Post B6v8eqBKoUBDdOhpg0 by eighthbell@freebeerextremist.com
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(DIR) Post #B6tFV8U6Dj6Irlsmfo by MK2boogaloo@freebeerextremist.com
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Today’s Hero of the Imperium - someone you ought to read if you have any interest in American history and particularly that of the antebellum South - Eugene Genovese.Genovese was a prominent Marxist historian from Brooklyn, NY. Born to working class Italian immigrants during the Great Depression, he abandoned Catholicism as a teenager and became a member of the Communist Party. Genovese did groundbreaking scholarship, specializing in antebellum slavery and the slave economy - which few before him had studied systematically. He interpreted slavery through the Marxian lens of dialectical materialism and class conflict. He had studied the work of the great Italian Marxist thinker, Antonio Gramsci, which had yet to be translated into English. Gramsci grappled with the question, “why had Italians never overthrown their oppressors, the usurers, the capitalists? Why did the proletarian revolution never occur here?” He concluded that mere economic forces or political answers from Marx were insufficient. Cultural hegemony - things like the media, popular culture, religion, language, education - had to be taken over by Marxists if the revolution were to have any hope of success. (His work would also influence the Frankfurt School, who further develop this notion of cultural marxism and subverting politics via culture) Genovese applied Gramscian thought to his analysis of slavery. Why did slaves in the south so rarely rebel? Why did slaves often appear content with their conditions? Why did so many express nostalgia for their old lives when interviewed by historians during the 1930s? How did the ruling elite keep them in line? Groundbreaking scholarship on this was conducted during the 70s/80s in particular. But as he studied the American south, something unexpected happened - he began to fall in love with it, and to sympathize with its intellectuals - their cultural rejection of godless industrial mammon of the north, contempt for wage slavery, the quixotic preservation of an antique, thoroughly Christian way of life in spite of overwhelming economic/political pressure to transform. As Richard Weaver said, “the old South was the last non-materialist society.” Genovese also began to question the stereotype of the South as a cultural, underdeveloped backwater, owing to slavery, while the North was a land of enlightened innovation. This stereotype still abounds in history textbooks and the popular imagination. But his research showed the opposite to be the case in many ways: more southerners being classically educated, diarists, bilingual, higher per capita income, and many of the great writers and presidents hailing from the South. Ultimately, he realized that the South was one of the last bastions of an alternative to relentless, predatory capitalism - and that like Marx, the Southern intellectuals correctly warned that it would subvert or devour all that traditionalists held dear - the family, faith, traditional gender roles, culture, etc. (This incidentally, is why the pope, the English, the French, tended to sympathize with the confederacy)Long story short, Genovese ultimately returned to the Catholic faith, renounced communism, and embraced traditional populist conservatism. He visited Harvard and delivered a series of bombshell lectures in the 90s, defending the patrimony of the south from a Marxist perspective, published more magnificent texts, and ended up an unlikely hero for southern conservative intellectuals. His wife, a prominent feminist scholar, likewise entered the Church and abandoned her leftism. And even though he went to the dark side, leftist scholars still revere his work on slavery, and it remains the gold standard in scholarship of the field. https://solidarity-us.org/atc/162/p3782/https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/review/real-conservatism/image.png
(DIR) Post #B6tFgfws8rxNq3qMHw by MK2boogaloo@freebeerextremist.com
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cc @SuperSnekFriend
(DIR) Post #B6v8eqBKoUBDdOhpg0 by eighthbell@freebeerextremist.com
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@MK2boogaloo "Genovese also began to question the stereotype of the South as a cultural, underdeveloped backwater, owing to slavery, while the North was a land of enlightened innovation. This stereotype still abounds in history textbooks and the popular imagination. But his research showed the opposite to be the case in many ways: more southerners being classically educated, diarists, bilingual, higher per capita income, and many of the great writers and presidents hailing from the South."This is a very interesting point indeed. It seems that the perception of the South as some working-class backwater is more manufactured by the intelligentsia through decades of conditioning via information channels than it is anything concrete. It is plainly obvious that their motivations for doing this are political in nature (although other ailments, such as hookworms [https://www.vice.com/en/article/southerners-werent-lazy-just-infected-with-hookworms-stereotype/ ], likely played a role as well). For instance, did you know that 8 of the first 10 presidents were Southerners? Or that the average white Southerner had a GDP per capita significantly higher than that of their Northern counterparts prior to the war? Furthermore, were the South truly so uneducated and illiterate, how do you explain their performance during the war itself in spite of the Herculean odds that they faced or their subversion of the historical narrative surrounding the war following it? Why is the South portrayed as though it were some poor argrarian backwater when it was the 4th most lucrative economy in the world in 1860? (https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/10-facts-confederate-manufacturing) It becomes self-evident that both the historical narrative and the present-day stigmas and attitudes towards Southerners are largely psyops the more you look into it. Although I find Marxism highly cringe and probably won't agree with this man on everything, I will have to give his works a read someday. Thanks for sharing this.
(DIR) Post #B6vK03HsNiAvrE5BQm by MK2boogaloo@freebeerextremist.com
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@eighthbell he became a traditionalist later in life due to his obsession lol. So I think it's fine to read his books.