Cultural Materialism: A Summary of Principles

Abstract

Since Raymond Williams's initial adoption of the concept 'cultural materialism' in Marxism and Literature (1977), the position that goes with it has gained currency among a sizeable number of those active in the humanities. This development would be encouraging, were it not for some rather liberal, if not downright fraudulent, appropri-ations of the label. While Williams would have been the first to welcome a proliferation of materialisms -late in life he wrote, for example, a political article entitled 'Towards Many Socialisms' 1 in which he attacked the idea of a singular and unilinear movement to Socialism -he was also careful to distinguish certain inalienable properties of a materialism worthy of that name. In some recent claims about the concept, often in the typically British marriage with poststructuralist approaches, it takes a hard look to detect the ma-terialist stance. However, rather than meet some of these substantive investiga-tions polemically on their own ground, I have chosen to identify the principles that seem to me to form the basics of cultural materialism. The list drawn up here may not be exhaustive, but it is a first brief attempt to define the core elements of this position. Each of the following sections is thus concerned to give a sum-mary account of one principle. The mottoes that introduce these sections have deliberately been chosen from a wide range of think-ers, and not from Williams. This is to underline, first that the author was not alone in filling the cultural space left open by Marx and Engels (and often stored with heavy economic content by later rep-resentatives of historical and dialectical materialism), and secondly that cultural materialism, as a critical undercurrent of Marxism, existed avant la /ettre. In fact, the term was first used, not by Williams, but by the American anthropologist Marvin Harris, though, as will be seen, with a different emphasis. It is only after the actual pre-88 Cultural Materialism 89 sentation of the issue that each section concludes with a pertinen t reference to one of the major works from Williams's late phase (the 1970s and 1980s), which saw his rapprochement with Marxism. To emphasise the unity of the author's expository and fictional reuvre, these pointers include quotations from the novels. 2