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. (National Union of Teachers), and soon after joined the “Healyite” WRP (Workers Revolutionary Party). I remained an active member of the WRP in East London until 1985. I was also Secretary of the ASTMS (Association of Scientific Technical and Managerial Staff) sub-branch at North East London Poly where I worked as a technician in the Physics Department. During this time I published a paper in Nuclear Instruments and Methods, an article in an electronics magazine, and a couple of articles on dialectics and mathematics in Labour Review. 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, firstly in Otolaryngology (where I worked on the tickle-talker project) in the Buildings Department where I later joined the Committee of the GSA (General Staff Association). After amalgamation of the GSA with the SPSF (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 house-mate Vonney, and a black-and-white cat, Charlie. Until August 2000, I was a Federal Councillor for NTEU and Committee member for the Melbourne University Branch of NTEU. Until December 2002, I worked at Melbourne University, responsible for development of teaching spaces, but retired to concentrate on study. Since Vonney's stroke in August 2006, I have become for the time being a full-time carer.

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 Hegel 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 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. The Summer School in February 2002, collaborating with Geoff Boucher, Neli Nanovska and Paul Ashton, focussed on Slavoj Žižek and Hegel, and investigated the problems of ethical action in a society where liberalism masks a deeply unethical public polity.

Focussing on the need to develop an entirely new way of doing politics, appropriate to the new terrain which has opened up over the past few years, which I characterise as “Ethical Politics”. In February 2003, I completed the manuscript of “For Ethical Politics”, published in October 2003, and an article on the subject was published in Arena.

The Hegel Summer School in February 2004 centred on the Recognition versus Redistribution debate, with my talk focussing on the concept of subjectivity, and the 2005, 2006 and 2007 Summer Schools continued this theme. In July 2005, I organised a tour of Australia for Nancy Fraser, and my article Subjectivity, Redistribution & Recognition, at the conference at Deakin University at which Nancy spoke, was published in Recognition in Politics. My investigations expanded around the problems of poverty and marginalisation, anxiety, and the various theories such as “social capital”, works on globalisation, social democracy, and so on, with the objective of clarifying the centrality of the notions of self-determination, social solidarity and subjectivity. This work led me to see the notion of Subject as key to understanding the foundations of social solidarity in modern society.

From June 2007, the Hegel Summer School became an independent project, for which I am just an adviser. Currently a group of 5 young women run the project and the 2008 event is shaping up to be bigger and better than ever.

Currently, I work as a member of the Marxists Internet Archive Collective, building an archive of the works of Marx and Engels and other writers an understanding of whom contributes to an understanding of Marxism. I am also a member of the Independent Social Research Network, a network of philosophers and social theorists, both within and outside the academy, committed to serious study of problems of social justice in the late capitalist world.

In October 2005 I began work on a book to be titled The Subject, tracing the genealogy of the concept of “subject” and the contests over its meaning in recent decades, and proposing a new concept of subject, capable of shedding light on the problems of social justice we face today. I expect that this work will take 3 or 4 years. In the meantime, through 2007, I have been concentrating on developing my interpretation of Hegel, beginning with presentation of the Winter 2007 Introduction to Hegel course for the Melbourne Society for Continental Philosophy. The judgment is that Hegel exegesis offers me the best chance of being heard in the academic arena.