Genovese's thesis was the same as Gramsci's, that successful domination over time requires a mixture of consent or acqwuiesence extracted by concessions to the interest of the dominated group, as well as application of coercion or force to repress unrest or outright opposition. The "fucking point" that I accused W of missing -- perhaps unfairly -- in the context of Esat European Jewry was that their relation to the dominant Polish/Russian culture was one of oppression, domination, and exploitation. But now I don't think W meant to deny that. But was there consent and acquiesence? You better believe it. Frankly, African Americans were far more rebellious than Eastern European Jews. It's just that wasn't their domiannt mode. Couldn't have been. The system would not have lasted if it had been.
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CB: Sorry, I was being a bit impish and parenthetical ( and obscure; but Michael Puglese found the old impolite way I said it :>) ). Just that to some people Genovese does sound like he's saying something somewhat equivalent to " slaves and slaveowners lived in some kind of symbiosis in the US South" or however you phrased it to Wojtek.
I realize to Wojtek you meant your phrase to demonstrate by the example of an overly mild way of describing the U.S. South how what he was saying was too mild to describe the situation of Jews In Eastern Europe. Then our old LBO exchange about Genovese and the Old South popped into my mind.
Actually, now it sounds like Gramsci's thesis and Judith Butler and Althusser's theses are similar theses , don't they ? How the oppressed participate in their own oppression ? This overlaps with the intermittent thread on why opportunism and class collaboration have prevailed as the ideology and practice of the U.S. working class and trade union movement.
One answer to that last question on the cause of opportunism is "that damned Stalinist(un)Popular Front did it. "
Isn't Gramsci's thesis a sort of "lemma" to Marx's "axiom" that capitalism relies more on the the "civil" means compulsion of the wage-labor relationship ( exchange of equivalents) than on the direct physical coercion of feudalism and slavery ? Of course, the Old South had slavery, not a wage system of civil compulsion.