I brought this title home from the library for my two year old son. He instantly fell in love with it! I said, "What do you think this book is about?" He said, "Bug". I said, "What kind of bug," and he replied, "Blue Bug". From then on he was hooked. This brightly colored book is filled with familiar school objects, and assists in teaching colors, letters, and numbers. It would be a valuable addition to any preschool or home.

This is a fascinating account of the intellectual career of Perry Anderson, long-time editor of the New Left Review and cofounder of New Left Books. But in giving such a full survey, Elliott, probably unintentionally, exposes Anderson as arrogant, dogmatic and, practically, useless.

For a Marxist, an understanding of class is basic. What is Anderson's idea of the working class? He assumes it is just the manual workers, not seeing that as capitalism has developed, it has needed growing numbers of white-collar workers to keep it going. Elliott explains, "Given that the proletariat was a social minority in most capitalist countries ... ."

This wrong premise, never argued, made room for the notion that this small weak working class needed a separate 'socialist intelligentsia'. Its members were, according to Anderson, the 'sources of consciousness in society' - workers are not even conscious! He concluded that the "party ... must include intellectuals and petit bourgeois who alone can provide the essential theory of socialism." Workers need the 'petit bourgeois' to teach them socialism!

How do we turn a minority revolutionary movement into a mass revolutionary movement? Anderson claims that only the development of revolutionary theory can move the class towards revolution, but that the absence of a mass movement prevents the emergence of this theory - an impasse. He adheres to Trotskyism, writing smugly in 1976, "the tradition descended from Trotsky ... filled no chairs in universities" - ironic now that he is Professor of History at the University of California.

Anderson believes that progress for Britain can only come from abroad - earlier, from Euro-Marxism, more recently, from the European Union. As he wrote in 1992, "a major task of the Left will be to press towards the completion of a genuine federal state in the Community, with a sovereign authority over its constituent parts."

Anderson's ideas are the polar opposite of what Marxism should be: he is unrooted in, and hostile to, our trade union movement and to the British nation. We need workers' nationalism, not abstract internationalism.

I picked this one up because I thought it would be a nice relaxing series of short essays for a cross country plane trip. I was a bit disappointed. Its essays are of uneven quality, the first and last two being the best, and in order to get the little nuggets of pithy critical theory goodness out of muddled mass that is the rest of this book one has to do a bit of searching. In fact Cultural Turn was almost completely unmemorable, except for the interesting bit on architecture and spectrality in "Brick and the Balloon" (The last essay) and a few of the remarks on the myth of scarcity in the "Second World City" that are to be found in one of the first two pieces. Jameson's writing in Cultural Turn seemed crippled by a greater than usual density of language and jargon, unlike in Political Unconsious, which make several of these pieces tough on either the casual reader (like myself), or the reader who is not versed in Jameson's ideas or specific field of Marxist aesthetic critique. A good addition to other writings by Jameson and on various subjects, but not a pleasant escape or introduction.