>Any oppressed group can "consent" in the Gramscian sense (which confers no
>legitimacy on the order to which they consent) if its members accept the
>conditions of their domination, internalize, at least partly, the values that
>make them subordinate, and generally acquiese to their life circumstances.
>The fact that the slaves were themselves bought and sold doesn't mean that
>they could not thus "consent." So I reject the proposition that slavery means
>absence of any sort of consent. In fact, slave societies, which have been the
>norm in human history, have been stable for millenia precisely because they
>succeeded in enforcing consent. Any class society that forfeits all consent
>and comes to rest purely on force rapidly becomes unstable.
Chattel slavery did not require the consent of the enslaved, and one may say that this absence of consent on the part of slaves distinguishes it from pre-capitalist slave societies. "Even without adding in the price he would pay just to be free, 'Selling a slave to the highest bidder would mean selling him to himself'95 -- a practice that was very common among slaveowning profit-maximizing Romans. However, although this might profit individual slave-owners and the slaves themselves, it would certainly have undermined a society whose defining core was plantation slavery and whose ethic was fundamentally anticapitalist. Thus, very severe legal restrictions developed on the freeing of slaves" (at <http://spot.colorado.edu/~wehr/40RD8.TXT>). Had American slaves been ruled by consent as ancient Roman slaves had been, slaves' interests -- the foremost of which would be to become manumitted -- would have been partially taken into account, and there would have been no legal restriction on the freeing of slaves.
> > (BTW, do you think that so-called
> "comfort women" -- women _forced_ to serve Japanese soldiers sexually
> -- "consented" in the Gramscian sense? It would be so _grotesque_ to
> stretch Gramsci's theory of "hegemony" to include rape!) >>
>
>No, and I don't think the Jews consented to their own extermination under the
>Nazis. Consent is based on limited but real acknowledgemeny by the domiannt
>groups of the interests of the oppressed ones, an acknowledgement that may be
>merely instrujmental and cynical, but must be real to win consent. The
>Japanese merely used the comfort women; the Nazis merely attempted to murder
>the Jews. But American slaves were valuable property and had to be treated
>with attention to its survival and reproduction. Btw, American slavery
>involved massive rape, and although it may be grotesque, I think that a
>Gramscian theory of slavery must indeed extend to include that, or to explain
>it. That does not mean that there was no rape because the sex was consensual:
>the term "consent" does not have the same meaning in a feminist theory of
>rape anda Gramscian theory of hegemony.
Gramsci developed his idea of consent _only within his theory of the hegemonic bloc_, and black slaves were _in no way_ part of the hegemonic bloc of the South or the entire America; it was _non-slave-owning whites_ who consented to the rule of slave owners and formed the hegemonic bloc with them. According to Gramsci, those who fall outside of the hegemonic bloc can be simply _subjugated without consent_: "The methodological criterion on which our own study must be based is the following: that the supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as 'domination' and as 'intellectual and moral leadership'. A social group dominates antagonistic groups, which it tends to 'liquidate', or to subjugate perhaps even by armed force; it leads kindred and allied groups." To repeat, slaves were _not_ part of the "kindred and allied groups" led by slave owners.
You may speak of American slaves' "consent" to slavery in the sense of preferring life to death, but certainly slaves' preference of life to death did _not_ constitute "consent" in the Gramscian sense of consenting to become a subordinate member of the hegemonic bloc.
Yoshie