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Resolving Epistemological Contradictions in Marxist African Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Extract

The Epistemological status of their own consciousness is the core contradiction of Marxist thought. This difficulty has not been acknowledged by African Marxists, nor do they explicitly admit to the varieties of radical scholarship which form their intellectual heritage, and which their own worl seeks to modify and elaborate. Marxist scholars have been unable to develop a cogent, persuasive justification for radical theorising as an alternative to positivist social science, largely because of their unwillingness to confront and affir, their own historical specificity. As argued by Bogumil Jewsiewicki:

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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

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39 ibid. pp. 47–50.

40 Samoff, ‘On Class, Paradigm, and African Studies’, p. 46.

41 ibid. p. 50. See also Scarritt, James R., ‘Relating Classes and Politics: the contribution of Joel Samoff to the study of Africa’, in Africa Today, 29, 3, 1982, pp. 36–8.Google Scholar

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84 E.g. von Freyhold, Michaela, ‘Labour Movements or Popular Struggles in Africa’, in Review of African Political Economy, 39, 1987, pp. 27–9.Google Scholar What, for example, does it mean to argue for the ‘adaptation’ of Marxist concepts to African realities, if these are not granted an autonomous power to shape or ‘force’ adaptations. In ‘Class, Class Conflict and the State in Africa’, p. 44, Samoff argues that ‘class’ is deprived of its Marxist connotations if defined as a ‘stratum’, as a concrete category of observable individuals and ‘their attitudes, values and behavior’; whereas if conceived properly, ‘class’ is ‘a relationship, defined simultaneously by structure and process’, and can be ‘observed indirectly by focusing on its behavior’. But the only observable ‘its’ are precisely the individuals and ‘their attitudes’ that have been rejected as indicators of class. There are no ‘its’ whose behaviour can be observed either directly or ‘indirectly’. Class is a construct, an imputed relationship among things and people. Hence it is not clear what adaptations African reality has forced on Marxist concepts and consciousness. As pointed out by Joshua B. Forrest, ‘The Contemporary African State: a “ruling class”?, in ibid. 38, 1987, pp. 69–70, there is ‘an unfortunate tendency among some Africanists to impose a modified Marxian framework on a social context in which classes are in fact quite difficult to locate’. In consequence, the ‘conceptual strength of their paradigm’ is weakened as ‘“class” is transformed into no more epistemologically significant a term than “group”, “caste”, “clique”, “status”, “name”, “identity”, or “affiliation”’.

85 Kolakowski, op. cit. Vol. I, p. 311.

86 Gouldner, op. cit. p. 21.Google Scholar See also Suchting, W., ‘Knowledge and Practice: toward a Marxist critique of traditional epistemology’, in Science and Society (New York), 47, 1, 1983, pp. 236.Google Scholar

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88 Jewsiewicki, op. cit. p. 70.Google Scholar Following Critcher, Charles, ‘Structures, Cultures, Biographies’, in Cultural Studies (London), 1975, pp. 167–73,Google ScholarTakagi, Paul, ‘Race, Crime and Social Policy: a minority perspective’, in Crime and Delinquency, 27, 1, 1981, pp. 4863, suggests the categories of structures (‘objective givens of a society’), cultures (common ways of thinking), and biographies (the attempts by individuals to manage their lives within given structural and cultural givens) as organisational devices. Events need to be explained by concepts appropriate to each category, and by the specific conjuncture of structure, culture, and biography. None of the categories is more or less true or primary for explanation. All are necessary.CrossRefGoogle Scholar