<< it seems to me that this concept
>is of far less utility in analyzing American slavery where naked coercion
>played a much greater role in.
> Exactamente. I'm rather baffled by Justin's apparent inability to
get this point.
Maybe I'm just stupid. Or maybe I get it, but disagree.
> That American slave owners' ideology was
paternalistic & sometimes anti-capitalist, as Genovese correctly
argues (though Genovese overstates, in my view, anti-capitalist
components of slave owners' ideology), doesn't mean that the social
formation in question was in reality paternalistic in the style of
pre-modern class societies with serfs or slaves,
Genovese doesn't say it was. nor do I. G discusses the differences between ancient and modern slavery.
> much less that
slaves themselves "spontaneously" consented to the ideology of
paternalism in the Gramscian sense of consent. >>
No, it doesn't "mean" that, in the sense that it does not follow from the slaveowners' paternalism that the slaves necessarily consented. They didn't have to, and sometimes they didn't. There were Nat Turners and Denmark Veseys, as well as thousands of runaways. There were also Frederick Douglasses (my some is named for him, apropos of nothing), but citing the experience of the greatest runaway slave intellectual, the one who formulated the radical jsutice that shaped the abolitionist movement, to show that slaves did not consent, is sort of like referring to Marx, or maybe Josepf Dietzgen, to show that workers do not consent to capitalism. If most slaves were like Douglass, or most workers like Dietzgen, we would live in a different and better world. So, the lack of consent by some slaves does not mean that most slaves did not consent, and the fact that paternalism does not require consent does not show that it did not get consent in most cases.
Personally, I think the rael objection to the thesis is that it somehow insults the solaves or threatens to legitimate slavery if we do not say that all slaves were Nat Turners who were kept in line by sheer terror if at all. The problem is that this is inconsistent with the observed facts of the relative stability of American slavery for a very long period, and the security inw hich the slaveowners lived their lives. The famous Confederate diarist Mary Chestnut wondered why she and others of her class did not have to worry that their slaves would not cut their throats while they slept. ANd thsi was during the war, when the armed forces were away at the front and the slaves were becoming openly restive! Yoshie might contemplate why not, if her theory was right. --jks
--jks