A Study Of Thompson’s Ideas On Cultural Materialism

In the middle of the last century,with the capitalist countries entering the stage of abundant society one after another,left-wing thinkers began to reflect on the status quo of capitalist exploitation and the predicament of the western socialist movement.Cultural materialism,as a new thought to interpret the core of Marxism and guide the British proletarian movement,also came into being here.Today,the capitalist system of operation and exploitation has taken a new turn,a cultural turn characterized by the establishment of a material order,which has acquired the same status as the intellect and has been transformed from a structure of life in the period of materialization to a communal cognition in the shell of truth.How to arouse the subject and reinterpret the radical potential of the subject in the intellectual exploitation is an important issue for us to ponder and solve.The cultural materialism created by British Marxists effectively echoes the current intellectual exploitation with a distinctive and holistic view of culture,and contributes to the construction of an ideological rationale for overcoming capitalist modernity.Among them,Edward Thompson has set up a unique cultural materialism banner with his national,class,and historical interpretation of cultural materialism.This paper takes Thompson’s cultural materialism as the basic point of study and tries to answer the basic question of "what is cultural materialism" ?Firstly,build a genealogy of Thompson’s cultural materialism by combining history and theory;secondly recover Thompson’s cultural materialist theoretical system with the three elements of "crowd-class-culture" by retracing its historical origins,and at the same time perceive the specific dialectical interaction of the internal elements in its construction based on a process-principle research position;thirdly capture the interplay between Thompson’s cultural materialism,classical Marxism and Western Marxism in the context of the critique of capitalism,and ask what kind of century-long dialogue has been formed by this collision and what kind of civilizational way out is implied in the current historical context.The article is divided into five parts without the introduction.First,it traces the three streams of thought that drove the birth of cultural materialism,showing the ideological warp and woof of cultural materialism as framed by Marxism,Western Marxism,and the British radical tradition.These three streams intersect with the practical need to explore the third way,and thus shape the Thompson’s cultural materialism triadic structure revealed as "human destiny-class production-cultural ethics".Secondly,Thompson’s cultural materialism is portrayed as the basic color of "subjectivism",and the questioning of the dilemma of human existence is the basic content that drives the operation of cultural materialism.Thompson,moreover,anchors the subjectivity of the crowd by perceiving their plight and exploring their possibilities.Thompson hopes to clarify that the crowd’s subjectivity in the double dilemma brought by capitalism and Stalinism is still embedded in class experience related to material practice in a potential form,while the structure of "experience-morality-consciousness" builds a concrete path for the return of subjectivity.The structure of "experience-morality-consciousness" builds a concrete path for the return of subjectivity.Again,the mechanism of Thompson’s cultural materialism constructed by "class theory" is clarified.After confirming the possibility of the return of the subject,Thompson concretizes the production of the subject in the historical emergence from the crowd to the class.He goes back to the history of British workers in the 18 th and 19 th centuries to prove that the radical core of the crowd never receded but was preserved in the form of customs and morals,thus indicating that the emergence of the working class and working class consciousness is the same process as the emergence of history.The intertwined process and relationship of class generation also realize the unity of individual and group,truth and value.Then,the inner meaning of Thompson’s cultural materialism,which is highlighted by the "cultural theory," is explained.After sorting out the crowd and class,it can be seen that the historical generation of rebellious crowd and revolutionary class penetrates the dialectical relationship between culture and subject,i.e.culture always accompanies the subject’s transformation of the world and its own development as a holistic real force.However,in order to bridge the gap between the economic base and the superstructure created by dogmatism,culture in Thompson’s context has been given an overarching and material connotation,symbolizing the overall life of human beings and even representing the concrete way of revolutionary struggle.In this way,culture,as a resonant force among subjects trapped in capitalist exploitation,integrates the potential for scattered resistance,and the paradigm of British cultural studies has thus made a double turn from elitism to popularism,from abstract reflectionism to the practice of cultural production.Finally,the structure of the general-participation structure again echoes the proposition of "what is cultural materialism".The organic bridging between crowd,culture,and class together forges cultural materialism as a theory,paradigm,and trend,but its pluralistic,three-dimensional paradigm of cultural studies does not fundamentally overcome the discursive overtones of Western Marxism.The essay concludes with a critical reflection on the limitations of cultural materialism due to its deviation from historical materialism,and also discusses the "re-enlightenment" of culture in the light of modernity,detecting the intrinsic connection between cultural change and human destiny and social development in the field of modernity,and reflecting on the "cultural materialism" represented by Thompson in the new historical perspective of modern development.It also reflects on the effectiveness and limitations of the "third way" represented by Thompson’s cultural materialism,and highlights the unique value of the Chinese modernization path in responding to the process of modernity and transcending the dilemma of modernity.