Just received this short note from Humphrey McQueen this morning. Condolences to Humphrey and to Bruce’s family, friends and comrades. – Ian Curr Ed., WBT.
Bruce died this evening at around 9 Christchurch time.
Knowing that if not now then, and if not then now, does not made his loss easier.
We have a lost his experience, passion and knowledge.
His last letter from about ten days ago was as keen minded as ever.
The url is to a tribute I did for the Journal of Contemporary Asia.
Please feel free to circulate it widely, and to extract any segment to use without needing to seek permission.
Humphrey McQueen
11 Dec 2022
| This webpage celebrates the achievements of Bruce McFarlane (1936-2022), 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 |
References
https://www.surplusvalue.org.au/McQueen/marxism/Bruce%20McFarlane%20tribute.pdf