Contemporary Sociological Theory Reviewed

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1.

Our understanding of contemporary capitalist culture and globalization has been greatly influenced by neo-Marxism. There have been many significant events all over the world such as the Great Depression, The Second World War which have contributed to our understanding of contemporary capitalist culture. There has been a "false consciousness" associated with this time and date since capitalism continues to "deliver the goods" (Adams & Sydie, 2002: 90). The beginning of the end of capitalist conflict and the beginning of the beginning of socialism came with the U.S. economic and military dominance after 1945 and also, on the other side of the coin, the Stalinist model of socialist development failed to live up to it's own Marxist Ideology. These changes were a great contributing factor in the downfall of Marxism.

Marx asserted that "hegemony has been determined by control of the means of production and exploitation of the workers" (91). Antonio Gramsci was a dedicated Marxist revolutionary. He felt that hegemony was not only domination through economics or politics but that it combined political, intellectual and moral leadership. There was the involvement of the superstructure and the private institutions but also the politics. The question thus arose: "What can the working classes do to offset such broad-scale hegemony by the bourgeoisie?" (92). Gramsci felt that the best way to avoid that fate was to try to become a national class and represent the interest of many social groups.

Baran and Sweezy dealt with the issues of under consumption and waste. They saw capitalism as wasting most of its productive capacity on the military, advertising and product differentiation instead of promoting a higher standard...

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... it is then that you would attempt to put it back together in a different and better way. This is present in our everyday society. You could make the analogy of how people are buying older homes now and simply tearing them down in order to completely reconstruct them into what will ultimately work for them and their family.

Wallerstein wrote a book The end of the World as we Know it and it predicts uncertainty in the future. He stated that we were not headed toward the Marxist revolution but toward a type of cataclysm (Adams & Sydie, 2002: 265). I believe that is possible and chaos is definitely not something that shouldn't be feared, but as a society, that moves at a rate that allows us to generally stop, catch our breath and figure out a way to deal with everything, I don't foresee any great destruction of epic proportions that we won't be able to handle.

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