Culture as Politics: Selected Writings of Christopher Caudwell, edited with an introduction by David Margolies. Pluto Press, £17.99. https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745337227/culture-as-politics/ Caudwell was the most imaginative Marxist thinker in pre-war Britain. Auto-didact, writer on aeronautics, crime novelist as well as theorist, killed in the Spanish Civil War at 29, he developed a materialist understanding of how culture not only is shaped by material conditions but in shaping people’s attitudes also becomes a material force. His analyses of bourgeois ideology’s penetration of all areas of thought in our society makes a convincing case that the failings of bourgeois society are not casual but systematic. His arguments are strikingly relevant to the current political situation.
