Nostalgia for old regimes (was: Re: [Marxism] A critique of Genovese

[LouPaulsen@xxxxxxxxxxx]

Yea, but the "subsumed" slave mode and associated culture/tradition in the U.S. 
South was not uncapitalist in a progressive sense as Genovese implies or 
outright says. It was uncapitalist in a reactionary sense.

> Charles

I don't think that (in his Marxist days anyway) Genovese would have consciously 
stated or implied that U.S. Southern slave plantation culture was actually 
progressive as against Northern capitalist culture.  On the other hand you are 
right that a certain amount of nostalgia for the supposed culture and taste and 
honor and morality and courage and dignity of the southern slaveholders does 
contaminate the passage that was quoted.   This sort of plantation nostalgia is 
a constantly recurring theme in U.S. culture; "Gone with the Wind" is the 
obvious exemplar, but you see it all the time.  I remember some stupid play 
they staged on PBS once in which the key dramatic moment is when the hero, a 
spy for the North, decides that it would be "ungentlemanly" to transmit 
information about Confederate troop movements that he had obtained from a 
trusting southern lady.  The viewer was expected to approve of this treason.

Two non-US examples that come to mind are Victor Hugo's "'93", where the 
courageous old royalist is freed from prison by his idealistic revolutionary 
protegé, and "The Red Violin" with its sequence on China's cultural revolution.

Of course it's quite true that capitalists have no ideals, morality, dignity, 
culture, honor, etc., but I think the honor and morality and dignity of 
Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and John Brown (e.g.) would stack up well 
against those of the slaveocrats.

Lou Paulsen
Chicago.
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