Reflection On Marxist Theory And Post-colonial Theory

As a cultural critical theory, the post-colonial theory arose in the late 1970s in the West. The three post-colonial theorists, Edward W. Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spvik and Homik Bhabha, who came from the "East" and occupied a higher position in American academic circle, use the post-modernist methods and the analytic frame of cultural hegemony proposed by Antonio Gramsic, the founder of the West Marxism, to reinterpret and rethink critically the texts of the West intellectual circle on the East from the colonial times. They discover that the West (i.e. the Europe in the colonial times and the United States in the globalization times) has been carrying out the cultural hegemony on the East. From the new critical angle of rethinking the relation between the West and the East, the post-colonial theory stimulates the global theoretical thinking and sets off a great surge of the post-colonial criticism in the West.The post-colonial theory uses Gramsic's hegemony theory to analyze the cultural hegemony imposed by the West on the East. In the narration of the post-colonial theory, there exist some bits of thought of Gramsic's hegemony, such as "intellectuals", "civic society" and "consent". However, there are essential differences between the post-colonial theory and Gramsic 's on whether to fight against the capitalist system or not. Then, to what degree does the former differ from the latter? Gramsic's Marxism follows but also deviates from the classical Marxism. But to what degree does the post-colonial theory follow and abandon the latter? The post-colonial theory abandons the classical Marxism and thus leads to internal contradictions and theoretical predicaments. But what are these internal contradictions and theoretical predicaments? The discussion of these questions sets the logical order of this thesis.First, the author bases the analytic frame on the Gramsic 's theory of hegemony in classes and uses the research methods of texts to analyze deeply the texts of the post-colonial theorists. From the deep analyses, some bits of thought of Gramsic 's hegemony, such as "intellectuals", "civic society" and "consent" are revealed but deformed in the post-colonial theory. In the vision of the post-colonial theorists, the working orbit of the cultural hegemony imposed by the West on the East reveals the process from the knowledge production of the Western centralist ideology to the implementing networks of the Western cultural hegemony and to the realizing mechanism of the Western 1 hegemony.Second, regarding Gramsic as the medium, the author dissects post-colonial theory by classical Marxism, and uses the philosophical speculative method to extract what post-colonial theory enriches the classical Marxism and abandons the classical Marxism. The post-colonial theory follows the critical spirit of the classical Marxism and enriches the observations on the power relation in the global cultural prospect by the classical Marxism over one hundred years ago.But, basically, the post-colonial theory abandons the classical Marxism: historically, it neglects the decisive role of economic basis on culture; epistemologically, it opposes the cognition of the universal laws; strategically, it neglects the social revolution and advocates speech and psychological resistance.Third, the author observes the internal, insurmountable contradictions and predicaments of the post-colonial theory. The post-colonial theory deserts the essential spirit of the classical Marxism and thus leads to internal contradictions and theoretical predicaments. By using the Marxist method, the author attempts to analyze the complicated cultural prospect of the globalization times: mobility and multiplicity of cultural identity; the process and class nature of the Western cultural hegemony; the economic background of the capitalist globalization of the Western cultural hegemony; the three-dimensional system of racial, class and sexist oppressions.Last, the author uses the logical inference to focus on the question about why and how China should carry on the cultural...