Eugene D. Genovese used Gramsci to argue for a new American socialist strategy in 1967. His route ran through Communist youth work, study, and research on slavery. He urged socialists to work openly within universities and unions, win people's trust, and build a party. This account follows his work through 1967.[1][2]
Early life and intellectual formation
Genovese was born in 1930 and studied at Brooklyn College before earning further degrees at Columbia. His early party work began before he took theory seriously. In a 1978 interview, he recalled joining the Communist youth movement at 15. By college, he hoped to work for the party in unions. He saw himself as a man of action and had little time for the study of ideas.[1][3][4]
The Communist Party expelled him at the end of his second college year, he recalled. The break changed his plans. Already unhappy with parts of party life, he wanted to test ideas he had taken for granted. After trying newspaper work as a copy boy, he returned to college to study history. He said he began serious study of Marxist theory then. He first read Capital after leaving the party. His support for socialism continued.[1]
His teachers helped turn those interests into research. At Brooklyn, Arthur C. Cole urged him to study efforts to reform farming in the slave South. He carried the subject to Columbia. Frank Tannenbaum's work helped him see the economy as part of a wider social process. Dumas Malone and Richard B. Morris guided his PhD work. In his book's preface, he thanked these teachers for helping him find his own approach despite their different views.[5]
By his 1965 book, he was asking how a small slaveholding class had shaped a whole society. Profit alone, he argued, could not explain the slaveholders' defense of slavery. Their power rested on a way of life and a view of what was right. Those questions were already in his research before the 1967 Gramsci essay.[5]
Ideas and political aims
Genovese wanted socialism to replace capitalist rule. Gramsci helped him explain why hardship alone would not bring that change. People could suffer and still believe the existing order was right. Socialists had to grasp those beliefs and show people how a better society could work.[2]
He used hegemony to explain the problem: a ruling class gained strength when others accepted its right to lead. He pointed to dockworkers who refused to load ships trading with Communist countries. Such action could cost them wages. He read it as loyalty to a cause, not a search for gain. He wanted socialists to win them over.[2]
His plan reached beyond factory workers. People in technical and management jobs might also help form a new ruling class. Socialists needed to address war, safety, values, and daily life as well as wages. He marked these proposals as his own argument, drawn from his reading of Gramsci and Cammett.[2]
For him, work inside institutions had to serve the struggle for state power. Socialists should openly seek to change existing universities, unions, and other groups into supports for a move to socialism. A lasting party would join those efforts and test its ideas through shared action.[2]
Career and activities
Genovese taught at Rutgers from 1963 to 1967. On April 23, 1965, he spoke at a faculty-organized teach-in on Vietnam. He identified himself as a Marxist and socialist and welcomed a Viet Cong victory. According to the Rutgers archive's account, the remarks brought demands for his dismissal. The university's governing bodies upheld his position on grounds of academic freedom.[3][4][6]
Free speech was thus a live issue in his own work. It was also part of his 1967 case for socialism. He wanted socialists to win arguments and defend free thought on campus. He rejected bullying and opposed giving students control over how teachers taught their courses.[2][6]
He also took part in his colleagues' research. Cammett thanked him for criticism of the draft of his 1967 Gramsci book. Genovese used the study to frame his own plan for socialist work.[2][7]
Major works
Genovese studied slavery as the basis of a social order, rather than as a business alone. Slaveholders had wealth, power, and moral beliefs that helped sustain one another. Their conflict with the North involved the defense of that whole order. He joined research on farms and factories to a study of class rule.[5]
The book helps explain the questions he brought to Gramsci. It does not tell us when he first read him. By 1965, he was already asking how beliefs and material power worked together.[5]
On Antonio Gramsci (1967)
The essay began as a review of Cammett's book and became a proposal for American socialists. Genovese quoted a definition of hegemony by Gwyn A. Williams through Cammett. He then used it to discuss American workers, universities, and the New Left. The essay shows his use of that reading, not a completed campaign to carry out its proposals.[2]
He credited the New Left with making culture and ways of living central to politics. But he thought it needed a party and a shared program. He also doubted that small radical schools could replace the main universities. His answer was organized socialist work within institutions that already shaped public life.[2]
Influence and criticism
Genovese's essay made a clear American proposal from Gramsci's ideas. Its publication establishes that argument, rather than how many readers adopted it. His own call for a party acknowledged that the organization he wanted still had to be built.[2]
He was also an active critic of other readings. He praised Cammett's scholarship but wanted more criticism of Gramsci. He accused American Marxists of neglecting the Italian thinker, even while noting two English selections. The sweeping complaint expressed his frustration; the essay's own footnote qualified it.[2]
In 1967, his case combined a socialist goal with a defense of academic freedom. Those commitments belonged together in his proposal: universities should remain open enough for socialists to argue, organize, and persuade. Whether readers would turn that proposal into lasting work remains a question for the next period.[2]