Getting to the heart of Caudwell's philosophy

FOR many readers, Christopher Caudwell will be an unfamiliar name. Aside from an article in the Morning Star earlier in the year to mark the 70th anniversary of his death, little has been printed about a man whose writings provide much insight and deserve to be much more widely read and studied - though not uncritically.

Caudwell was killed in action on February 12 1937 during the Spanish civil war. He had been covering the retreat of his comrades in the British battalion of the International Brigade. He was just 29.

Some 30 years ago, Communist Party members at Birmingham University set up a staff Marxist discussion group known as the Caudwell Society.

We welcomed as our inaugural speaker Edward Thompson, whose appraisal of Caudwell should be read by anyone who wants to get to grips with Caudwell's writings. Thompson brilliantly sorted the wheat from the chaff.

He identified the main thrust of Caudwell's work as the analysis of bourgeois ideology.

"Either the devil has come among us," Caudwell wrote in the foreword to his Studies in a Dying Culture, "or there is a causal explanation for a disease common to economics, science and art."

In developing his approach, Caudwell was almost certainly influenced by the ferment of ideas coming out of the Soviet Union at the time, in particular Science at the Crossroads, papers presented in 1931 by the Soviet delegation to the international conference on the history of science and technology in London and Marxism and Modern Thought, a collection of essays published by the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1933 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the death of Karl Marx.

The lead author in both these publications was Nikolai Bukharin. Although he had been removed from the politburo in 1929, Bukharin was still on the central committee and was editor of Izvestiya and head of the Academy of Sciences commission on the history of knowledge.

His paper in Science at the Crossroads set out to demonstrate the vitality of Marxism to a sceptical audience, while his essay in Marxism and Modern Thought is much more partisan, claiming that, "On the background of the present collapse of bourgeois ideology in general," Marxism "grows as the only theoretical generalisation which embodies the whole future of humanity."

We have to ask whether the crisis in science - and, by implication, Caudwell's extension to "economics" and "art" - was overstated, both by himself and Bukharin.

Certainly, as communists have had to recognise since the fall of the Soviet Union, capitalism has managed to cope remarkably well, at the expense of working people, with what was called "the general crisis of capitalism."

The last 70 years have not exactly been barren on the cultural front. And physics and the other natural sciences have continued to develop without their leading practitioners feeling the need to embrace dialectical materialism.

But one of the key arguments that Caudwell was making was that bourgeois ideology is unable to hold together a consistent world view. This sort of schism has allowed untold horrors to be perpetrated by imperialism, from the nazi death camps and the dropping of the atomic bombs to the occupation of Iraq and the impoverishment of peoples under the impact of globalisation.

Capitalism's crisis remains with us and one of the tasks of communists is to expose the false ideological premises which help the bourgeoisie to maintain its rule.

Caudwell, in Thompson's words, was "an anatomist of ideology, obsessed with the characteristic illusions of the bourgeois epoch ... He was concerned with the way in which, in bourgeois thought, certain central illusions occupy or reoccupy the mind - with the false opposition between 'the individual' and 'society,' the oscillation between mechanical materialism (or utilitarianism) and idealism, between social determinism and individual freedom, between 'economics' and 'love'."

Anyone seeking to find such illusions today need only look at new Labour's false presentations of "choice" and "efficiency" in the public services.

US Marxist John Bellamy Foster draws particular attention to Caudwell's Heredity and Development, an essay not published with the rest of the studies because of its explicit criticism of Lysenkoism, which dominated the Soviet approach to natural science for much of its existence. It finally came out in 1986.

Foster lauds this work for a truly Marxist approach to the environment and for development of a critique of the new science of ecology.

Caudwell rejected the view that the environment was simply to be understood in terms of the struggle for existence. "It is not possible," he wrote, "to separate organism from environment as mutually distinct opposites."

In fact, he regarded the relation between organisms and the environment as a mutually determining one, connected to "material change."

It is arguably in this area that British Marxism lost most from Caudwell's death at the age of 29.

A more rounded approach to the environment would have led to a sharper critique of the idealist "mastery over nature" approach common to both bourgeois ideology and to Soviet Marxism of the mid-20th century and to a vision of socialism and communism in which the mutually determining relationship between humanity and the environment is respected.

• Edward Thompson's take on Christopher Caudwell is available online at http://socialistregister.com/files/SR_1977_Thompson.pdf