http://home.mira.net/~andy/index.htm ADELANTE
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Andy
Blunden's Home Page
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Born 11 October
1945. My parents Betty and Ralph Blunden were advertising people, and members of
the Artists Branch of the Communist Party of Australia. I went to Balwyn State
and Balwyn High Schools and began Engineering at Melbourne Uni. in 1963. In 1966
I was drafted, and with two others, we were the first in this State to burn our
draft cards. I Left for Britain just before the 1966 election and thus avoided
the Vietnam War. Did my PhD at University College London during which time I
began studying Marxism. In 1973, I began work as a teacher in Brixton, and the
same year became Branch Secretary of the local school branch of the N.U.T., and
soon after joined the "Healyite" WRP. I remained an active member of
the WRP in East London until 1985. I was also Secretary of the ASTMS sub-branch
at North East London Poly where I worked as a technician in the Physics
Department. After supporting the expulsion of Gerry Healy from the WRP, I
returned to Melbourne where I went back to the University of Melbourne to work
in the Buildings Department where I later joined the Committee of the General
Staff Association. After amalgamation of the GSA with the State Public Services
Federation, I became a State Executive member of the SPSF, but in June 1995 I
resigned the SPSF, along with about 500 others in the Victorian Higher Education
section, and joined the NTEU (National Tertiary Education Union).
Currently, I live in the inner Northern suburb of Melbourne, Brunswick, with my
partner since 1989, Vonney, and our black-and-white cat, Charlie; I work at
Melbourne University, responsible for development of teaching spaces. Until
August 2000, I was a Federal Councillor for NTEU and Committee member for the
Melbourne University Branch of NTEU, and I'm a member of the Progressive Labour
Party.
I first studied Hegel in 1980, to try to make sense of Lenin's Annotations in
the Philosophical Notebooks, which were the centre of Healy's orientation at the
time. After returning to Australia and after the final collapse of the Soviet
Union in 1991, which to my surprise affected the Trotskyist movement just as
negatively as it affected the Stalinists, I spent a couple of years studying the
history of Stalinism, and this is contained in my book Stalinism: Its Origin
and Future. It was then only in 1996, struggling to understand the obvious
inadequacy of Marxist theory as I knew it, that I returned to a study of Hegel's
Logic. Unable to find anyone to discuss the material with, I started the
Hegel-by-HyperText web site and advanced both my own study and the promotion of
Hegel study via the Internet.
The outcome of that first year of study was the little book The Meaning of
Hegel's Logic and the Understanding Hegel's Logic Summer School in
February 1997. This work approaches Hegel in a “Leninist” way, that is to
say, focussing on the logic, interpreting it in the spirit of a materialist
theory of knowledge.
Following this then, I began reading my way through Western Philosophy from
Galileo to Derrida, and this study led me to a broader understanding of what I
thought were relatively cut-and-dry questions, and the second Summer School in
February 1998 was based on this study and is reflected in the Value of
Knowledge web site. Discussions on the Internet also caused me to face the
fact that Hegel himself was motivated also by political and social questions,
and after reading The Philosophy of Right and Marx's critique of it, I
began to see the way in which thinking reproduces social relations and the role
Hegel played in elaborating this view. This then led me to a series of papers on
Capital and Labour, which suffered from being somewhat chaotic methodologically,
but laid the basis for a more systematic consideration.
The third Summer School in February 2000, presented jointly with Geoff Boucher,
was entitled Hegel - Marx - Derrida, and in this seminar I presented a
reading of Hegel's Logic as an abstraction from the development of
universal forms in social relations, and looked at the foundations of Marx's
understanding of capital as an alienated form of this dialectic. The focus of my
work then shifted to the ethical foundations of a movement against bourgeois
society.
This task however meant settling accounts with ‘science’, and getting to the
foundation of knowledge, ethics and personality in human social activity. As a
result of this I have renewed my interest in Vygotsky, whom I first learnt about
in the early 1980s. In the 2001 Summer School — Spirit, Money &
Modernity, I have joined up with Geoff Boucher (talking on Hegel) and Anitra
Nelson (talking on Marx and Money) to pose in a new way the problems of
modernity and the struggle for socialism.
