Dialect Anthropol (2012) 36:245262 DOI 10.

1007/s10624-012-9287-5 OBITUARY

Eugene Genovese and a dialectical anthropology

George Baca

Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012

Eric Hobsbawm is one of the few genuinely great historians of our century. He is also the one genuinely great historian to come out of the Anglo-American Marxist left. I admit to my prejudice. He has been the strongest inuence on my own work as a historian, and in 1979 I dedicated a book on black slave revolts to Eric Hobsbawm: Our Main Man. I have made a great many mistakes in my life, but reading and rereading Hobsbawms powerful new book I am relieved to see that I got at least that much right. Eugene Genovese (1995: 43). Over the past two decades historian Eugene Genovese has been an object of scorn, even hatred, by the Left. Meanwhile various right wing and conservative gures have embraced him and he developed a number of friendships and alliances that seemed to undermine his long and uninching career as a radical scholar. I will confess, the perception of two Eugene Genovesesthe radical historian gifted with great analytic powers and the rightwing ideologuehas been puzzling. In 1993 I discovered Genoveses prodigious critical powers in his classic Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. I was in awe of the way he rejected the simple moralism inherent in liberal assessments of slavery by drawing an authoritative picture, bewildering in all its contradictory details, of the manner in which slaves and their owners created a society. I navigated my way through Genoveses corpus largely unguided, which left me oblivious of his now legendary shift to the Right (see Genovese 1994). To say the least, my enthusiasm for Genovese went over like a lead balloon as I began to traverse my way through the political landmines of academia. My admiration for Genoveses intellectual powers met hushes, awkward
G. Baca (&) College of International Studies, Dong-A University, International Studies B5-0256, 225 Gudeok-ro, Seo-Gu, Busan 602-760, Korea e-mail: baca.george@gmail.com

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silences, raised eyebrows, and the occasional didactic lecture to disabuse me of my ignorance. Over the past twenty years I have continued to pay attention to Genoveses workwhile ignoring much of his incendiary political rhetoricand believe that he offers many insights necessary for a dialectical approach to anthropology. Any scholar interested in understanding contemporary global capitalism and changing forms of nationalism and racism, will ignore Eugene Genoveses work at her own peril. The excerpt above, from a generous yet sharp review of Eric Hobsbawms Age of Extremes (1995), may help reframe our recollections of Genovese. Even in his much maligned reincarnation as a conservative he retained an abiding interest in understanding capitalism. Moreover he remained inuenced by Marxism and even claimed Eric Hobsbawm as his greatest inspiration. Yet Genovese distinguished himself with the uncanny ability to combine careful synchronic analyses and systematic theorizations with the type of sweeping historical narratives of global capital and empire that was the hallmark of Hobsbawm; and he continued to yield relevant insights about the ways the American South has developed from a dialectical relationship with global capitalism (see Fox-Genovese and Genovese 1983, 2005, 2008). Genoveses methods for connecting local studies with global phenomena are relevant to contemporary anthropology. Especially in light of the ascendance of concepts like globalization and transnationalism, which have left many anthropologists grasping for new methods to scrutinize what is perceived to be the novelty of global ows (see Mintz 1998; Trouillot 2003). In this context Genovese offers a useful model of history; a painstakingly dialectical methodology that aggressively breaks down the mechanistic binaries and oppositions from which the road to hell is paved with Manichaean characters representing good and evil. Genovese was never interested in telling comforting stories as the title of his latest monographFatal Self-Deception: Slaveholding Paternalism in the Old South (Genovese and Fox-Genovese 2011)attests. Instead of feel-good and uplifting narratives, he told complex stories that highlighted, in Marxian fashion, the radical ways in which capitalism restructures social relations; a process that is characterized by a complex mix of coercion, resistance, accommodation, and reform that illustrates the historical nature of cultural forces. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, Genovese made an indelible mark drawing, it seems, equal parts of praise and criticismwith the rapid-re publication of four classic texts: The Political Economy of Slavery (1965), The World the Slaveholders Made (1969), In Red and Black (1971), and nally Roll, Jordan, Roll (1974). Armed with a sophisticated understanding of Marxist theory he made a valiant effort to reorient the discipline of American history. At the time, the study of slavery in the United States was mired in parochial notions of American Exceptionalism that presumed slavery was an aberration to the United States core ideals, a nation that was ultimately viewed as having, through godly ordinance, the mission to spread liberty and democracy. Inspired by Antonio Gramscis concept of cultural hegemony (see Genovese 1967), he found within pro-slavery ideology an antagonism to the market-based bourgeois society of the antebellum North. In the end, he showed that the southern planters constituted a forceful opposition to the

