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This webpage celebrates the achievements of Bruce McFarlane (1936- ), both as a
tribute a friend and comrade for fifty-six years, and to enrich collective
awareness of how much cutting-edge Marxism has been produced here as an
encouragement to anyone who fears that they missed out by not being born in
Paris or Caracas.
Bruce graduated from
University of Sydney, and later a Masters in Economics. Between 1957 and 1960, he
studied in Yugoslavia, which gave him a lifelong commitment to self-management,
and then to the Indian Planning Commission with Michal Kalecki. At Cambridge, he
worked with Joan Robinson and Maurice Dobb.
He taught economics at
the University of Queensland, Political Science at the ANU, was Professor of
Political Science at the University of Adelaide and Professor of Economics at Newcastle.
He has published some dozen
books, including Economic Policy in
Australia, the case for Reform (1968); The
Chinese Road to Socialism (1968) with Ted Wheelwright; Radical Economics (1982), and A
history of economic thought in Australia (1990) with Peter Groenewegen. There are countless journal articles on Asia
and Australia, about central planning and economic theory.
He served on the
editorial board of Labour History and
was among the founding editors of the Journal
of Contemporary Asia.
After more than a decade
of activism opposing the war against the peoples of Indo-China, which saw him
arrested three times, he, with his second
wife, the late Melanie Beresford, contributed to planning the reconstruction.
Bruce has never been
afraid of algebra anymore than he supposed that it equated to real existing
economies. Nor did he fall for the Third World-ist misreading of Lenin’s
Imperialism as latter-day colonialism rather than the era of monopolising
capitals.
No one on the Australian
Left more exemplifies what Marx meant in writing that if we are to change the
world we must interpret it but that we can interpret the world only through changing
it.
Humphrey
McQueen, October, 2016 |
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