Slow learners.(Student Radicals: The Old Left at Sydney University)(Book Review)

Student Radicals: The Old Left at Sydney University, by Alan Barcan; Melbourne University Press, 2002, $59.95.

ONLY ALAN BARCAN could have written this book. Not just because he is an historian used to handling sources critically, or because he is a leading historian of educational institutions. Student Radicals is also an autobiography by a man deeply involved in the story--and an Old Leftie whose disenchantment, however qualified, gives him a useful detachment.

A key chapter is the memoir. It develops two basic themes. The first is that for Barcan the radical or revolutionary cause was never the welfare state or the improvement of working conditions. His revolution was anchored in the Western liberal tradition. It meant the end of the regime of repression, superstition, philistinism. It intimated emancipation, a freeing of the mind.

In Australia the most theoretically articulate of this kind of revolutionary was John Anderson, especially the Anderson of the 1920s and early 1930s. The influence of his ideas, including his later anticommunism, was great and continuous, although Barcan was often hard to persuade. We may get a better idea of Barcanism if we think of George Orwell and his lifelong struggle against the three evils of the age--fascism, communism and imperialism.

The second theme is related to this. There were two turning points in Barcan's life. One was when he left the Communist Party following the Stalinist coup in Prague and the Stalin-Tito split in 1948. The other was when he left the Labor Party following what he calls the "Cultural Revolution" of 1967-74. He sees it as a nihilist revolution--the devaluation of the Western heritage, the denial of disinterestedness, objectivity, truth, freedom, and the triumph of relativism, egalitarianism, multiculturalism. The rise and spread of this empire of nihilism has become his master theme.

There are several episodes in his story, at once exhilarating and depressing, of university or student politics. In the first, Barcan describes the establishment in the 1920s and 1930s of political clubs, notably the Labour Club, and the struggles--within the left--between the Stalinists and the anti-Stalinists. At Sydney University this meant between the Communist Party and the Andersonians. They argued about the Spanish Civil War, the Moscow Trials, the rise of Hitler, the early reports of the Gulag, the assassination of Trotsky.

Next, in the 1940s, there was a surge of Stalinism in the wake of the Red Army's epic victory over Hitler's war machine, which had been expected to roll easily through the demoralised Soviet Union. This triumph was soon followed by revulsion against Stalinism as it became clear what the sovietisation of Europe (as in Czechoslovakia) meant. These stages correspond, broadly, with Barcan's joining and leaving the Communist Party.