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expansion of modern capitalist social relations (Lichtenstein 1997). Yet it produced a class hegemony through paternalisma process that bound planters and slaves into fraught yet tight social relationships, which he chillingly described in the opening passage of Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made: Cruel, unjust, exploitative, oppressive, slavery bound two peoples together in bitter antagonism while creating an organic relationship so complex and ambivalent that neither could express the simplest feelings without reference to the other. By denition and in essence it was a system of class rule, in which some people lived off the labor of others. American slavery subordinated one race to another and thereby rendered its fundamental class relationships more complex and ambiguous; but they remained class relationships. The racism that developed from racial subordination inuenced every aspect of American life and remains powerful. But slavery as a system of class rule predated racism and racial subordination in world history and once existed without them (Genovese 1974: 34). By the mid-1970s Stanley Diamond had launched Dialectical Anthropology and Genoveses studies of American slavery were in conversation with, and grew alongside, the newly developing approach in anthropology known as culture and political economy. With this emergent approach Genovese shared what William Roseberry dened as a cultural-historical methodology that offered an alternative to the World Systems theories tendency to subsume local histories into global processes (for this type of critique of World Systems see Mintz 1977 and Genovese 1975: p. 75). To be sure, Genovese contributed an innovative methodology that grasped the formation of anthropological subjects (real people doing real things) at the intersections of local interactions and the larger processes of state and empire making (Roseberry 1988: 163, italics original). With the recent passing of Eugene Genovese, it is a good time to reect on his approach to studying culture and history by revisiting an article he published in the rst volume of Dialectical Anthropology entitled Class, Culture, and Historical Process. This rather bland title belies the engaging and critical examination of Sidney Mintzs Caribbean Transformations. In this volume, Mintz synthesized some of his most important studies of Caribbean societies. Over the past four decades, Caribbean Transformations has become a classic text. What distinguishes the volume is that it displays Mintzs unique ability to speak authoritatively about Anglophone, Hispanophone, and Francophone societies in the region. Rather than being a rehashing of previous arguments, he pulled these studies together in order to make a comprehensive and vigorous argument for the Caribbean as a cultural region that emerged from a plantation economy under regimes of slavery. Genoveses evaluation of Caribbean Transformations begins with his sophisticated concept of culture, which he argues is necessary for understanding the ways in which the historical transformation of relations between the European metro-pole and Caribbean colonies have shaped the extenuating problems facing those who would lead these or other new nations out of poverty, disunity, and colonial exploitation (Genovese 1975: p. 75). Genovese insists that the careful description of cultural life of oppressed peoplewhether it is ethnography or social historyis

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relevant for understanding large questions about the development of capitalism and systems of domination. Moreover he stresses the strength of Mintzs ethnographic view lay in that Nothing is irrelevant. The ways in which slaves, and later freedmen, cooked their food, reinterpreted received religious doctrines, organized a division of labor in the home, sang songs, worked hard or shirkedthe ways, big and small, they shaped their own livesprovided them with reference points of their own (Genovese 1975: p. 73). Amid his praise for Mintzs eldwork and analytic performance, Genovese begins to reveal his disagreements on the level of conceptualization. In contrast to Mintz, Genovese fancied himself as a theorist and put great efforts into conceptualizing the ideological structures of American slavery. His approach has certainly yielded impressive insights in his formulation of paternalism. Unlike the way in which contemporary anthropologists often dismiss the ideas of neoliberals as a charade, he took paternalism as a central organizing theme of southern society, which could not be dismissed as a smokescreen that merely glossed over exploitation. Instead he illustrated that it was expressed as an authentic expression of class rule, rather than as a hypocritical pretense designed to paper over naked human exploitation and greed (Lichtenstein 1997). Genovese makes no bones that the central idea of slavery, from the perspective of the master, was the absolute submission of the slave whereby the slave represented the extension of the masters will (Genovese 1975: p. 72). It is in relationship to reigning ideologies of power that he credits Mintz with bringing to life the manner in which oppressed peoples are agents of history (Genovese 1975: p. 72). In the case of slaves and their descendants, these cultural forms of resistance surely had some African antecedents, but these were not African per se. Instead they were shaped by their integration into large scale, often proto-industrial, plantations with a meticulous division of labor. In the process, slaves drew on Europe, the colonial setting, and above all the immediate plantation community in a process that Genovese brilliantly describes as ruthlessly appropriating everything they needed and could use. The world view they fashioned in consequence allowed them to meet the demands of the economics and social system without fully becoming its creatures. That the system took a heavy toll, culturally as well as physically, is beyond doubt. But it could not produce the robots it wanted (Genovese 1975: p. 73). In this way Genoveses depiction of New World civilization simultaneously captures the tragedy of enslavement while demonstrating that slaves were actors who fashioned a world view of their own at the same time they were tragically subordinated to a ruthless regime of class power. At the end of the essay Genovese fully reveals his disappointment with Caribbean Transformations when he asserts the main difculty with Mintzs brilliant work on the relationship of class and culture lies in his skirting of the problem of hegemony (Genovese 1975: p. 77). He adds irony when he points out the aw in analysis appears most clearly in midst of one of his nest analytical performances in describing effectively the complexities of accommodation and resistance and rebuts the rigid mechanistic formulations that have marked the recent debate on the slave personality. Genovese provides a long quotation that simultaneously represents Mintzs excellent discussion and a certain mechanistic quality of its own:

