Circling Marx: An Introduction

Learning through and from Peter Beilharz

“…Reading the introduction to Peter’s book, Circling Marx (Beilharz, 2020b), it quickly becomes apparent that Peter’s own teachers were important to him, and that they influenced him greatly. While this introduction chronicles his road to and his circling around Marx and Marxism, it is also a powerful artifact that shows how his road, how any such a road, is paved by relationships with others.…”

“…While this introduction chronicles his road to and his circling around Marx and Marxism, it is also a powerful artifact that shows how his road, how any such a road, is paved by relationships with others. We read about Doc Saffin, his year 12 teacher and mentor, the first person to call him mister (who was also the first to call him a socialist), who ‘bid [him] to read Edward Bellamy, and his local antipodean follower, William Lane’; who curated an ‘amazing’ year 12 curriculum: ‘Huxley and Orwell, Koestler and Camus, Wilde and Beckett, Shakespeare, Marx’s favourite, and then the Russians’ (Beilharz, 2020b: 3). Saffin continued to guide Peter’s voracious, yet indiscriminate reading, even as he began secondary teacher training at Rusden College in the suburbs of Melbourne: ‘Marx in Easton and Guddat, Fromm, Marcuse, Mattick, Mandel, Dunayevskaya’ (Beilharz, 2020b: 3).…”

“…We read about Doc Saffin, his year 12 teacher and mentor, the first person to call him mister (who was also the first to call him a socialist), who ‘bid [him] to read Edward Bellamy, and his local antipodean follower, William Lane’; who curated an ‘amazing’ year 12 curriculum: ‘Huxley and Orwell, Koestler and Camus, Wilde and Beckett, Shakespeare, Marx’s favourite, and then the Russians’ (Beilharz, 2020b: 3). Saffin continued to guide Peter’s voracious, yet indiscriminate reading, even as he began secondary teacher training at Rusden College in the suburbs of Melbourne: ‘Marx in Easton and Guddat, Fromm, Marcuse, Mattick, Mandel, Dunayevskaya’ (Beilharz, 2020b: 3). Peter chronicles how another revered teacher, Alastair Davidson, figured prominently in his intellectual development: ‘With Alastair [he] studied, and then taught Revolutionary Theories and Movements, from Marx to Althusser, and Comparative Communist Systems, Italy and France in the years of ascendant Eurocommunism’ (Beilharz, 2020b: 6).…”

Peter Beilharz as intellectual

“…The final chapters of Peter’s Circling Marx (Beilharz, 2020) are two Thesis Eleven editorials – the first from 1980, Volume 1, Issue 1, the second from 2010, Volume 100, Issue 1. In the latter, Peter notes, with respect to the ambitions and exuberance of those early years, that ‘rather than becoming the agents of transformation, we and others like us became its objects’ (2020: 395).…”

“…Peter’s concerns with the temptations and consequences of Faustian and redemptive politics never meant distancing himself from Marx, Marxism, socialism, utopia – in part, because the dominations they spoke to and struggled against remain with us, partly because they’re just part of our modernity. Continuously at the centre of Peter’s work (Beilharz, 1987, 1992, 1994, 2009, 2020), these currents are thought and engaged with as plurals and under culturalist and normative lights. Peter’s approach here, absent of pessimism, declinism or belligerence, has been to insist on the need to keep moving, circling back in new ways to draw on the strength and wisdom still to be found in these traditions.…”