One of these days, when I have the time, I'd like to delve into the
question of Genovese's intellectual evolution. You should remember that in
his Marxist prime, he was linked with Robert Brenner as adhering to a
hard-nosed vision of Marxism that ran counter to the mushy "third worldism"
of the Monthly Review. While Brenner's focus was on rural England of the
16th century, Genovese sought to explain the rise of modern capitalism in
the United States as a class struggle against the feudal south. Since the
system was "feudal", it obviously incorporated aspects of an organic
society based on noblesse oblige mixed with outright repression. This led
Genovese to the controversial conclusion that resistance to slavery was
fairly minimal. At some point, he lost interest in the underclass
apparently and became much more interested in the life-style and values of
the ruling class.
I tend to agree with Jim Blaut that the slavocracy was based on capitalist
rather than feudal property relations, just as I believe contra Brenner
that capitalism describes the class relations that existed in 16th and 17th
century Latin America.
As to the suggestion that the ante-bellum south had anything in common with
the ways in which the Arawak, Hawaiians or Inuit lived because they are all
"precapitalist" or "traditional", I can only suggest that PEN-L'ers read
"Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State" where Engels writes
of the constitution that governed the Iroquois confederacy:
"And a wonderful constitution it is, this gentile constitution, in all its
childlike simplicity! No soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles,
kings, regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits-and everything
takes its orderly course. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the
whole of the community affected, by the gens or the tribe, or by the gentes
among themselves; only as an extreme and exceptional measure is blood
revenge threatened-and our capital punishment is nothing but blood revenge
in a civilized form, with all the advantages and drawbacks of civilization.
Although there were many more matters to be settled in common than
today-the household is maintained by a number of families in common, and is
communistic, the land belongs to the tribe, only the small gardens are
allotted provisionally to the households -- yet there is no need for even a
trace of our complicated administrative apparatus with all its
ramifications. The decisions are taken by those concerned, and in most
cases everything has been already settled by the custom of centuries. There
cannot be any poor or needy-the communal household and the gens know their
responsibilities towards the old, the sick, and those disabled in war. All
are equal and free-the women included. There is no place yet for slaves,
nor, as a rule, for the subjugation of other tribes."
If you want to know what Marx and Engels thought of the plantation system
in the south by contrast, I refer PEN-L'ers to Marx's Herald Tribune
articles that called for smashing the system into the ground. As far as I
know, Engels agreed with him. Neither really called for smashing the
American Indians into the ground as far as I know. That's the position of
dogmatic Marxists like Bob Avakian who don't really understand Marx.
The last time I heard American Indian society and the slavocracy conflated
on PEN-L was the time Jim Heartfield was around. Not only do Marx and
Engels' writings militate against that view, it should be obvious from the
vast evidence of anthropological research from Franz Boas to Marshall
Sahlins that communal societies, despite their sometimes desperate
connections to available resources, were a lot freer than any society that
has followed them in the "evolutionary chain", which of course has nothing
to do with Marxism to begin with.
Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/
