Rick Kuhn is an Honorary Associate Professor in Sociology at the ANU. Since his first appointment at ANU in 1987, he has researched and taught in political economy, the history of the labour movement, race and racism in Australia, and Marxist economic theory. His book Henryk Grossman and the Recovery of Marxism (2007) won the international Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Prize “for a book which exemplifies the best and most innovative new writing in or about the Marxist tradition.” When I met him in his office in the Beryl Rawson Building on a hot summer afternoon, he had just arrived back from a rally outside the gates of the United States (US) Embassy in Yarralumla. He had addressed the rally, ‘In Solidarity with Jerusalem’, which was a response to President Trump’s announcement that his administration intended to move the US Embassy in Israel from its current location in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
-Louis Klee
LK: So what did you say at the rally today?
RK: My initial argument was that people like us at the rally—in Canberra, in Sydney, and in Melbourne, but also especially in Amman, and in Cairo, and in Beirut— are what will make a significant difference. While the Palestinian people are very brave, their leverage isn’t that great. Major change in the Middle East will come from what happens in the surrounding countries. The Arab Spring showed what was possible. It toppled regimes and there was a shift towards real support, as opposed to just verbal support for the Palestinian cause. We are in a phase of reaction now in the Middle East, but we’ve seen what is possible, and those possibilities can be realised when the Arab masses topple their regimes which are de facto allies of Israel and the United States, especially in the case of Egypt, which is the most populous, and Saudi Arabia, which is the richest.
LK: The politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is something you’ve been involved in for many years. You’ve been a member, for instance, of Jews Against Oppression and Occupation (JAOO). Is there a significance to opposing the occupation from a specifically Jewish standpoint?
RK: I think so. I’m not religious—I’m an atheist—but growing up I had a sense of how Jews were persecuted. Now in Australia Jews are not persecuted. There’s some anti-Semitism around, but the people who face serious persecution are Muslims and people who aren’t white; and that sense of identity with people who are persecuted was part of my political formation—a sense of solidarity with other people who are fighting against oppression. At university that intersected with what I came to know about left politics. I got involved with a struggle for political economy courses at Sydney University from my first year. That was my initial practice and my initial theory was being involved in the Capital reading group with people who had much more knowledge than I had.
LK: When was that?
RK: That was while I was an undergraduate from ‘74 to ’76 at Sydney University. So the tail end of the student revolution.
LK: Did that have ramifications for Sydney University?
RK: The struggle for courses in political economy was very big and was eventually successful. There still are courses in radical approaches to economics in a separate Department of Political Economy at Sydney University. I took a year off after my economics degree and worked in the public service in Canberra for six months and I came into contact with a revolutionary Marxist organisation and joined it. That is what has sustained me as an activist—being part of an organisation with other people who want to change the world, who are actively trying to change it, and who also have an analysis of what’s going on. As an individual you can be terribly clever—which I’m not claiming to be—but even if you are terribly clever, covering everything and knowing about everything is exceptionally difficult. But if you’re in an organisation where you share basic assumptions and approaches then the burden on the individuals is eased and you can develop a broader kind of understanding. You’re also much more effective in concert with other people, particularly if you have means of disseminating your ideas, like a newspaper.
LK: What was that organisation?
RK: That was the called the International Socialists, which was a forerunner of the organisation that I’m in now, which is Socialist Alternative. That participation, that collective project of trying to bring about change, having a perspective of change that comes from below (because for us Marxism is the theory and practice of working-class self-emancipation)—that’s been really important.
LK: On the subject of theory and practice, has your activism been in a dialectical relationship to your scholarship?
RK: My real university education, in terms of developing theoretically, has been Socialist Alternative and its predecessors. I have an economics degree from Sydney University, Honours in politics from Macquarie, and a PhD in Government from Sydney University, but my real education has been through being involved with other people who share perspectives. That has influenced the way that I’ve approached the world and my reading. Some of my academic studies have provided opportunities to engage in that reading and deepened my understanding of Marxism and how to apply it, while also working towards a degree—and eventually, as it turned out, getting a job.
LK: What are some of the struggles you’ve been involved with over the years?
RK: I’ve been involved in quite a lot—struggles for abortion rights; much more recently, since 2004 when the Howard government legislated against equal marriage rights, I’ve helped organise demonstrations for equal marriage rights and organising demonstrations over that issue; solidarity campaigns such as with the Palestine struggles, on and off since before I joined the organised left. And I’ve been an activist and workplace delegate, most recently with the National Tertiary Education Union. In the late 70s and early 80s, there was the Movement Against Uranium Mining. I participated in the campaign over Star Wars, which was US President Reagan’s rearmament program (Strategic Defense Initiative). I remember marching up Capital Hill, to Parliament House with our daughter in her pram on a summer’s day—she would have been one or two. When the Northern Territory Intervention, which curtailed Aboriginal people’s rights, was announced the Secretary of Unions ACT, Kim Sattler, and I organised demonstrations in Canberra, the first demonstrations in Canberra against the Intervention.
