Craig McGregor

LEFT HAND DRIVE

CRAIG McGREGOR

Affirm Press, 2013, 334 pages, $24.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Two experiences of institutional conformity – as a boarder at an elite private school and as an Australian army conscript – bequeathed a lifelong “fear and hatred of authoritarian systems” to Craig Rob-Roy McGregor, a blues-playing guitarist, would-be rebel, fringe Bohemian, journalist, novelist, cultural studies professor and fierce believer in equality.

His memoir, Left Hand Drive, charts the colourful journey of the shy, rural New South Wales boy, born in 1933, to radical public intellectual. His highlights include a three day nuclear disarmament march in England (scuppered by his National Service army boots), tear-gassing at a Vietnam war protest in Washington, facing the guns of three squad cars’ worth of police in the US (for doing 35 in a 25 zone), his professional and personal encounters with Bob Dylan, his feud with Barry Humphries over the Australian satirist’s reactionary politics and “ugly nihilism”, and his controversial profiles of Australian Labor leaders (Whitlam, Keating, Hawke, Latham).

Whilst warming to these men personally, McGregor remains, nevertheless, underwhelmed by Labor’s “caution, gradualism and managerialism”, their leading lights having “given power to the corporations and the wealthy” thus corrupting parliamentary democracy as an arena for addressing the “destructive inequalities” of the class system.

Class may be the dark side of the moon to Labor politicians but, says McGregor, it “formalises brute privilege and brute underprivilege”. McGregor gained from Marx the centrality of class to understanding society and also took, from the Marxist theoretician, Antonio Gramsci, the belief that the always-pregnant dynamic of social, economic and political forces can blow apart the ideological hegemony of a small, capitalist ruling class whose self-serving ideas become the ruling ideas of broader society.

However, as a self-described pluralist who rejects all dogma (including the “authoritarianism of Marxist-Leninist dogma”), McGregor, by including much more, or perhaps, more accurately, much less, than Marx (Weber, semiotics and post-modernism, for example), can blunt his analytical sharpness and fudge the political focus for social change.

In, for example, defining class by cultural/lifestyle trappings and employees’ collar-colour, the resulting conceptual looseness allows McGregor to erroneously characterise the working class as now largely middle class, thus diluting workers’ class consciousness and political power which remains based on their indispensability to generating, and potential for withholding, the capitalist’s life-blood of profit.

There is, alas, little investigation of the political significance of such sociological issues in McGregor’s book which is a self-confessed “melange” of social musings and personal anecdotes. Only towards book’s end do we see that its patchy quality, ranging from narrative dazzle to bad blog day, may be due less to intellectual laziness than to the cerebrovascular stroke which has left the eighty year old memoirist with irreparable brain and speech damage.

McGregor estimates he has written some eight million words in his lifetime, driven by rage at social unfairness and desire for its radical correction. He hopes that some of these words have had some positive impact. On that, many social activists can answer in the affirmative. It’s been a life well lived, mate.