If there WAS a broad mass-based left-wing revolution during a Democratic presidency...

[BainsBane]

59. "They wondered why Nat Turner was the only one"

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.

why should the Democratic Party remain loyal to the existing order

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.