>>> JKSCHW at aol.com 10/13/00 10:33PM >>>
In a message dated 10/13/00 9:43:43 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
furuhashi.1 at osu.edu writes:
I said:
<< The slaves were themselves
>commodities; their labor was not. But Charles knows this, and nothing in our
>disagreement rests on it. --jks
Yoshie asks:
> How can commodities "consent" in the Gramscian sense? Isn't the
essence of modern capitalist slavery -- unlike wage labor -- the
absence of "consent," whether one theorizes "consent" a la Gramsci or
social contract theorists?
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.
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CB: The reason you put "consent" in quotation marks is that application of Gramsci's idea of consent to describe the consciousness of enslaved African Americans stretches the concept to the ridiculous. You might as well claim that people in prison "consent" to being in prison, since prisoners accomodate themselves in various ways, trying to get time off for good behavior and the like. and because every prisoner does not try to escape. Becoming resigned against your will to your plight extinguishes the applicability of the term "consent" to the consciousness of your subsequent actions.
Did Gramsci consent in the Gramscian sense to being a prisoner of the fascists because he didn't try to escape and wrote the Prison Notebooks in code instead of explicit language thereby "internalizing" fascist anti-communist values ?
You and Genovese's effort to characterize the consciousness of enslaved African Americans as "acceptance " of the conditions of domination, internalizing slaveowners values ( afterall slaves became Christians which they had not been in Africa, and spoke English etc), and "acquiese" to their life circumstances is hardly distinguishable from the slaveowners' own version of the slaves' consciousness. How could the slaves "accept" the conditions of their domination, and "acquiesce" without internalizing white supremacy/Black inferiority ? Is that your claim ? That enslaved Africans internalized the slaveowners' values of white supremacy ? If the slaves did not internalize white supremacy, what consciousness caused their "acquiesence" and " acceptance" , EXCEPT dissembling and pretending ( like Gramsci's coding in prison) to avoid torture and death ?
In other words, your theory lacks the common sense that people under continous threat of death and torture PRETEND, DECEIVE, WEAR MASKS to the full extent of human genius in order to survive and minimize their pain.
All you and Genovese do is bring into question the validity of Gramsci's overall thesis by trying to extend it enslaved African Americans. Come to think of it, given what a nutcase , anti-communist that Genovese seems to be, this might be one of his ulterior motives.
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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.
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CB: Do you have evidence to support the proposition in your last sentence ?
The fact that a ruling class has and ruthlessly uses overwhelming dominance of the state repressive apparatus at critical times, such that the oppressed classes give up armed struggle for long periods of time does not mean that the potential use of force does not remain throughout the predominant necessary condition for rule. The test would be to liquidate the overwhelming force advantage and see if the "consent" in itself is sufficient to maintain rule and subordination. No ruling class in history has trusted the consent of the ruled that much. The phenomena of accomodation and opportunism within the oppressed classes is not sensibly termed consent.
It is Marx's thesis that it is exactly capitalism's "free" labor that constitutes a Gramscian form of consent by the exploited in contrast with the openness and constant presence of the brutality and force standing behind the ruling class in feudalism and European ancient slavery. The element of significant consent to being rule arises with capitalism , free labor , mass democracy , etc. Part of the significance of the socalled primitive accumulation in which force played a more open role in removing the European peasants from the land as their natural laboratory and ownership of their own means of production is that subsequent generations of proletarians had to sell their labor power to live because they were just born into a life without any means of production. In other words, their suppression did not require constant use of force or threat as with the peasants in feudalism. You don't understand why Marxists call capitalist workers free labor.
With respect to your claim that American slavery was stable because of consent of the slaves, there is plenty of evidence, provided by THAT GREAT SCHOLAR AND GENIUS THINKER HERBERT APTHEKER especially, that there was continuous use and presence of brute force throughout the 300 years of slavery's stability. A main element of the Duboisian/Aptheker tradition of critique of the historical profession is demonstrating the widespread use of the whip, torture and rape DAY TO DAY. How the hell could anyone characterize anything in the response of the vicitms to this circumstance "consent" ? How the hell could anyone do that except by adopting some version of the slaveowners' version of the slaves' consciousness.
You and Genovese play true devil's advocates by trying to coverup and deny the evidence of how world historically brutal , continuously and openly, American slavery was.
> (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.
Yoshie, you read and rather liked my paper on this, in which I used American slavery as my main example!
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CB: Rape reintroduces the legal concept of consent. In this case, even bourgeois jurisprudence suggests by analogy a more sensible thesis than yours. The law recognizes that cooperative behavior , acquiescence or acceptance under DURESS makes CONSENT impossible.