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nt As the Vietnam War came to an end, the Maoist student movement declined rapidly, as did the Trotskyist and Anarchist youth movements in other states. The lack of very clear and recognisable party connections between the Maoist youth movement and the broader society contributed to the decline of the Maoist student movement. p> During this decline the Maoist movement became even more sectarian and there were a number of incidents of physical assaults by some Maoists against political rivals on the general grounds that they were "counter-revolutionary". Happily, after a while these assaults ceased. p> A number of former Maoist student leaders moved on to become organisers of the Builder's Labourers Federation, under the Maoist union leader Norm Gallagher - particularly Jim Bacon and Brian Boyd. In 1977, after the overthrow of the Gang of Four in China, the Maoist student movement split, with leading personalities such as Langer and Russell supporting the Gang of Four, and they formed a group called the Red Eureka Movement, which didn't last long.
The most charismatic figure in the Maoist movement, Albert Langer, gained a certain notoriety in the 1990s through a belligerent campaign for the right to vote informal in elections, and came out in support of the first Gulf War, as did some of his old associates, such as Darce Cassidy. Darce, generally a pleasant and affable bloke, became first a producer at the ABC, and the secretary of the ABC Staff Association (the union), then moved over to become head of industrial relations of the ABC (the employer).
When the second Gulf War erupted, Langer and Kerry Russell, energetic activists still, became converts to the "progressive nature" of US imperialism, their former primary foe, viz a viz the allegedly barbarous "Islamic Threat". They assembled a number of their old Maoist associates, such as Bill Kerr and Barry York around a website devoted to preaching the virtues and progressive features of the second Gulf War. A recent article in the G oo d W ee k e nd (the Sydn e y M o rn i ng H e r a ld and A g e Saturday magazine) was revealing about the political evolution of the old Maoist activists. Albert Langer, Kerry Russell, Bill Kerr and Barry York supported the second Gulf War, while Mike Hyde and Fergus Robinson, in addition to Humphrey McQueen, Brian Boyd and Jim Bacon, all opposed the war. So the second Gulf War divided the old WSA Maoist student cadres down the middle. br/>
Humphr e y McQu ee n ' s c o mpl e x i nt e ll e ctu a l d e v e l o pm e nt a nd h i s pr o d i g io us l i t e r a ry a ct i v i ty
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,...