LK: Marcuse at times speaks of the university as a space for the fermentation of radical politics. Do you think this is still the case today?
RK: The thing about universities is that there is scope for young people who are less ground down by the established order to engage in some exploration of ideas and to experiment and so on. Whether they take advantage of those opportunities or not is another question but there is that scope.
The political climate at universities can change quite rapidly, given the three-year or so cycle of student turnover. In that sense there may be more of a space for people to come to radical ideas than elsewhere. And you can have an impact as a group of students in a way that’s not possible amongst workers. A minority of students can really disrupt the university, but a minority of workers who take industrial action—unless they do very strategic jobs—will be screwed unless they have the majority behind them.
There is some space for students to explore ideas, including radical kinds of ideas. It depends, in part, on whether there are people around who can offer them those ideas. People of my generation who had careers at university that were made possible by the radicalisation in universities of the late-sixties and early-seventies—which was driven by students—are dying out and retiring. In terms of staff who can make those ideas available there are fewer and fewer. So now it’s overwhelmingly radical students themselves who are spreading the ideas.
LK: You have an enduring fascination with the work and life of Henryk Grossman. How did you become interested in him and his work?
RK: In the late ‘70s, or maybe the early ‘80s, I read a terrific piece by Anwar Shaikh about Marxist crisis theory which mentions Grossman. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, 1989, I started learning German here at the ANU and thought I might apply this skill to the Grossman fellow who I’d read about. A lot of his work wasn’t that well-known. There were mentions of him, mainly denunciations. He was widely denounced by both Stalinists and Social Democrats. I got stuck into it after my first study leave from ANU. I’ve worked on him since then. I produced a biography of Grossman, the first book length biography in English—and it took me a mere thirteen years to write.
LK: What is the significance of his theory of crisis to you as an activist?
RK: In terms of the kinds of arguments we make, it’s important because it says that capitalism cannot be fixed, that it’s inherently crisis-prone, and those crises lead to significant class struggles. At the moment, unfortunately, it’s mainly class struggle from above down on the working class. But it leads to class struggles; it intensifies the horrors of capitalism. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote words to the effect that the bourgeoisie is unfit to rule because it can’t feed its slaves in their slavery, meaning workers. That’s not true all the time, but it is true some of the time, and necessarily so, when workers are thrown onto the scrap heap and their living standards are attacked during deep recessions. I think that’s an extremely important and powerful argument, but abstract argument doesn’t convince many people. You might win over some, but not significant numbers.
The other thing about being in an organisation is that you can participate in struggle more effectively alongside others. And it’s through mass struggle that large numbers of people can be radicalised. But any struggle against oppression or exploitation is important. So I was at the US Embassy expressing solidarity with the Palestinian struggle over Trump’s provocation on Jerusalem. My comrades in Melbourne are going regularly to the picket line at the Webb Dock. Anywhere people are fighting against their oppression or their exploitation we want to be there, we want to support it, and we want to make arguments about how it fits into a bigger picture—that this individual struggle is a response to the underlying problem of capitalism. The more we generalise those struggles, the more that solidarity is built amongst them, the more effective each of those partial struggles can be and the better the prospects that there will be a struggle that gets rid of capitalism.
LK: I thought I’d ask you about one of your passions—bird watching. How did you come to bird watching?
RK: I got interested in bird watching when I was depressed about my academic career and left-wing politics. Things weren’t going so well in the mid-1990s. I thought I needed to do something that I wouldn’t do so obsessively; bird watching was it. I might write down some things that I see but I don’t have a life list. Bird watching, for me, is about enjoying the natural world and getting some exercise, but it tends not to be aerobic.
LK: Is that passion for the natural world in Marxism too?
RK: In fact, it is. There were some brilliant works published around 2000, such as John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology and Paul Burkett’s Marx and Nature, which recovered Marx as an ecological figure. Because of the environmental movement, and their interest in Marxism, they went back and looked at Marx, finding that he was concerned and wrote about environmental issues. He understood environmental crises as a product not just of human nature or technology, but a product of the kind of society we live in—a capitalist society where production is to make profits not to satisfy human needs. Human beings have biological needs and are part of nature themselves. Therefore, environmental and ecological concerns are fundamental to a humanist understanding of the world. In 1998, I set up a page called ‘Marxism and Birds’ which touches on these questions, hopefully in a humorous way, through quotes from different Marxists, such as Marx and Engels, Luxemburg, and Trotsky, who in some way mentioned birds.