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But there was also accommodation, submission, degradation, and self-hatred. Moreover, it is clear that some of the most effective forms of resistance were built upon prior adaptation, involving the slaves in processes of culture change and retention of a complicated kind. To write off all adaptive mechanisms as a loss of will to resist is tantamount to the denial of creative energies to the slaves themselves. Was the readiness of Jamaican slaves to grow their own foodstuffs on plantation uplands to be written off as nonresistance? Through such activities, the slaves acquired skills in cultivation and marketing that greatly increased their ability to escape plantation labor after emancipation; traveled freely to the market-places, where they learned much of value (some of which may have been essential in fomenting rebellion); demonstrated to observant visitors their capacity to function independently and intelligently; and acquired liquid capital for various purposes. Yet no one would call subsistence cultivation and marketing mechanisms of resistance, for the very good reason that they were not resistance as such, but forms of accommodation. At the same time, suicide since it deprived masters of their laboris correctly labeled resistance, even though, once dead, one does precious little resisting (Mintz 1974: 76). In this passage, Genovese argues, Mintz poses a brittle dichotomy between resistance and accommodation that ultimately does violence to the dialectical character of the specic analysis (Genovese 1975: p. 78). And this problem, Genovese insists, stems from Mintzs attempt to bypass the problems posed by the ideological character of the slave regime considered as a whole (Genovese 1975: p. 78). Genoveses critique of Mintz in term of ideology and hegemony is not surprising. Certainly these two concepts are the hallmarks of his early work. Clearly this objection to Mintz stems from his reading of Antonio Gramscis concept of cultural hegemony. It is important to point out that Genovese was one of the rst North American scholars to engage Gramsci. Dare I say he preceded, by more than two decades, the mainstream of anthropologys enthusiastic embrace of hegemony. Genovese sees the concept of hegemony as the tool that can restore the dialectical character of social life to Mintzs analysis. In this way, he brings everyday life of oppression into an exploration of social change and historical process whereby the ruling classes, and the various factions within, are in a continuous struggle, or what Gramsci calls a war of maneuver that dispenses with any type of a binary opposition between resistance and accommodation (Gramsci 1971). Through intraclass struggles and the framing of what is acceptable we see the creation of a common sense (in the Gramscian sense) which permeates the fabric of New World plantation-based societies. Clearly not everyone is affected the same way given their material realities and how groups are in structured hierarchy with one another, but nonetheless it does affect allmasters, slaves, and everyone else alike. It claries the limits of power and understands the way in which these dominant views are constantly resisted and challenged in ways that modify and shape the structures of power and economy: There are, after all, profound differences between the culture of Brooklyn dock workers and that of Wall Street bankers; there may be even greater

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differences between the culture of Jamaican peasants and that of the Kingston elite. Yet ruling classes, when they are not in their death throes and relying on naked force, rule by mediating these differences within the context of a hegemonic ideologyhegemonic because it compels the lower classes to dene themselves within the ruling system even while resisting its aggression with enormous courage and resourcefulness (Genovese 1975: p. 77). Genoveses interpretation of cultural hegemony was part of a political vision for a radical politics, which he shared, for a short time, with many of the anthropologists who helped establish Dialectical Anthropology in 1975. Genovese proved to be a respected interlocutor and his contributions to radical scholarship landed him on the original editorial board of Dialectical Anthropology. In establishing the journal, Stanley Diamond expressed an optimism about the reemergence of a critical scholarship through which the impulse of the sixties had survived the generation that created them; they have found more serious, focused, and more deeply political (that is, Marxist) expression (Diamond 1979). By the 1980s such condence had dissipated and Genovese was tacking to the right. This leads me to reect on the fact that during the 1960s Genovese was already talking about issues of global capital and the inherent struggles against market ideology long beforeand betterthan many people do today. However, he became rightfully despondent about the type of conversations that were emerging and one has to think that if alliances had been fortied within anthropology, Genovese might not have been captivated by a rightward political position. That is to say, his railing against the identity politics, however wrong he may have been, partly stemmed from the fact that American anthropology followed a detour away from the path of rigorous analysis that he had sketched. And so the negative reactions to my insistence on reading and using Genovese are indicative of what he was railing abouteven if the specics of his diatribes (and its extremes) may have been quite mistaken. Its impossible to say whether this would have affected Genoveses slide to the right. However, if anthropology had paid more careful attention to this research agenda, history could have been different. Whatever Genoveses faults were, we must be equally critical of the path that the discipline of anthropology has taken.

References
Diamond, Stanley (ed.). 1979. Toward a Marxist Anthropology: Problems and Perspectives. The Hague: Mouton Publishers. Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, and Eugene Genovese. 1983. Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism. New York: Cambridge University Press. Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, and Eugene Genovese. 2005. The Mind of the Masterclass: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders Worldview. New York: Cambridge University Press. Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, and Eugene Genovese. 2008. Slavery in White and Black: Class and Race in the Southern Slaveholders New World Order. New York: Cambridge University Press. Genovese, Eugene. 1965. The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and the Society of the Slave South. New York: Vintage. Genovese, Eugene. 1967. On Antonio Gramsci. Studies on the Left 7(12): 83107.

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Genovese, Eugene. 1969. The World the Slaveholders Made. New York: Vintage. Genovese, Eugene. 1971. In Red and Black: Marxian explorations in Southern and Afro-American history. New York: Pantheon Books. Genovese, Eugene. 1974. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage. Genovese, Eugene. 1975. Class, culture and historical process. 1(14): 7179. doi:10.1007/BF00244570 Genovese, Eugene. 1994. The question. Dissent 41(3): 371376. Genovese, Eugene. 1995. The squandered century: A Review of Ages of Extremes. The New Republic volume 212: 3843. Genovese, Eugene, and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. 2011. Fatal Self-Deception: Slaveholding Paternalism in the Old South. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1995. Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 19141991. New York: Pantheon Books. Lichtenstein, Alex. 1997. Right Church, Wrong Pew: Eugene Genovese & Southern Conservatism. New Politics, 6 (3) http://nova.wpunj.edu/newpolitics/issue23/lichte23.htm. Mintz, Sidney. 1974. Caribbean Transformations. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton. Mintz, Sidney. 1977. The so-called world system: Local initiative and local response. Dialectical Anthropology 2(4): 253270. Mintz, Sidney. 1998. Localization of anthropological practice: From area studies to transnationalism. Critique of Anthropology 18(2): 117133. Roseberry, William. 1988. Political economy. Annual Review of Anthropology 17: 161185. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Class, Culture, and Historical Process

