Bruce McFarlane and His Contribution to Radical History of Economics

With the recent passing of Bruce McFarlane at the age of 86, Australian political economy lost an insightful radical economist that needs to be recognised by the history of economic thought community.

McFarlane’s enormous contribution to the study of Asian economic development has been well documented in the Journal of Contemporary Asia (JCA) – an alternative journal to mainstream perspectives on contemporary Asian issues for which he was co-editor from 1980 to 2005. The first JCA article on McFarlane marked his retirement after 25 years as editor (Rasiah 2006). The second was a detailed tribute in the twilight of his life on his unique political economy role as activist-scholar by a long-time friend and comrade (McQueen 2021). The last item was an obituary by the current editor of JCA (Hewison 2023). However, nothing else has marked McFarlane’s life except for a short website recognition by Marxist friends in Adelaide who describe him as a ‘brilliant lecturer …[with] powerful use of rhetoric’ (Nyland and Nyland 2022).

This obituary marks McFarlane’s contribution to the history of economics in three respects: (i) the early years of HETSA and related articulation of an Australian approach to economic thought, (ii) Marxian/Kaleckian theoretical insights and their policy implications, and (iii) Australian economic development. Two contextual notes set the scene. McFarlane is the only avowed Marxist to hold an economics professorial chair in an Australian university. Along with Allen Oakley, these two professors were my PhD supervisors at the University of Newcastle.¹ Towards the end of the thesis writing, McFarlane arrived in Newcastle and ‘stepped up to the plate’ with feedback on my drafts. He was crucial in providing intellectual stimulus and insights in applying Kalecki’s business cycle analysis to the Australian manufacturing sector.

The second note concerns the use of the term ‘radical economics’ in relation to the history of economics. As McFarlane (1982, 9) states as the first sentence of his book simply titled Radical Economics: ‘Confrontation within economics is 150 years old’, and that is the recurrent radical core of all his history of economic thought (HET) research work. From Ricardo to Walras, J. B. Clark, Hobson and Veblen, McFarlane’s focus was on insights in their economics (or more accurately ‘political economy’) that have never been incorporated into the dominant mainstream economics. He rejected the pure ‘moral indignation’ approach of so-called radical economics that looked at the empirical problems of inequality, racism, sexism (up to 1968) and then technological unemployment, inflation, and stagnation (in the 1970s). This ‘radical’ approach lacked an understanding of the market forces and associated mechanisms that underpin such issues.² Groenewegen (1979) in his survey of Australian radical economics in the 1970s recognised the significant role that McFarlane contributed to deepening the level of theory and practice in this field.

McFarlane was a founding member of HETSA but was not at the inaugural Armidale conference, as he was in the UK at that time. He was a regular contributor to early editions of the HETSA Newsletter and later History of Economics Review (HER), with articles, book reviews and refereeing. Michael White convened the Sixth HETSA conference at Monash University in July 1991 and stated that, in his opinion, McFarlane ‘delivered the best After Dinner we have had’.³

During this period of HETSA activity, McFarlane produced a wide variety of HET research that deepened the historical roots of radical economics, for example, a detailed book review of Maurice Dobb on underdeveloped countries (MaFarlane 1964a), a monograph on the first professor of economics at the University of Sydney, R. F. Irvine (McFarlane 1966), revisiting the Swedish School (McFarlane 1974) and papers on the use of economic theory (McFarlane 1976) and economic planning (McFarlane 1984). Then came the landmark book with another founding member of HETSA, Peter Groenewegen, as co-author, called A History of Australian Economic Thought (Groenewegen and McFarlane 1990). This book clearly showed McFarlane’s radical economics influence in assessing the historical contribution of Australian economics. The book provides biographical detail and historical context to elicit the debates and intellectual ferment that form the rich tapestry of Australian economics, covering a wide variety of contributors to economics, not merely academic economists, but also statisticians, public advisers, heretics and cranks. This produced an Australian pluralist pragmatic economic analysis, which, the authors argue, began to be undermined in the 1960s by the dominance of ‘the American version of neoclassical economics’ (Groenewegen and McFarlane 1990, 232). The book challenged the dominant descriptive HET approach of outlining the work of only academic mainstream economists, and thus inevitably created its own debate (for example, see Kenyon et al. 1991).

Working in early 1960 under Michał Kalecki, who advised the Indian Planning Commission on its third Five-Year Plan markedly influenced the whole body of McFarlane’s academic output. In particular, he placed Kalecki’s body of work within a socialist economic planning setting. As a result, the Kaleckian insights espoused never subsisted within the Post-Keynesian paradigm, but instead were underpinned by the Marxist paradigm that was the basis for Kalecki. Many theoretical insights and policy implications emerged from this Kaleckian/Marxist perspective and were examined in Radical Economics (McFarlane 1982): on the philosophical problems of orthodox economics (including Keynes), critique of other radical responses (ecologists, Ricardian and neo-Ricardians), various versions of Marxism and socialist alternatives. In terms of the 21st-century ecological approach to sustainable development, MaFarlane (1982, 98) was very prescient when he argued that it is naïve to rule out ‘the crucial role of profits and the liveness-inventiveness of Capital’ in undercutting ecological concerns. Overall, McFarlane worked with a broad palate in contributing to radical economics, notably specifying growth/cycle models, third-world economic development (e.g. Asiatic mode of production), socialist self-management (e.g. Yugoslavia) and Australian political economy.

