For Caudwell, then, the crisis in physics was not due to the mystical and contradictory nature of the phenomena discovered, but to the attempt of the bourgeois to keep the world of physics closed and to preserve his own freedom outside it, to keep himself at all costs immune from causality.
Caudwell did anticipate that a certain crudity and clumsiness might be inevitable in the early stages, rather like what resulted when the proletariat occupied for the first time a role in administration, which hitherto had been the prerogative of the bourgeoisie.
Caudwell was not only far clearer about the nature of class consciousness and the process of its emergence and development, but he was actually able to achieve a vision of totality.
Caudwell observes that artists of the late capitalist period (capitalism is the only class society Caudwell examines) who retain the view of the now dying class, the bourgeoisie, do suffer intensely because of their false consciousness.
Caudwell categorizes most contemporary art as “high” or “low brow” art, where bourgeois or “high brow” art is refined and artistic, and “low brow” art is escapist and trashy, art only “for the proletariat.” For Caudwell “low brow” art is less significant as art than bourgeois art.
Caudwell would undoubtedly find in filmmakers such as Bergman another example of the bourgeois artist who recognizes the ossification and alienation of the society yet who is not able to recognize the transforming and cleansing power lying dormant in the proletariat.
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