Eugene Genovese

Caribbean Transformations1 brings together Sidney W. Mintzs most important studies of the Afro-American experience and of such related subjects as the development of the plantation system, the emergence of post-emancipation peasantries, and the social basis of nationhood.1 Anthropologists and other Caribbean specialists, who have long appreciated the high quality of Mint_ s eld z work, research, and analytical performance, will welcome a volume that conveniently presents these previously published papers together with much new material. They should take additional satisfaction in Mintzs decision to revise his earlier work so as to shape these papers into a coherent interpretation of Caribbean social history. Even those who know Mintzs work well will nd this book fresh. To Mintzs great credit, Caribbean Transformations deserves careful criticism from a wide range of perspectives, for it makes important contributions to cultural and economic anthropology, to the political and economic history of the Caribbean, to the development of a social history of oppressed classes, to an understanding of the roots of racism, and to the theory of capitalist development. Consideration of
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Sidney W. Mintz, Caribbean Transformations (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, Inc., 1974). Eugene Genovese is Chairman of the Department of History at the University of Rochester, New York.

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these contributions, especially to anthropology and Caribbean studies, may best be left to specialists. As a historian with no claims to being a Caribbean specialist, I wish to limit myself to some of the implications for the Marxist interpretation of historyan interpretation that has clearly inuenced Mintzs thought and helped shape his formulation of major problems. Taken as a whole, Caribbean Transformations does much more than explore the origins and development of Afro-Caribbean culture; it provides an original vantage point for the study of Caribbean political economy and of the problems facing those who would lead these or other new nations out of poverty, disunity, and colonial exploitation.2 As such, it should provide all the answers anyone needs to refute those who pursue the cult of relevance. What could be less relevant than to dally over the different ways in which Caribbean peoples cook their food or organize their yards and gardens? Yet, as Mintz demonstrates, the problem is not that cooking has no relevance for politicswe have good reason to know that it doesbut that we cannot as yet establish the chains of connection within the patterns we are struggling to identify. The way a people cooks its food and the kinds of food it cooks reveal a good deal about its spirit andto invoke the word that conjures up vast mystical properties these daysits consciousness. For example, slaves in the United States had ostensibly been whipped into sulleness, dispiritedness, and even infantilization; yet we know that they took great pride in their cooking. They carefully handed down recipes from mother (and father) to daughter (and son) and quietly assumed that blacks were naturally superior to whites in culinary matters, and indeed in much else. Cooking, like many other seemingly trivial activities, became a politically safe way for a downtrodden people to remind themselves and others with eyes to see that, however badly mauled, they were keeping themselves alive to ght another day. Among American scholars, no one has displayed a deeper sense than Mintz of the political implications of an oppressed peoples culture. From a general appreciation of cultural manifestations as proto-politicsas resistancehe has carried his analyses to higher levels in order to establish the most specic linkages he can discern, consistent with responsible scholarship. He has delineated those linkages he regards as almost certain, those he regards as probable, and those he regards as merely possible. Thereby he has established the foundation for further work that may, as he well knows, overturn some of his favorite hypotheses. He has forcefully demonstrated that the history, economy, and politics of the Caribbeannot to mention the prospects for revolutionary social and national transformationcannot intelligently be pursued outside a cultural context. For Mintz, culture is ever changing. In one of its decisive aspects, it serves oppressed people as a strategy for survival through the organization of daily life. As such, it is profoundly political, for it provides the essential context, both material and spiritual, from which a people forges its politics, strictly dened. Or, as Mintz eloquently puts it: It seems to me immensely important to maintain an insistence on the sociopolitical signicance of everyday lifewhether we analyze contemporary black power movements, slave revolts, or the growth of a nation. Throughout history, the massive struggles of whole peoples to discover and

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claim their own destiny has been waged against a background in which love, hate, personal loyalty, the rewards of propinquity and familiarity, and the ordinary pleasures of existence continue to make irrevocable claims upon the human spirit, The peoples of the Caribbean, predominantly poor, rural, agricultural, and illiterate, have been as subject to these claims as any other peoples in world history. Crops must be planted, cultivated, and harvested; babies must be conceived and born; young people must fall in love; old people must be cared for. The animal and spiritual needs of all human beings demand satisfaction, no matter what the convulsions of history (p. 32). The central idea of slavery, from the masters point of view, was the absolute submission of the slave to the master. Theoretically, the slave represented no more than an extension of the masters will. Stanley Elkins, in his controversial book, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, charted the logic, although by no means the historical reality, of this system.3 But human beings, including slaves, do not so readily collapse into mindless puppets of the logical processes invented by their rulers. Theory or no theory, law or no law, whip or no whip, the slaves manifested wills of their own, and every manifestation of those wills, no matter how trivial to outsiders, constituted resistance to the system, for it imposed limits on the power of the masters within a system of ostensibly unlimited power. Mintz shows, among other things, that each specic response by slaves and groups of slaves to the system of control imposed upon them must be studied in its particularitythat an understanding of the worlds the slaves made for themselves must rest on a dissection of the discrete ways in which particular slaves at particular historical moments combined the legacy of their embattled past with the emergent demands of their painful present. Mintz tells us that he is merely trying to etch in the background against which great historical events have occurred and will occur. This claim is too modest. When, for example, he explores the origins and nature of the African elements in Caribbean life, he demonstrates the limits within which all modern ideologiesPan-Africanism, nationalism, Marxismmust operate if they expect to sink deep roots in these heterogeneous societies. In particular, Mintz carefully lays out the ways in which the Caribbean peoples, including the blacks, have had a variety of historical experiences within which differences match similarities in importance. These considerations lead Mintz to confront the vexing question of the relationship of class, race, and nationality, not in terms of the balance among these elements but in the way in which class shapes culture and vice versa, and the way in which each separately, and both as an organic whole, shape the struggle for national identity. His examination of historical orgins, of types of metropolitancolonial relationships, and of plantation economic systems all form necessary parts of a search for a coherent theory of the relationship of class, culture, and nation. Mintzs papers on Puerto Rico and Jamaica, for example, make bold new departures that have already yielded results in the work of other scholars, some of whom occasionally even acknowledge his inuence. By tracing the stages in the development of a plantation during and after slavery, Mintz in effect offers a better

