Marxist Theory, Black/African Specificities, and Racism

146 Pages·2008·3.222 MB·English

by  Babacar Camara

Marxist Theory, BlackIAfrican
Specificities, and Racism

Marxist Theory, BlacklAfrican
Specificities, and Racism
LEXINGTON BOOKS
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Copyright O 2008 by Lexington Books
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Camara, Babacar, 1951 -
Marxist theory, BlacWAfiican specificities, and racism / Babacar Camara.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN- 13: 978-0-739 1-1056-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-7391-1056-X (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Blacks. 2. Racism. 3. Philosophy, Marxist. 4. Postmodernism. 5. Ideology. 6.
Communication. I. Title.
HT1581.C36 2008
305.86~22 2008004146
Printed in the United States of America
@=The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSVNISO 239.48-1992.
To the 229,866 victims of the Tsunami (Christmas 2004)
To the 1,836 victims of Katrina (August 29,2005)
By themselves, the Tsunami and Katrina have revealed the secret reality of our
society. In no time, these disasters have laid bare the social misery behind the
extravagant consumerism of modern society. We saw what we never wanted to
see and what no one wanted us to see.

Contents
Preface
1 Language and Totality
2 The Concept of Ideology
3 Nkgritude
4 Dialectic and African Specificities
5 The Specificity of African American Oppression
6 Racism and Ideology
References
Index
About the author
vii

Preface
My final prayer: oh my body, make me always a man who asks questions.
Frantz Fanon (1961)
That Marxism is dead is a position that a scholar like Fredric Jameson vigor-
ously criticizes by showing the tight connection between capitalism and Marxist
theory. For Jameson, Marxism is not dead because it is inseparable from capital-
ism. As long as capitalism exists, Marxism will exist. He says: "Marxism is the
very science of capitalism" (54). It does not matter that capitalism updates itself,
for any new form of capitalism creates a corresponding Marxism. That is why
"whatever its other vicissitudes, a postmodern capitalism necessarily calls a
postmodern Marxism into existence over against itself' (54).
I would like to right away stress the fact that I am not dealing with the
Marxism illustrated by the Soviet Union or China and their satellites. I make the
difference between Marxism-a political and economic doctrine-and the
Marxian dialectic, a scientific tool inherited from Heraclites and Hegel. For lack
of a better term, I use Marxism whenever it is convenient. In the same order of
ideas, I also use "economy" in the bourgeois sense.
Historically, the philosophy of Marx and Engels may be regarded as a joint
product of Hegelian dialectics, materialism, and empiricism. As a result, Marxist
philosophy is a product of the gains of anterior philosophical systems and of the
various natural and human sciences whose development it must constantly fol-
low. The philosophy, thus, offers a diversity of human experience at all levels,
which cannot but enrich and perfect it as an analytical tool. Moreover, at the
core of this tool is Hegel's dialectic: "The dialectic is the process of develop-
ment of an adequate conception of the world, by way of pushing a wide variety
of conceptions to their ultimate conclusions" (278). Such a process guarantees
its own creative movement and empties all the so-called concepts of "revision"
or "supersession" of Marxist philosophy, because it is synonymous of anti-
dogmatism and immobility as Professor Henry D. Aiken (1984) puts it:
So long as we consider things as static and lifeless, each one by itself, alongside
of and after each other, it is true that we do not run up against any contradic-
tions in them. We find certain qualities which are partly common to, partly di-
verse from, and even contradictory to each other, but which in this case are dis-
tributed among different objects and therefore contain no contradiction. Within
ix