Neo-marxism Culture in Capital Society

Neo-marxism Culture in Capital Society

This paper discusses the concept of mass culture in a capitalist society with a neo-marxist point of view.

Even if we accept that Diop's two cradle thesis is concerned with delineating ideal types, we can not avoid the obvious point that it would appear that cradles may have generated cultural but not racial unity. 4 There is no explicit time element in Diop's thesis; therefore, we can argue that different racial types that inhabited different cradles were just as likely to be incubated in the environmental conditions of that culture in such a way as to create a singular cultural framework over a plurality of racial types+1.

That being the case, it is difficult to attempt to construct a pan-Africanism, for Diop a reflection of cultural unity, on the basis of racial definitions. The unity is only demonstrable where the culture obtains, not necessarily where the phenotypically similar coexist. That is, we can no longer suggest pan-African "common cause" based principally on shared black skin. Race is a specious concept in itself, and skin color definitions of race are Eurocentric anyway. We will return to these concerns shortly 1.

Importantly, it is useful to accept Diop's two cradle theory as a point of departure, or as Carruthers suggests "a working hypothesis," but one that needs further development to deal with some of the shortcomings I outlined above. I maintain, however, that it is inconsistent to argue Afrocentrism using a neoMarxist interpretation. Again, it is understandable, on one level, why this is done (i.e., the critique of European capitalism). Beyond its scathing critique of capitalism, dialectics, which provide the philosophical underpinnings of Marxism, are represented in the philosophy of ancient Egypt like those found in the Shabaka Texts (Memphite Theology). A dialectical interpretation of history, it could be argued, is quite consistent with classical Afrocentric historiography. However, the materialist, and European-centered orientations of Marxism ignores and denudes any contribution of more specific African developmental patterns2. This violates the primary relativist doctrine that patterns and regularities that are garnered from the domain under study be understood within the context of the indigenous culture and not be imposed from the outside unless those regularities can be shown to obtain in the society under study. Marxism and neomarxism did not even pretend to do this for the non-European world, and I find no convincing claims to the contrary in this regard 1.

This rationalist nesting process neutralizes challenges to the orthodoxy by representing them in much less salient or threatening forms--a kind of jurisprudential inoculation. 149 Hence, for instance, the social construction of the subject is often represented as an idea the sovereign individual subject can accept or reject without having to confront it as the truth of her being. Likewise, deconstruction is represented as supporting a form of radical individual subjectivism that turns out to be at once untenable and politically harmless, or as a set of argumentative techniques that can be wielded at any ...