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model than we have had for the study of New World plantation systems. Its special value lies in the links it helps establish between those plantations based on slave labor and those based on wage labor and various forms of disguised bondage. Whereas most other efforts to dene and examine the continuities and discontinuities have focused on economic organizationsometimes with excellent resultsMintz sets the economic organization itself in a broader social framework. Mintz treats us to a careful, empirically grounded analysis of the stages in the development of the plantation system at the unit level. Other scholars, especially historians and sociologists, have followed this procedure before, but it is done here, probably for the rst time, from a theoretically integrative anthropological point of view. The material basis (land, labor, techniques of production, etc.) receives careful attention, as do the limits it places upon human action. But that human action never appears in these pages as something passive or receptiveas mere object or superstructural reex. On the contrary, minute details of social life and culture appear with a new power because Mintz demonstrates the ways in which they in fact do mold and ultimately inform the material basis of production. Nothing is irrelevant. The ways in which slaves, and later freedmen, cooked their food, reinterpreted received religious doctrines, organized a division of labor in the home, sang songs, worked hard or shirkedthe ways, big and small, they shaped their own livesprovided them with reference points of their own. These reference points had strong African antecedents, but also drew on Europe, the colonial setting, and above all on the immediate plantation community. The slaves ruthlessly appropriated to themselves everything they needed and could use. The world view they fashioned in consequence allowed them to meet the demands of the economic and social system without fully becoming its creatures. That the system took a heavy toll, culturally as well as physically, is beyond doubt. But it could not produce the robots it wanted. The struggle of the masters to impose their will, of the slaves to resist it, and of the compromises and antagonistic unity that resulted cannot be understood without a detailed, specic study of the cultural mechanisms of everyday life. This kind of study lies at the heart of Mintzs work. The masters provided the material conditions of production, which shaped what they themselves were to become. Together, as a ruling class of men who presided over a regime of things, they sought to make their laborers an extension of their own will. But, as Mintz convincingly demonstrates, the slaves and peasants created lives for themselves even within the narrow limits set by the regime. They stretched and ultimately broke through those limits, not so much by waging frontal warfare although they did their share of thatas by making themselves into human beings and building a collective community life upon their own self-created humanity. Their effort changed, for better or for worse, both the masters and the machines; the oppressed and the oppressors together dened the regime as a whole and simultaneously shaped each other. Mintz does not, however, leave matters there, as is the fashion among those social scientists and social historians who invoke the cultural creativity of the lower classes either to minimize their misery and the force of oppression or, alternatively and from the left, to escape having to discuss the price every people must pay for channeling its creativity into a cultural response to exploitation, oppression, and

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terror. Mintz faces these painful questions and relates the admirable cultural achievements of the slaves and peasants to long-term political weaknesses. In the Caribbean these questions of class and culture loom large in a consideration of the new problems of nationalism. Mintz reveals the terrible price paid by each society as a whole for the racial and class biases that prevented the planters and the metropolitan elites from recognizing how much the slaves and peasants had in fact built both for themselves and for the island nations now struggling to emerge. If Mintz seems cautious about attributing a central role in social change to class forces, the logic of his interpretation of culture carries the argument onto essentially Marxian ground. And no Marxism that fails to take his ideas seriously is likely to be worth much. His interpretation of historical process is, however, marred by ambiguity and a dubious theory of capitalist development. Mintz repeatedly obscures the distinction between the capitalist mode of production and capitalistic elements in other modes of production. He does not, for example, clarify matters when he writes: The African slave trade and slavery itself were ultimately bound up with the spread of European military and colonial power and with commercial developmerits, especially in overseas capitalistic agriculture (p. 9). Or when, despite his appeal to Marxian categories, he suddenly shifts to antithetical ground and implicitly seeks the mainspring of historical development in systems of exchange rather than systems of production by contrasting capitalism with isolated manors (p. 47).4 Or when he writes: The establishment of the plantation system meant a rooted overseas capitalism based on conquest, slavery and coercion, and investment and entrepreneurship Thus, the growth of slavebased economies in the New World was an integral part of the rise of European commerce and industry (pp. 910). Or when he slides over major problems of interpretation: Hence the development of slave systems outside Europe was important to European development; the slave economies were in fact dependent parts of European economies (p. 10). Every statement in these passages is individually defensible. But neither individually nor together do they address the main theoretical question they are meant to address. And nowhere does Mintz hedge more outrageouslythe more so since he rarely hedges at allas when he alludes to unnamed and probably nonexistent opponents: The curious view that slavery and capitalism are mutually exclusive still persists (p. 47). If that viewnot so much curious as manifestly stupiddoes indeed exist, we ought to be told where and by whom. Marx cogently analyzed the ways in which capitalism, from the moment of its birth in Europe, fed upon prior social systems, and in our day we haye seen innumerable instances of advanced capitalist countries deliberately frustrating incipient bourgeois-nationalist movements in underdeveloped countries so as to exploit resources under the de jure control of essentially seigneurial rulers. But this process has always been contradictory, as Lenin brilliantly perceived in his celebrated critique of imperialism. The relationship between metropolis and colony has generally been propelled by the contradiction between pre-capitalist propertied classes in the colonies, and the bourgeoisies ruling the metropolis and therefore indirectly ruling the colonies as well. Mintz presents an essentially sound interpretation of the Caribbean slave regimes as mere appendages of European capitalism. The problems arise when he

