Resistance

Abstract The institution of slavery, wherever it has existed, represented an extreme form of human dependence and subjugation. No matter how individually privileged, no matter what their religion, sex, color, race, or ethnicity, slaves lived tenuous and dishonored lives, ever vulnerable to a capricious display of their master’s arbitrary power. Resistance to such a dehumanizing condition has appeared to be an inevitable, predictable, even a natural response to the fact of enslavement itself. Indeed, no society in human history, from before Plato’s Greece to after Hitler’s Germany, produced a master class sufficiently powerful to prevent some of its slaves from violently removing their bonds. At one level, as the Marxist historian Herbert Aptheker declared in ???□ in a seminal book on the history of slave revolts in the United States, the answer to the deceptively simple question of why slaves rebelled is no mystery: ‘ The fundamental factor provoking rebellion against slavery was that social system itself, the degradation, exploitation, oppression, and brutality which it created and with which indeed it was synonymous.’