Genovese impressively overthrew many existing assumptions within US slave historiography, only to replace them with dissimulations and distortions that were yet another set of theological postulates in the name of Marxism.
Manuel Yang
Issue #69, June 2004
In 1960, E.P. Thompson penned one of the opening shots of the British New Left, "Outside the Whale," which critically surveyed the political terrain of the 1950s in which disenchantment became the norm of erstwhile Communist militants and sympathizers who recoiled in the face of their Stalinist Yahweh that failed. That recoil, honorably experienced and articulated, Thompson said, more often than not progressed into default, that is to say, "capitulation to the status quo." Default meant taking refuge in the theological shelter of original sin where denunciation of former political commitments and Marxist faith equaled repentance: "The ritual demolition of Marxism perform necessary theological functions. They would remain a necessity to Natopolis, as a Satanic Idea, even if the Soviet Union were to vanish from the earth."
In our age of neoliberal imperialism, fifteen years after the Soviet Union vanished from the earth, Thompson's point remains as valid as ever, with the latest military entrenchment of the Bush administration exercising crude imperial boosterism for the post-Cold-War Natopolis that is under increasingly insecure US global hegemony. A vicious feature of this neoliberal world regime has been the rise of proletarian slavery throughout the world. George Caffentzis has incisively commented on this phenomenon: This does not imply a return to the "chattel" slavery of the pre-Civil-War period, where the slave was the property of private individuals and could be sold at will. But there are many forms of "unfree labor" — e.g., debt bondage, serfdom, prison labor, and corvee. These near-slave forms of labor were used in the US South for almost a century after slavery was abolished and the First Reconstruction was scuttled. The ending of the Second Reconstruction — practically in the late 1970s, and formally in 1995, with the Supreme Court decision to void Affirmative Action — has paved the way for a second round of near-slavery regimes which prey on the traditional source of slaves: the poor woman, the prisoner, and the stranger. For if slavery is, as Orlando Patterson suggests in his broader definition, "the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonoured persons," then these people fit the definition of the dominated. The existence of an "information-driven," "cyber-spaced," capitalism will not save us from a revival of slaveryÖ¡s long as capitalism continues to exist there will be an inevitable tendency to reintroduce slave-like forms of labor. If waged and unwaged workers do not have the force to resist this tendency, then many of our number will be doomed to slave status at whatever the level of productive forces the capitalists command.
Nowhere has this notion of "slavery" been more woefully mystified than in the domain of US historical scholarship. Genovese and Slaveocracy
One of the prime sources of this mystification is Eugene D. Genovese, once a leading Marxist historian of U.S. plantation slavery and now a neoconservative, Catholic curmudgeon in the Culture Wars, a man who appears to have traversed the path of apostasy as readily as the previous generation of ex-Communists. Genovese impressively overthrew many existing assumptions within U.S. slave historiography, only to replace them with dissimulations and distortions that were yet another set of theological postulates in the name of Marxism. In The Political Economy of Slavery (1965), he wrote that the Southern slave "planters were not mere capitalists; they were precapitalist, quasi-aristocratic landowners who had to adjust their economy and ways of thinking to a capitalist world market" and this quasi-aristocratic, landowning tradition "developed neither a strange form of capitalism nor an undefinable agrarianism but a special civilization built on the relationship of master to slave," a civilization that, "in its spirit and fundamental direction, represented the antithesis of capitalism, however many compromises it had to make."
Hence the nineteenth-century struggle between the North and South in the US Civil War (which Genovese insistently dubs "the War for Southern Independence") was a clash of two civilizations, the Northern bourgeois one of market-based industrial capitalism and the Southern one of slaveholding landowners. Genovese has gone so far as to say that the latter civilization, at its best, "constituted a rejection of the crass, vulgar, inhumane elements of capitalist society," refusing social relations based on the cash nexus, and, "given their sense of honor, were prepared to defend [their ideals] at all cost." Indeed, "The planters, in truth, grew into the closest thing to feudal lords imaginable in a nineteenth-century bourgeois republic."
This Genovesean thesis is not far removed from the fetishism of categories that Marx decried in his attack on bourgeois political economy, that secular theology of the capitalist class (note that the title of his book is not the Critique of the Political Economy of Slavery). One of the central features of theology is that it mistakes appearance for the essence of things. Hence seeing the appearance of perfected humanity in God, capitalism, or socialism, as well as the appearance of embryonic capitalist relations in all forms of society throughout history, are manifest examples of theological thought. When Genovese calls the US Southern slave planters "the closest thing to feudal lords imaginable in a nineteenth-century bourgeois republic," he mistakes the appearance of aristocratic ideology and mores for the essence of the historical, social relations that defined the plantation system. <SNIP>
Michael Pugliese