Реферат The life and work of the self-employed socialist intellectual, Humphrey McQueen

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, Th e Bl a ck Sw a n o < i> f Tr e sp a ss . 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. Bl a ck Sw a n o f Tr e sp a ss 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. p> In this intellectual territory McQueen published a major work on the 19 th 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, PP McGuiness, so his network of acquaintances crosses many boundaries in a rather typical Sydney way). p> 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. <В В  Humphr e y McQu ee n a t a g ea b o ut 60 i n th e y ea r 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 <...