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We wouldn't want to criticize the banks. We can't blame them for what they did, you know. Poor people are much more convenient recipients of the blame.
Because my answer depends on whether you're talking about a mass changing of minds and broad consensus agreement (which a president should join) or an armed uprising (which a president should suppress, if not "crush"
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He was accusing people who might have asked the question he objected to of calling slaves cowards, and of doing so from a position of personal comfort. The actual reason people would have asked that question was far different from what Genovese implied: they were just wondering why Nat Turner was the only one...the fact that they wondered that did not mean they were retroactively saying that the slaves should have gone on suicide missions of defiance-and it simply meant that those people weren't as aware as they might have been about how futile open slave revolts would have been. But that was a question of innocent lack of historical awareness, NOT of knowing arrogance and sanctimony.
And Genovese permanently discredited himself by his vicious and arrogant essay, titled "The Question"
IIRC), in which he implied that everyone on the Left everywhere KNEW the Bolshevik Revolution would end up degenerating in to Stalinism from the very beginning, even before Stalin took power, and that, therefore, everyone on the Left, even those on the parts of the Left that were independent of Bolshevism and, later, the Comintern, were ALL complicit in Stalin's crimes and that, as a result, EVERYONE on the Left anywhere, no matter how independent and anti-dictatorial, were evil. He also basically ended up as an apologist for the antebellum South and the supposed benevolence of white Southerners towards blacks, during slavery AND during "Jim Crow". Thus, nothing he had to say could have any redeeming value.
I know the Tea Party types are armed and the people who would back a left uprising aren't. Everyone knows that. That fact has nothing to do with whether the question I asked has any validity. And there's no way that this poll would give aid and comfort to a right-wing uprising.
What harm does it do to ask the question the poll asks? It's a hypothetical...about a situation that likely wouldn't happen anytime soon.
I suppose part of why I asked the question, though, is based on this larger question:
why should the Democratic Party remain loyal to the existing order when that existing order puts anyone and everyone who works for any sort of progressive social change at a permanent and hopeless disadvantage? In a way, isn't it kind of like asking prisoners to remain loyal to their jailers?
Why should we remain loyal to what is inherently unjust to us?
BTW, you have no reason to assume that I do NOTHING but post here. I am active in other ways as well. I post here simply because it's far easier to communicate quickly with large groups of people all over. Why should I just work locally, when that confines me to having no effect on anything outside my own town? Why should anyone accept that limitation?
Local work is important...but, by itself, it can't lead to anything beyond the local. Just working locally can't affect anyone anywhere else...and change has to ultimately be national and international to matter. Just winning your own county, or even just your own state isn't anything. There must be national and global communication and activism for ANY meaningful change to occur.
Last edited Wed Sep 3, 2014, 11:39 PM - Edit history (1)
and you claim Genovese discredited himself? If you bothered to glance at the book I cited, you would see it discusses HUNDREDS of slave revolts throughout the Americas. You consider yourself more knowledgeable than a leading historian in the field when you haven't even heard of famous revolts like Denmark Vessey, Gabriel Prosser, or the HAITIAN Revolution!!!!
Since you didn't bother reading Steven Hahn's piece, I'll make it simple: Genovese applied the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci's notion of cultural hegemony to the master slave relationship. Genoevese was a MARXIST at a time when leftists had been purged from universities by McCarthyism. Most historians of the US still don't read Marx and many read no theory whatsoever. That he became conservative as an old man does nothing to diminish his great work of his younger years. Hahn Described Roll, Jordan, Roll as perhaps the greatest monograph ever written on slavery, and I have to agree. By the way, even after turning right politically, his historical analysis remained Marxist. What I cited was his work on slavery because it speaks to the kind of bourgeois musings that are far too common.
Genovese was not an expert in the Russian Revolution. He was a leading historian of slavery. I haven't read the essay you refer to, but given the rest of the wild inaccuracies I don't see any reason to trust your account of it. He may well have lit into the left. He did that often, as Hahn points out. He did that while a leftist radical and after turning to the right. That you think a comment about one thing discredits his lifetime of work on slavery is patently absurd.
You don't deal with any of the questions I posed. It's all about--you're right, he's right, I'm left. Yet you, who imagines the Democratic Party is some revolutionary organ, considers yourself further left than Marxists. It's all about labels and nothing to do with substance or evidence.
The Democratic Party IS the existing order.
That is what is so out of it about your OP. The political parties are the political establishment.
I don't expect non-experts to know about the history of slavery and revolutions, but when they display the kind of arrogance to claim leading experts in the field "discredit themselves" while knowing nothing about the subject matter . . . you're just embarrassing yourself all the way around.
I don't know what you do offline. All I know is you know is you are supremely confident about things you clearly know nothing about. That does not exactly do a lot to enhance your narrative authority.
As you continue imagining the Democratic Party is "revolutionary" and Gramcian Marxists are right-wing, I'll leave you to your leader of the People's Revolution, Harry Reid. Good luck with that.
