Charles Brown wrote:
> Comment from historian Mark Solomon.
>
> Charles:
>
> Just a very quick, undigested response to this interesting dialogue with Lou
> Proyect.
>
> First, an attempt was made to conjoin Jewish concentration camp slave labor
> with slavery in the US. It was done in what I consider a vile, racist (and
> unintentionally anti-Semitic) book by Stanley Elkins, "Slavery: A Problem in
> American Institutional and Intellectual Life" published in 1959 (and
> interestingly, with an introduction by Nathan Glazer). Elkins sought to
> "explain" the "docile," "child-like" and "Sambo" behavior of slaves by
> comparing their conditions with the total oppressiveness of concentration
> camps which allegedly engendered a fawning, nearly infantile dependence by
> inmates upon guards and the whole brutal camp structure. Elkins tries to have
> it both ways by denying resistance and rebellion AND then claiming that
> failure to rebel was due to unspeakably horrible circumstances and total
> subjugation which produced a culture of dependency illustrated by every
> racist stereotype to come down the pike since the 15th century. By linking
> alleged slave behavior to the alleged behavior of Jewish camp inmates, he
> tries to universalize the issue and thus disguise his acceptance of racist
> perceptions of slaves. It's a kind of 'leftist" variant of the Fogel-Engerman
> thesis which locates slave "adjustment" in their alleged adoption of a
> Protestant Ethic under as a quasi-feudal system of mutual obligations.
>
> To create some kind of overarching tension or conflict between Genovese and
> Fogel-Engerman is absurd. In social terms, they were all at the University of
> Rochester at the same time, and developed their work in a kind of symbiosis.
> Genovese's psedo-Gramscian efforts to deny slave rebellion by positing a
> holistic hegemonic slave culture is simply a manipulation of different
> categories to arrive at essentially the same conclusions as Fogel-Engerman.
>
> Marx made it abundantly clear that slavery was the fundamental source for the
> primitive accumulation of capital which was the mandatory life blood of
> nascent capitalism. While the internal class dynamics and culture of
> plantation slavery were different from mercantile capitalism and even more
> different from emerging industrial capitalism, both systems of class rule and
> surplus value extraction were tied together by a virtual umbilical cord. We
> know today that various social and economic structures which maintain strands
> of slavery, feudalism, and even primitive communism cannot escape the tyranny
> of global capitalism. So--I'm for a dialectical approach which acknowledges
> structural and cultural distinctiveness in slavery, but also grasps its
> inseparable (and contradictory) relationship with capitalism.
>
> For what it's worth, feel free to share this with Lou.
>
> Best,
> Mark
--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
