher with half a brain giving a decent advance to McQueen to produce a new, more elegant, edition with improved production and colour plates.

In this intellectual territory McQueen published a major work on the 19th century painter, Tom Roberts, and with others, a major piece of work on the painter Margaret Preston. McQueen also produced a major work on the Sydney religious artist Keith Looby in this period. This rather elegant book was published by Penguin. Looby is a friend of McQueen (and a friend of the reactionary op-ed journalist, P.P. McGuiness, so his network of acquaintances crosses many boundaries in a rather typical Sydney way).

Over the past 15 years, McQueen has produced a number of books about Australia that cross the boundaries between social history, history and current affairs. They're witty, useful and erudite, but they have a slightly more ephemeral quality than some of his earlier work. He has also written a spirited defence of his old teacher, the historian Manning Clark, against the right-wing literary and historical vultures who have attacked Clark's reputation. This is a very effective little book. In 1991 McQueen spent a year in Japan, and wrote a book about that, which is a useful insight into Japanese life, and perhaps had a little of the flavour of a kind of intellectual corrective to the crude anti-Japanese sentiment that used to prevail in the Maoist circles in which McQueen mainly began his intellectual activity.

McQueen's latest book is that most unlikely leftist artifact, a Marxist history of Coca-Cola. This is a very useful work indeed, and demonstrates in a low-key but effective way the great utility of classical Marxism in the social sciences. He also recently made a very serious contribution to the workers' control conference, organised by Jura Books on the last major upsurge of industrial militancy in Australia between 1965 and 1975. An insightful and useful contribution to that gathering, of considerable importance in trying to comprehend how a new industrial upsurge might begin.

Humphrey McQueen at age about 60 in the year 2004

Humphrey is still what he has been all his life, both an activist, and a serious Marxist intellectual. A year or so ago he joined the DSP-led Socialist Alliance, which, ideologically speaking, was more of a case of the DSP leadership joining him, in the sense that the DSP now holds an even more extreme version of the ultraleft, sectarian attitude toward the mainstream labour movement that Humphrey once did in his youth. It's not entirely clear to what extent he still holds those views. McQueen has certainly abandoned the incorrect, ultraleft methodological substructure of the first edition of A New Britannia. It's also interesting and moving to hear McQueen speak, as I've heard him several times in recent years, talking about the attachment, particularly of his father, to the ALP, and the aspirations to radical social change embodied in that attachment. It'll be interesting to see how McQueen expresses himself on the tactical questions that are emerging in the run-up to the next federal election.

In my view the main weakness of McQueen's contribution to Australian Marxist theory is that, despite the fact, that in expounding the general ideas of Marxism, he has few peers in Australia, nevertheless these days he tends to avoid making current tactical propositions. Up to a point, this is understandable, considering his early political excesses, along with those of others in the Maoist movement of that time. However, this failure to express himself very clearly on current tactical questions severely limits his contribution to current debates.

McQueen is an impressive, colourful and interesting public speaker. Given any audience, he can talk to them underwater, so to speak. He prepares his material carefully, and presents eloquently, with lots of flourishes, and his impressive meeting magisterium is sharpened by his great height (a bit like Gough Whitlam). In the cut-and-thrust of debate, he takes no prisoners. He is a pretty useful bloke to have on your side, and a difficult man to argue with if you disagree with him. He plays a crowd elegantly and with great verve.

McQueen has all sorts of strings to his bow. He is, for instance, an opera buff, and he manages to earn a few dollars, from time to time, writing opera and cultural reviews for The Bulletin, where his and my old mate and sparring partner, Hall Greenland, is one of the sub-editors. All in all, Humphrey McQueen has made a major intellectual contribution to the preservation of a Marxist intellectual current in Australian life, and that is particularly important in the current difficult, defensive framework in which socialists find themselves at the moment.

At the moment Humphrey McQueen is engaged in a new venture, being one of the major editors of a Marxist magazine for the Socialist Alliance, to be called Seeing Red. McQueen and the other editors have assembled some good articles, and one not-so-good article, for the first issue, but the stumbling block seems to be, as it always is in socialist publishing, scraping together the money to produce the kind of elegant socialist magazine that McQueen favours. In this era of the net, producing, financing and distributing hard-copy socialist magazines is even harder than the past, because a lot of the potential audience and demand seems to be satisfied by the internet.

I have been acquainted with Humphrey McQueen for a very large part of my political life. To be frank, I took the initiative in putting up several of his significant articles on Ozleft as part of the ongoing political argument between myself, him, and others such as the DSP leadership, on labour movement history and tactics. In the course of doing this, however, it began to forcibly strike me that Humphrey McQueen is a pretty unusual political survivor. Some of the political contemporaries who we share, who have made past contributions to socialist agitation and Marxist intellectual activity, have shifted over to the political right. These include some of McQueen's early associates in the Maoist movement (Albert Langer, etc) and such people as Keith Windschuttle and Bob Catley. Others, such as Stuart McIntyre, Humphrey's associate in the critique of the Old Left historians, have shifted over to the Social Democratic centre. In this context, it is therefore pretty important that McQueen has continued, in his own independent way, the project of developing Marxist theory in Australia in new conditions, and his continuing intellectual energy and activity is pretty impressive in a man of 60 or thereabouts.

He has published more books non-fiction books on labour and social history, sociology and art history than any other Australian Marxist intellectual, and he's still hard at it, and that's an important achievement in itself.

Bibliography

A New Britannia: An Argument Concerning the Social Origins of Australian Nationalism and Socialism, Pelican Books, Melbourne, 1970

Aborigines, Race and Racism, Penguin Books, Melbourne, 1974

Social Sketches of Australia, 1888-1975, Harmondsworth Penguin, 1978

The Black Swan of Trespass: The Emergence of Modernist Painting in Australia to 1944, Alternative Publishing Co-operative, Sydney, 1979

The Art of Margaret Preston, Art Gallery Board of South Australia, Adelaide, 1980 (with Ian North and Isobel Seivl)

Australia's Media Monopolies, Visa, Melbourne, 1981

Gone Tomorrow: Australia in the 1980s, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1982

Gallipoli to Petrov: Arguing With Australian History, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1984

Suburbs of the Sacred: Transforming Australian Beliefs and Values, Penguin, Melbourne, 1988

Japan to the Rescue: Australian Security Around the Indonesian Archipelago during the American Century, Heinemann, Port Melbourne, 1991

Tokyo World: An Australian Diary, William Heinemann, Melbourne, 1991

Tom Roberts, Macmillan, Sydney, 1996

Suspect History: Manning Clark and the Future of Australia's Past, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 1997

Temper Democratic: How Exceptional is Australia? Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 1998

The Essence of Capitalism: The Origins of Our Future, Sceptre/Hodder Headline

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