Robert McLean
Forms of Freedom: Marxist essays in New Zealand and Australian literature by Dougal McNeill (Otago University Press, 2024), 248pp, $45
Marxist literary theory is a broad but dogmatic church, attracting all sorts but requiring mental agility and stamina to rise in its priesthood. My middle-class National Party voting parents were somewhat put out when I distributed xeroxed copies of The Communist Manifesto pamphlet at high school, but not especially so. My motivations for that, from this distance in time, now seem almost entirely opaque. No doubt discomfiting adults had something to do with it, but so too my vague intimation that all was not right in the world. Certainly, something took seed and for much of my early adulthood I delved deeply into that broad church of Marxism, actually trudging through much of Karl Marx’s Capital and then being drawn to what ought to have been indigestible portions of Althusser, Gramsci, Negri, Badiou, Adorno, but which as a would-be-radical adolescent I was hungry for.
Nowadays, though, I find it difficult to understand why ‘Marx’ remains such a potent panjandrum for the left. Possibly it is because he and the ideas concatenated under his name are so adaptable to time and temper; at least they are in the realm of the academe. But in the pragmatic world, particularly when they are applied in government, especially ones with unchecked power, they always seem to go the same way and Marxist ideology leads to famine, want and war. Putting that aside for a bit, Dougal McNeill’s Forms of Freedom is very much the academe variety. McNeill’s placing of his essays under the aegis of Marxism seems to have been done partly to annoy or disturb—and thereby attract—middle-class readers. None of its ideas or assertions require Marxist authority, and indeed some of them are directly opposed to it, or at least to how I understand it: ideas like ‘liberty’ and ‘rights’.
McNeill’s premise is: ‘We are mutually dependant beings, reliant on each other for care and support. We are also capable of conscious self-directed labour and so creativity and expression are core parts of what makes us human.’ At present, and presumably since the end of feudalism (or possibly mercantilism), these human capacities have been made ‘subordinate to the profit motive and the unplanned and destructive needs of capital’. Obviously, there is a problem that needs solving. McNeill’s key to all mythologies is Marxism; or as he calls it, ‘The freedom project’, which unfortunately ‘is necessarily vague’ because ‘this kind of freedom is, as yet, nowhere realised’. It is worth emphasising this point: nowhere during the last five or six hundred years has it been ‘realised’, while ‘freedom’ itself in our contemporary world has become something a weasel word, claimed by authoritarian regimes and human rights protesters alike.
In lieu of the depredations of rapacious ‘capital’, McNeill turns to literature—to poems by Robbie Burns and Hone Tuwhare and novels by Albert Wendt and Pip Adam amongst other works by New Zealanders and Australians—where ‘the work of the imagination’ can shape logographic life-worlds with a freedom that anticipates that of the Marxist world-to-come. Forms of Freedom, then, is McNeill’s attempt to tease out a latent or blatant messianism from a diverse range of broadly leftist or liberationist texts.
However, rather than focusing on the actual texts, McNeill emphasises the motivations of his chosen authors. For example, McNeill asserts that ‘Tuwhare’s act of ventriloquizing becomes one of his methods to hack his path into poetry and his way of making audible and imaginable collective forms of working-class agency and subjectivity. The figure of those collective forms is Māori Marx, Māori modernism.’ Although there is much in those two sentences that requires explaining, it comes at the end of the Tuwhare chapter. Is that ‘figure’ some kind of leviathan totem, intended to rhyme with Tuwhare’s poem ‘Totem Thoughts’? How, I wonder, does McNeill feel confident enough to speak on Tuwhare’s behalf about what the poet’s intentions were and why he had them? And even if we grant that McNeill has somehow deciphered the poet’s purpose, how are these intentions relevant? I suspect the reason is that according to McNeill they are ipso facto Marxist. Certainly, even after having stretched or squashed the poem onto an ostensibly Marxist procrustean bed, it is extraordinarily reductive to suggest a poem was written for such prescriptive reasons, not that I care particularly why any poem has been written: what matters is its effect.
McNeill fleetingly touches the poem’s formal aspects: he notes its ‘gentle assonance and vowel sounds and ghosts of rhymes’, which he bafflingly suggests are ‘opposing the ear’s instincts to the mind’s’; he notes Tuwhare’s ‘skills in rhetorical organisation’. Unfortunately, McNeill does not suggest that the poem’s striking rhetorical and poetic effects are Marxist avant la lettre and then explain why he reckons they are. Doing so would have been pleasantly and probably fruitfully bloody-minded. As for Tuwhare’s declared ‘skills’, they are a matter of supposition but the poem remains available for analysis in poetic terms. We can readily examine the poem’s rhetorical organisation. McNeill, frustratingly, does not do so. This, however, is unsurprising because for McNeill the poem is secondary: ‘it’s the recording voice that matters, not what is being recorded’. At which point, I wonder what has become of the ‘literature’ with which the book is supposed to be concerned.
McNeill writes apropos Tuwhare that ‘Dunayevskaya’—a lapsed Trotskyite—‘maintains that, for Marx, the proletariat, the speaker of a poem like “Monologue”, is the “live, concrete, revolutionary subject’ of the dialectic”.’ It seems to me that wheeling in the obscure Dunayevskaya tells us far more about McNeill than it does about Tuwhare’s poem. McNeill’s logic is choppy indeed: the poem’s fictional speaker is assumed to be working-class—perhaps the ‘fifteen months’ he has worked ‘here’ came after losing his job as an import/export executive—and assumed to have attained sufficient class-consciousness to be considered a proletariat. Because Raya Dunayevskaya is homogenously characterising proletariats—or the proletariat as they say—she is ipso facto characterising the speaker or objectifying him (or her). Of course, a poem’s speaker cannot be ‘concrete’ let alone ‘live’: these are the worst kind of abstract generalisations. They can, at a generous stretch, be a ‘revolutionary subject’ but nothing in the poem suggests the speaker is one, although that is true of living people, too. They are objectified by so-called Humanist Marxists like Dunayevskaya and McNeill—or by their books to be accurate—so they might become the subjects of historical necessity. It is vertiginous how topsy-turvy subjectivity and objectivity can get sometimes.
