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Black neoconservatism derives from three major systems of thought: free-market capitalism, sociobiology, & culturalism. All three agree in viewing market rationality as the sole standard by which human beings can be judged, & in regarding government intervention in the market as likely to harm blacks. This neoconservatism is a response to structural transformations in the US economy as a result of the shifting balance of global power relations. Black conservatives criticize the flaws of the welfare state but do not recognize that these flaws are inevitable in a compromise between progressive advocacy of subsistence rights & conservative advocacy of the market. A more effective solution would focus on creation of jobs for the poor. Black neoconservatives may inadvertently play a role in calling attention to the failures of black liberalism & opening a possibility of more progressive solutions. W. H. Stoddard

Going beyond mere Leftist rhetoric which pervades so much of black Marxist discourse, Marable empirically examines the role and function of the black underclass, black working class, black women, black prisoners, black farmers, black entrepreneurs, black preachers and black Brahmins. In short, Marable attempts to lay bare the present-day anatomy of black America in a highly detailed manner.

Jesse Jackson's bid for the Democratic nomination constituted the most important challenge to the American left since the emergence of the civil rights movement in the fifties and the feminist movement in the seventies. Unfortunately, the American left, for the most part, missed this grand opportunity. In this essay, I will argue that this failure to respond in a serious and sustained manner to the contemporary black political upsurge signifies the need for a reassessment and reconstruction of the American left-a rearticulation of progressive forces centered on anti-imperialist struggles (against U.S. and Soviet forms) and black unity (a unity open to non-black allies yet subordinate to no non-black groups).

The distinctive feature of Afro-American life in the 60s was the rise on the historical stage of a small yet determined petite bourgeoisie promoting liberal reforms, and the revolt of the masses, whose aspirations exceeded those of liberalism but whose containment was secured by political appeasement, cultural control and state repression. Afro-America encountered the modern American capitalist order (in its expansionist phase)—as urban dwellers, industrial workers and franchised citizens—on a broad scale for the first time. This essay will highlight the emergence of the black parvenu petite bourgeoisie—the new, relatively privileged, middle class-and its complex relations to the black working poor and underclass. I will try to show how the political strategies, ideological struggles and cultural anxieties of this predominantly white-collar stratum of the black working class both propelled the freedom movement in an unprecedented manner and circumscribed its vision, analysis and praxis within liberal capitalist perimeters.

Fredric Jameson is the most challenging American Marxist hermeneutical thinker on the present scene. His ingenious interpretations (prior to accessible translations) of major figures of the Frankfurt School, Russian formalism, French structuralism and poststructuralism as well as of Georg Lukàcs, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, Max Weber and Louis Marin are significant contributions to the intellectual history of twentieth century Marxist and European thought. Jameson's treatments of the development of the novel, the Surrealist movement, of Continental writers such as Honoré de Balzac, Marcel Proust, Alessandro Manzoni, and Robbe Grillet, and of American writers, including Ernest Hemingway, Kenneth Burke and Ursula LeGuin, constitute powerful political readings. Furthermore, his adamantly anti-philosophical form of Marxist hermeneutics puts forward an American Aufhebung of poststructuralism which merits close scrutiny.