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extrapolates from the Caribbean case, or set of cases, and speaks broadly of European expansion and the colonization of the entire New World. His argument would be unobjectionable for the Caribbean if he were to qualify his analysis of Saint-Domingue to account for the profound cleavage between the France of Nantes and Bordeaux on the one hand and that of the interior on the other;5 and if he would more sharply say what his historical reconstruction in fact demonstrates about the Spanish Caribbean that early colonization reected essentially seigneurial forces and that only later, With the sugar boom and foreign penetration, was Cuban slavery transformed along the bourgeois lines long dominant in the Anglo-Dutch Caribbean. I should not dwell on these matters of qualication and tangential renement were it not that Mintzs interpretation can and undoubtedly will be used to support the dubious (and fundamentally anti-Marxist) theory of historical development propounded thoughtfully by Paul Sweezy and recently developed with erudition and considerable intellectual acuteness by Immanuel Waller-stein.6 Mintz insists that slavery, the plantation systems, and indeed colonial exploitation as a whole represented the outward thrust of a rising European capitalism. Despite the attempts of Sweezy, Frank, and others to give this argument a Marxian cast, it soon proves incompatible with a Marxian interpretation of historical process, which necessarily stresses class relations of production rather than changes in the market and exchange relationsa distinction hammered at by Marx and defended skillfully by Maurice Dobb, H.K. Takahashi, and others. The road Mintz has chosen leads quickly enough either to Werner Sombarts idealism or to the mechanistic economic interpretations of a Pirenne (on whom Sweezy relied) or a Braudel (on whom Wallerstein now relies). Mintz implicitly takes his stand with Pirenne and Braudel, who at least offer plausible alternatives and appeal to historical evidence. But Mintz, like those great French bourgeois historians whom he does not directly cite, encounters Sombarts difculty anyway. Thus we learn of the contradictions in Spanish expansion, at the heart of which lay the lack of a suitable private bourgeois sector (p. 255). Mintz spares us Sombarts solution, according to which a bourgeois spirit miraculously ap-peared in Spain in the fourteenth century, just in time to found an empire, and then miraculously disappeared, just in time to account for the subsequent failure of Spain to create anything remotely like a capitalist society.7 Indeed, Mintz wisely falls silent. Having criticized this viewpoint elsewhere,8 I here shall restrict myself to one preliminary observation and then proceed to indicate the ways in which Mintzs work, despite this theoretical aberration, actually reinforces and promises to enrich a Marxist interpretation. The preliminary observation concerns the nature of the much-debated general crisis of the seventeenth century, which was general precisely in affecting the society as a whole and which therefore is most usefully envisaged as a crisis of the seigneurial social order. The capitalist sector suffered a specically economic crisis, which Eric J. Hobsbawm has skillfully outlined, but this crisis of Europes advanced sectors was analytically distinct from, although historically enmeshed with, the general social crisis; in itself it was general only in Hobsbawms restricted sense of being international.9 Were Mintz to relate his historical account to these wider developments, he might not be so ready to

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assimilate the whole of the Afro-Caribbean experience to the bourgeois aspect of a historical process marked by declining as well as rising social classes and systems. Mintzs wobbling into a fundamentally anti-Marxian view of capitalist development as a projection of commercial expansion is the more unfortunate since it proceeds on a level of abstraction divorced from the splendid content of his empirical studies and his rich forays into anthropological theory. Thus, he painstakingly and sensitively explores archaic social forms in their historical settings and in reference to their political implications. In so doing, he signicantly sharpens the theory of social classes, which, while at the heart of the Marxian interpretation of history, is in the process of becoming a blunt tool of analysis. The possibilities inherent in Mintzs work emerge most clearly from a critique of its more mechanistic portions. For if strong dissent from some of his favorite propositions is in order, so is warm appreciation for his reorientation of the discussion. Specically and briey, we may consider the social implications of his view of the plantation as a quasi-industrial enterprise and of his view of the relationship between slave accommodation and resistance. It is one thing for Mintz to chide scholars for slighting the quasi-industrial nature of the plantation system; it is another for him to slight in turn what he calls the deceptively rural, agrarian, pseudo-manorial quality of slave-based plantation production. To no small extent the quarrel concerns specicity. Mintz focuses on the great sugar plantations of the Caribbean, with their heavy capitalization of land, labor, and machinery, their considerable reliance on industrial processing, their large numbers of slaves, and their frequent control by absentee businessmen. But surely the cotton and tobacco plantations and farms of the United States, with their minimal capitalization of anything except labora gin only cost $125their limited processing facilities, their small slave force, and their resident planters, must introduce heavy qualications. Questions arise even for the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, not to mention those of Brazil. Mintz no doubt has made a valuable contribution by his demonstration of the manner in which the plantation system broke the African agriculturalist into a regime approaching industrial discipline. However cruel and costlyand Mintz does not hide his indignationthese hideous regimes did prepare millions of people to cope with some features of the technology and economic organization of the modern world. And yet, what was the result? Once emancipated, they turned their backs on much of the role to which they had been assigned and, in Mintzs splendid term, reconstituted themselves as peasantries. Mintz also shows, in one of his most piercing insights, that they had prepared themselves for this reconstruction by their own efforts within the slave system itself. The paradox implicit in Mintzs analysis reects the contra- dictory nature of the plantation reality he is describing. As a case in point, consider slave attitudes toward work and time. The plantation produced for a world market and required an appropriate level of output and economic rationality. Therefore, the views of work and time that the masters tried to impose on their slaves were typically bourgeois: work as a matter of duty, time as a matter of money. But for obvious reasons there was no way they could successfully impose such values, and the historical evidence from every slave society shows that

