Genovese

JKSCHW at aol.com JKSCHW at aol.com
Fri Oct 13 20:23:28 PDT 2000


In a message dated 10/13/00 11:08:47 PM Eastern Daylight Time, furuhashi.1 at osu.edu writes:

<< 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. . . . . 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.

Not so: the survival of chattel slavery in societies where slaves were in many parts of the country the majority surely did require the consent of the slaves. Consent requires taking intio account the interests of the subordinate group, but whether a particular interest is taken into account is contingent on the relative strength of the various groups and the parallogram of forces. You cannot say: no manumission, no consent. Anyway, manumission was only forbidden in the last 60 or so years of American slavery.

> 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_:

You are correct in your reading of Gramsci. Well, I don't say that Gevonese (or I) are orthodox Gramscians. We adapt the apparatus, which is in any case somewhat vexed--see Perry Anderson's fine essay onm Gramsci in NLR 100 (old series). In fact, I adapt it through Milton Fisk's transmogrification of the idea. I think that simple subjugation is only possible when the group is so weak that its interest need not be taken into account in ensuring the stability of society. That was true of the European Jews and the Korean confort women. It was decided not true of the majority of the population of the American South.


> 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.

No, there was a lot more to it than that. What more there was is painstaking detailed in Roll Jordan Roll, which is part of its greatness.

--jks



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