Are these essays meaningfully Marxist? Does McNeill actually subscribe to the labour theory of value or historical materialism? It doesn’t seem to me that the book’s purported Marxism is methodological. For it to be so, one would have to apply whatever Marxist principles, assumptions, or—more credibly—attitudes one has and apply them to whatever text is being interpreted. The Marxist summa-in-a-nutshell surely remains The Communist Manifesto’s ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’, which has been broadened to breaking point to include all dichotomous power relations. In such terms, a Marxist reading of any text is therefore available: diagnose the binaries and biases. Marx himself had described a constant change of hostile classes: ‘freedman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed.’ McNeill quotes the admittedly preposterous 1954 Mazengarb Report, a ready-made strawman if ever there were one, which hilariously reported that there had been ‘sexual orgies perpetrated in several private homes during the absence of parents, and in several second-rate Hutt Valley theatres’; the comedic timing is impeccable and the appendment of ‘second-rate’ is exemplary. But it is trucked out to provide evidence of ‘moral panic’ in service to capital’s imperatives and starkly fruitless contrast to Eve Langley—who sounds like terrific company—and her poems and novels, such as the rollicking roman-à-clef The Pea-Pickers, which caused critical conniptions because women wore trousers in it. The contrast is far too obvious. What is obvious is that approving readers of Mazengarb Report would find The Pea-Pickers as ridiculous as the novel’s approving readers would find the Mazengarb Report. And I wonder if I am the only parent who would be concerned about my children going to orgies for reasons aside from ‘disciplining “abject subjects” and “monsters” into pliable wage labourers’. I think it is possible to support or at least be ambivalent about ‘sexual dissidence and gender non-conformity’ without trumping for orgies, which to me have always seemed desperately middle-class and a form of intimate commodification decent Marxists ought to oppose.
What one is left with is a book of enthusiasms and commitments. The link it fashions between text and theory is—to borrow from Althusser—one of base to superstructure. They float independently of each other; the connection between them is purely associative: this poem or book, the author seems to say, reminds me of these (usually inscrutable ones) by various theorists. In the chapter about Elsie Locke’s 1958 essay written in response to the Soviet invasion of Hungary, ‘Looking for Answers’, one encounters the following:
Locke’s essay draws on debates from a social world no longer our own. Her contribution to the melancholy Traverso describes might have ‘its strategic dimension’, as Traverso writes, not in ‘organising the suppression of capitalism, but rather in overcoming the trauma of a suffered collapse’. Her art, following Traverso, ‘lies in organising pessimism: to draw lessons from the past; to recognise defeat without capitulating in front of the enemy, with the awareness that a new start will inescapably take new forms, unknown paths’.
Locke wrote an essay about the Left’s laggard crisis of conscience following yet another demonstration of the Soviet Union’s inhumanity, which had already included the Red Terror, the Soviet hijacking of the popular front during the Spanish Civil War, the Great Purge, and various ‘famines’ including the Ukrainian Holodomor … (mind you, the book tends to represent such real-world socialism as ‘socialism’). Enzo Traverso is a contemporary Italian Marxist scholar. Despite how Traverso’s musings are presented in relation to Locke’s essay, he was not writing about it: ‘Her art, following Traverso’. Obviously, I and most putative readers will know Locke did not because she could not write according to Traverso’s precepts. The connection is purely associative on McNeill’s part. But what does the association do for the reader? It reminds me of the Christian penchant for Virgil’s Aeneid: Aeneas is to Adam what Octavius is to Jesus; or that puer in Virgil’s Eclogue 4 pastoral is, ‘in fact’, Christ. The classical scholar H.J. Rose argued that Virgil’s pastoral is ‘in a sense Messianic, since it contains a prophecy (whether meant seriously or not).’ Swap out messianic for Marxist and, unfortunately, this is basically McNeill’s modus operandi in Forms of Freedom.
I certainly hope that humanity finds better and more sustainable ways to care for each other and the planet. The default settings have proven themselves to be wasteful and destructive. Finance capitalism is vile. But Marxists have always proven themselves to be a murderous bunch whenever they have unbridled power. As an aside, how has Trotsky ever received a pass for his bloodied talons? This is the Trotsky whom McNeill unironically quotes in an epigraph as saying, ‘Our position is in the highest degree tragic’; this is the Trotsky who, like the paleo-conservative movie actor Charlton Heston, beheld a vision of ‘The promised land—the new kingdom of justice, freedom, contentment and cultural uplift’, which like the second coming was constantly postdated while the corpses piled up obscuring the glowing horizon.
I haven’t seen it made, but there could be a tenderable argument that given how tenuous planetary life is becoming, Marxism and its attendant rigorously planned economies are the only way to save the situation and that gulags, killing fields, labour camps and late-night knocks on the door are the price to pay. Perhaps, but one can support all the causes to which McNeill ascribes—and fulsomely so—without a (rigorously qualified) party card. And one can read all the books and poems about which he writes without one, too.
ROBERT McLEAN is a poet, critic, editor and doctoral student at Massey University. His collected poems were published in 2020 by Cold Hub Press. He lives in Lyttelton and works in Wellington for the New Zealand government.
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