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in fact they failed. Mintz reminds us that the familiar charge of laziness against the slaves must be balanced against the undeniable fact that they did the work necessary to produce the surplus off which their detractors lived. But they worked according to a rhythm of their own, alternating great bursts of energy and enthusiasm with periods of exasperating slackness and indifference. Like other preindustrial workers and peasants, they demanded and got concessions to their own sense of time, which eschewed the regularity of clock-time for natural rhythms based on daylight, season, and religious beliefs. In the end, the planters made no more concessions than were compatible with a satisfactory level of performance and prot, but these were enough to underscore the importance of the rural and fundamentally preindustrial quality of the system.10 As a result, the blacks came out of slavery, in different degrees in different countries, having been disciplined to certain features of modern economic life but simultaneously having had their decidedly premodern patterns of work, time, and leisure disastrously reinforced. The political implications of this ambiguous legacy remain to be explored. These or other quarrels only emphasize Mintzs greatest achievement, which is, in my opinion, his contribution to a theory of social changeof historical process. If, as my own reading of his work suggests, he supports Marxs insistence on the centrality of social classes, he also confronts the problem of the nature of these classes in a new way. Marxist historiography has always been plagued by the crudeness of its denition of class. At rst glance, life is simple enough: classes are dened as the relationship of groups to the means of production. Taken straight, the recurrent problem of class consciousness has no meaning apart from requMng theories to explain false consciousness. Happily, the exigencies of politics have forced Marxists, as well as non-Marxists, to resist settling for this rst glance, if only because it soon exposes itself as almost useless. One way to confront the problem is to retreat into subjectivism, and we have recently been treated to a rash of theories according to which a class only becomes a class when it achieves class conscious-nessa point of view that nicely disposes of virtually all peasantries, and most other socioeconomic classes for that matter. It is, after all, not helpful to declare that: (a) all workers in all countries belong to one class; (b) this international class is exploited by an international bourgeoisie against which it should unite; and (c) in event of war the class should turn its guns against its particular bourgeoisie and then to howl with rage when workers assert national loyalties. On the surface, we confront a classic case of false consciousness: the workers do not yet perceive their own true interests. But a bit below the surface we begin to notice a strange phenomenon. Often these very workers believe that their class loyalties dictate support for their nation and that they are bound by ties of interest as well as sentiment more rmly to their own bourgeoisie than to workers of another country. In effect, they often dene their own classquite class-consciouslyto be a class within a wider national community rather than within some abstraction known as The World.11 Much more than culture accounts for these and other historical blocs. Economic interest, for example, carries its own weight. Indeed, Mintzs suggestion that imperialism must be understood as intrinsic to capitalismas pre-gured in its originsand not as a separate stage of economic development, reminds us of how little we yet know about the historical roots of the political and ideological links

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among the classes of metropolitan Europe in relation to the colonial peoples. But it is no less clear that a common culture has provided a powerfulperhaps the most powerfultie between the rulers and the ruled within modern nation-states. The obvious is, as usual, not so obvious. There are, after all, profound differences between the culture of Brooklyn dock workers and that of Wall Street bankers; theremay be even greater differences between the culture of Jamaican peasants and that of the Kingston elite. Yet ruling classes, when they are not in their death throes and relying on naked force, rule by mediating these differences within the context of a hegemonic ideologyhegemonic because it compels the lower classes to dene themselves within the ruling system even while resisting its aggression with enormous courage and resourcefulness. The main difculty with Mintzs brilliant work on the relationship of class and culture lies in his skirting of the problem of hegemony. This difculty appears most clearly in the midst of one of his nest analytical performances. He writes effectively about the complexities of accommodation and resistance and rebuts the rigid mechanistic formulations that have marked the recent debate on the slave personality. Yet his excellent discussion contains a certain mechanistic quality of its own: But there was also accommodation, submission, degradation, and self-hatred. Moreover, it is clear that some of the most effective forms of resistance were built upon prior adaptation, involving the slaves in processes of culture change and retention of a complicated kind. To write off all adaptive mechanisms as a loss of will to resist is tantamount to the denial of creative energies to the slaves themselves. Was the readiness of Jamaican slaves to grow their own foodstuffs on plantation uplands to be written off as nonresistance? Through such activities, the slaves acquired skills in cultivation and marketing that greatly increased thek ability to escape plantation labor after emancipation; traveled freely to the masket-places, where they learned much of value (some of which may have been essential in fomenting rebellion.); demonstrated to observant visitors their capacity to function independently and intelligently; and acquired liquid capital for various purposes. Yet no one would call subsistance cultivation and marketing mechanisms of resistance, for the very good reason that they were not resistance as such, but forms of accommodation. At the same time, suicide since it deprived masters of their laboris correctly labeled resistance, even though, once dead, one does precious little resisting (p. 76). The brittle dichotomy Mintz poses between accommodation and resistance does violence to the dialectical character of the specic analysis. For example, he avoids any such brittleness in his remarkable analysis of Caribbean Peasantries as a Social Science Problem. There he writes of the post-emancipation period: The creation of peasantries was simultaneously an act of Westernization and an act of resistance (p. 155). His previous reliance on the time-honored divorce of accommodation from mechanisms of resistance dissolves when he addresses such specics; then he treats us to more subtle and accurate descriptions of a single dialectical process.