From an HET viewpoint, McFarlane’s unique political-economic development analysis of Australia is large and theoretically rigorous. Three publications provide the essential elements of this analysis. The most ambitious is his first book-length exposition of the need for reform in economic policymaking in Australia (McFarlane 1968). It is remarkable that at the time of its writing, Australia was still in its long Menzies period, regarded as benign in economic terms. Yet, McFarlane in this book meticulously revealed an incipient malaise in the foreign-based ‘industrial oligarchy’ that determined the state of the Australian economy at the time (and continues to this day). It critiques the ‘hydra-head planning’ bumbling (or muddling through) of public bureaucracy while allowing powerful business interests to determine the economic outcomes. The book offers a throughgoing economic reform based on democratic self-management informed by a Kaleckian investment perspective (or iterative) planning. McFarlane proposes that markets and their business masters will inevitably ‘dance’ to the democratic reforms as they aim to extract profits as efficiently as possible from the reform system. Given strong consumer demand and large commodity resources in the country, leaving was not a profitable option for the large foreign-based corporations.

A book chapter by Melanie Beresford and McFarlane (1980) addresses the Australian stagflation crisis along the lines of a Kaleckian mark-up model and critiques the monetarist dominance using Kalecki’s political business cycle model. This was followed by a book-length critique of the boom/bust Australian economic system (Catley and McFarlane 1981). The options for the 1980s outlined in this latter book were diametrically opposite to the Accord and microeconomic reform agenda promulgated in the Hawke–Keating administration. The subsequent rise and dominance of neoliberal economic ideology took all democratic processes and indicative investment planning proposed by McFarlane over the previous 20 years completely ‘off the table’.

Outside JCA readers, Bruce McFarlane has a total body of scholarly work that, in general, remains unrecognised both in Australia and internationally. Given his presence in the early years of HETSA, however, McFarlane needs to be remembered for his contribution to theory and practice in economics over a long period and across a wide range of themes. This is especially the case because of his omission in the HER Supplement by Heinz Arndt on Essays in Bibliography: Australian Economists (Arndt 2000). In that publication, a biography of Helen Hughes occupies a chapter that sets out economic themes very similar to McFarlane’s, but from within a mainstream economics paradigm. Early in their academic careers, McFarlane and Hughes were both at the ANU Research School of Pacific Studies under Sir John Crawford, and ironically published a book together with two other writers (Hughes et al. 1964). McFarlane’s career path is one of an activist-scholar, which lacked the academic imprimatur associated with economist professors like Hughes.

The other problem with McFarlane’s work in political economy is the lack of a comprehensive bibliography. His numerous and varied writings cover a wide range of formats, from contributions to political pamphlets, newspaper articles (e.g. McFarlane 1963), magazine commentaries (e.g. McFarlane 1964b), conference papers (many not published), journal articles, book chapters, encyclopaedia entries, book reviews and books. Many of these were joint-authored, since ‘he sees scientific research as a collaborative activity’ (McQueen 2021, 194). Unfortunately, all available bibliographies are quite limited.⁴

The life of an activist academic was more appreciated in the pluralist age of the economics and politics departments in the 1960s and 1970s (note G. C. Harcourt and Jim Cairns), but not today. In the 2020s, the professionalisation of academia under strict ranking of publications and overseas importation of economics professors assigns Australian junior economists to exploitative causal teaching, insecure research assistant roles or leaving the profession altogether. In this light, Bruce McFarlane was a shining example of a former age, and as a Marxist professor of economics, it is safe to misquote Shakespeare from Hamlet and state that in Australian economics academia, ‘we will never see the likes of him again’.

Jerry Courvisanos Institute of Innovation, Science and Sustainability, Federation University Australia, Ballarat, Australia [email protected]

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Harry Bloch, Alex Millmow and Michael White, who provided helpful comments on a draft of this obituary and shared recollections of Bruce. All errors are my own.

Disclosure Statement

The author reports that he was supervised in his PhD by Bruce; thus Bruce’s mentorship significantly influenced the author’s own radical view of economics.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jerry Courvisanos

Jerry Courvisanos is Associate Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Institute of Innovation, Science and Sustainability, and Researcher in the Future Regions Research Centre, at Federation University Australia. Polish economist Michal Kalecki provides the foundation for Jerry’s research focus on eco-sustainability of innovation and investment. History of economic thought underpins all his research and an history of economic thought occasional publication.

Notes

1 Coincidentally, Bruce’s first academic appointment in 1957 at the tender age of 21 was as a lecturer in economics at the (then) Newcastle University College (McFarlane 1994). On the scholarly work of Allen Oakley, see the Festschrift issue of History of Economics Review, No 45, Winter 2007. Allen’s PhD and early publications were on the intellectual sources and evolution of Marx’s critique of political economy.

2 It also distinctly different from the newer use of the term ‘radical economics’ referring to ‘radical libertarian view of government and economics’ (see Mises Institute website at https://mises.org); McFarlane refers to this view as ‘a very “unreal” model of how capitalism itself worked’ (McFarlane 1982, 30).

3 Email communication from Michael White, 18 May 2023.

4 See the website Surplus Value for the best partial bibliography on McFarlane set up by Humphrey McQueen at https://www.surplusvalue.org.au/Bruce%20McFarlane.html.