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The difculty stems from Mintzs attempt to bypass the problems posed by the ideological character of the slave regime considered as a whole. Certainly, these problems, especially for the Caribbean, present enormous complexities and frustrations. I have argued elsewhere that accommodation and resistance in the southern United States constituted complementary and organically connected slave responses to an imposed paternalism that expressed the essence of a hegemonic slaveholders ideology.12 But this interpretation, even if it proves correct, cannot simply be extended to the Caribbean, for the social nature of the slave regime there differed radically from that in the Old Southl We may therefore readily appreciate the greater difculty posed for those who try to bring coherence to the Caribbean experience. But, as the best portions of Mintzs essays show, he is working toward a formulation that transcends the supercial bifurcation of resistance and accommodation. In no other way can Mintzs judgment on black culture realize its full potential: To survive at all under slavery was a mode of resistance; the cultures of contemporary Caribbean peoples are in their entirety a testament to such resistance (p. 229). The signicance of Mintzs cultural explorations, and not merely of his direct discussions of nationhood, therefore extend forward as well as backward in time.13 His efforts do not, as he warns his readers, end with a disentangling of the threads that bind class and nation, but they do bring us closer to that desired result. His careful dissection of specic peasantries reveals, rst, their ethnic conditioning, and second, the way in which the emergent, ethnically conditioned peasantries have in turn shaped the struggle for nationality. This point of view and the evidence on which it rests strengthen, in my judgment, the argument for the centrality of social classes in historical process, but they do so in a fresh and signicant way for those who would study the past and present so as better to shape the future.

Notes 1 The book is divided into an Introduction (Afro-Caribbeana) and three parts. Part I (Forced Labor and the Plantation System) contains three essays: Slavery and the Afro-American World; Slavery and Forced Labor in Puerto Rico; and The History of a Puerto Rican Plantation. Part II (Caribbean Peasantries) contains ve essays: The Origin of Reconstituted Peasantries; The Historical Sociology of Jamaican Villages; The Origins of the Jamaican Market System; The Contemporary Jamaican Market System; and Houses and Yards among Caribbean Peasantries. Part III (Caribbean Nationhood) contains two essays: The Case of Haiti, and Caribbean Nationhood: An Anthropological Perspective. 2 Among Mintzs many contributions that cannot be discussed in this reviewessay is an arresting analysis of the differences between the emerging nations of the Caribbean and other so-called Third World nations. Mintzs interpretation reinforces the deep suspicion that the formulation Third World is at best analytically useless and at worst a political swindle. And just what are those other two worlds anyway?

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5 6

8 9 10

11

12 13

Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago, 1959); Ann J. Lane, ed., The Debate Over Slavery: Stanley Elkins and His Critics (Urbana, IlL, 1971). Mintz repeatedly comes close to identifying the seigneurlal (or feudal) mode of production with manorial isolation and self-sufciency. Nowhere does he confront the Marxian objections to this identication, as best argued in Maurice Dobbs seminal Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York, 1947). This deciency leads Mintz straight to his dubious identication of capitalism with the spread of commercial capital. See, e.g., the suggestive analysis in Edward Whiting Fox, History in Geographic Perspective: The Other France (New York, 1971). Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern WorM-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1974). This book deserves a full critique in its own right, which must await another time and place. Its argument, however, is pregured in Sweezys attack on Dobb and in Franks position. See Maurice Dobb, ed., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (New York, 1955), which includes Sweezys critique, a reply by Dobb, and contributions by a number of noted Marxist scholars. See especially H.K. Takahashis attack on Sweezys position. Werner Sombart, The Quintessence of Capitalism: A Stud), of the History and Psychology of the Modern Business Man (New York, 1967), esp. pp. 134136. Sombarts viewpoint has caused a good deal of mischief in Luso-Brazilian studies. See, e.g., Bento Carqueja, O Capitalismo moderno e as suas origens ria em Portugal (Oporto, 1908) and especially, Roberto C. Simonsen, Histo mica do Brasil, 15001820 (2 vols.; Sao Paulo, 1937). But see the econo critique by the Marxist, Sergio Bagu, Economa de la sociedctd colonial. Ensayo ria rica Latina (Buenos Aires, t949), p. 54. de la histo eomparada de Ame Eugene D. Genovese, The Worm the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (New York, 1969), part one. E.J. Hobsbawm, The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, in Trevor Aston, ed., Crisis in Europe, 15601660 (New York, 1967), pp. 562. For an elaboration see my Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974), book two, part two. I am afraid that Mintzs viewpoint inadvertently leads toward that of Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, whose Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (2 vols.; Boston, 1974), manages to transform the slaves into puritanized Afro-Saxons with a bourgeois work ethic that would have made Benjamin Franklin green with envy. For an elaboration of these remarks and an alternative to a reliance on doctrines of false consciousness, see my Yeoman Farmers in a Slaveholders Democracy, Agricultural History (forthcoming). Again, I cannot pursue the matter here, but those who wish an elaboration may consult Roll, Jordan, Roll, the whole of which is devoted to this argument. Mintzs treatment o f nationalism and regionalism raises many questions, including the problem of the class nature of the state. On these matters, too, he

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has much to say and much to contribute to the development of Marxian thought. But these matters, like so many others suggested in this rich book, will have to be pursued elsewhere.
Acknowledgments I would like to thank Ananth Aiyer and Anthony Marcus for inviting me to write this essay; both provided important comments and advice. In addition Jason Antrosio, Louis Kyriakoudes, Alex Lichtenstein, Patrick Neveling, and Mark Smith provided helpful suggestions on very short notice.

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