The Legacy of Clóvis Moura: A Marxist Critique of Race in Brazil

Introduction

This year marks twenty years since the death of Clóvis Moura (1925–2003), an important working class intellectual who immersed himself in studies on the Brazilian reality and produced theoretical works with the aim of supporting social movements. After his death, research and courses on Moura, republication of parts of his works, and other initiatives have been carried out not only to honor him, but also to recuperate his far-reaching contribution. ¹

Born into a lower-middle class family in the State of Piauí, in northern Brazil, Moura placed himself as an intellectual on the side of the working class. Son of a white father and a black mother, he also affirmed his identity position as black. After his family moved to Natal, in Rio Grande do Norte, where he lived from 1935 to 1941, as a young man and as a student he was active in the student movement, writing articles for the newspaper O potiguar, a communication outlet of the then Student Society (Grêmio Estudantil), founded at Colégio Santo Antônio, called Grêmio Cívico-Literário ‘12 de Outubro’ (Mesquita, 2003).

In 1942, he moved to Salvador, in the State of Bahia, and began working with the Communist Party of Brazil (PCB) as a journalist, in the party’s daily newspaper entitled O Movimento. In 1947, he was elected state deputy; however, with the banning of the PCB, his candidacy was contested. According to Érika Mesquita (2003), as a result of this event, in 1949, Moura migrated to São Paulo and worked in the Cultural Front of the PCB, where he established relationships with significant figures in the party, such as Caio Prado Júnior.

In this context, he studied the struggles undertaken by Africans in Brazil and the contributions of these workers to the Brazilian social formation, whether in the cultural or economic sphere, including the emancipatory movements that took place in the country from the colonial period onwards. When studying social relations in Brazil, Moura immersed himself into a perspective of the totality of the Brazilian social formation, aiming to capture the nature of class contradictions through the functioning of the ideology of racism. Moura sought the causal links of the manifestation of racism based on the capitalist relations of production, their development and the national particularities of the universalization of capital.

In 1959, he published the book Rebelões de Senzala (Rebellions of Slave Quarters, republished in 2014) a study that was born a classic by virtue of demonstrating the role of the enslaved Africans within the social struggles of Brazil. Moura deconstructed the official view of the African as “passive” in the context of slavery and provided dense research into the countless quilombos and other forms of resistance. In this work, Moura showed how the process of enslaving Africans aimed to boost the capitalist mode of production through the trafficking of Africans and the implementation of enslaved labor in the Americas. This made possible a dynamic triangular trade, which culminated in lucrative gains for the companies of the colonizing bourgeoisie and in an expanded mercantile activity in the interior of the European continent. Thus, the reasons that led the bourgeoisie to consolidate the ideology of racism had to do with justifying the enterprise of the European bourgeoisie and ensuring the expansion of capitalism. For this reason, Moura defended the thesis according to which the ideology of racism is a mechanism of class domination.

Clóvis Moura was not concerned with winning applause within the academy, as his theoretical production was aligned with the needs of social movements; that is, the publication of articles and books would only make sense if such an undertaking would provide theoretical support to social movements. He vehemently criticized the social sciences, especially academic Sociology and Anthropology. It is no coincidence that in his book A Sociologia Posta em Questão (Sociology Called into Question, 1978), Moura affirmed that the professionalization of the social scientist was a strategy to detach the scholar from social practice and asserted that the fragmentation of the social sciences into Ethnography, Sociology, Ethnology, Human Ecology, Cultural Anthropology, Social Anthropology, and Social Psychology had at its core the training of specialists in empiricism. Drawing on Caio Prado Júnior, he highlighted that the professionalization of academia resulted in a “pastime and a way of legitimizing titles of sociologists and professors” (Moura, 1978, p. 46, our translation). In this way, he stated no less than that “the dominant ideas – and here are included the fundamental categories of academic social sciences – are those of the dominant class” (Moura, 1978, p. 53, our translation).

In contrast to “Academic Sociology,” Moura declared himself to be in favor of the emergence of a “Sociology of Praxis,” an instrument for understanding sociability based on historical processes and political-economic-social contradictions. The sociology of praxis refers to the search for understanding sociability as opposed to maintaining social order, as professionals from conservative and reactionary academia would have it. On the contrary, the “sociologist of praxis” must know society, explain it, and make knowledge available for social transformation. These are the objectives that allow us to place Clóvis Moura as a major theorist who, until his death, studied, researched, critiqued, and denounced the manifestations of conservative thought and its expression in the particularity of Brazil.

Considering Moura’s theoretical work and vast bibliographical contribution, this article intends to present the central points about the Brazilian reality that Moura confronted until his death.

Particularities of Brazilian Racism

Considering Moura’s broad theoretical work, it is possible to affirm that one of his primordial contributions was to identify the nature of the objectification of the capitalist mode of production in Brazil combined with the particularity of racism. In his book Dialética Radical do Brasil Negro (Radical Dialectic of Black Brazil, 1994), Moura compared the manifestation of racism in the United States and South Africa and found that there were differences between these countries and Brazil. In the United States, the practice of racism was evidenced in the consolidation of Jim Crow laws, which created racial segregation in the neighborhoods of North America, deepening ethnic–racial inequalities and favoring white populations with regard to substantial opportunities in that country. In relation to South Africa, racism was confirmed with the implementation of apartheid, which resulted in the creation of Bantustans, the places of segregation of black South Africans and rationalization of the exploitation of African workers.

Unlike the above countries, in Brazil, there is a tradition that omits the existence of racism, and this particular practice of “Brazilian racism” has accompanied the country since its inception. This becomes clear when considering the historical moment when the Constitution of the Empire of Brazil was consolidated in 1822, when, as Moura demonstrates, Teixeira de Freitas, author of the Civil Code of the Empire, refused to recognize the existence of slavery as a dynamic factor in the economy, or an action contrary to human freedoms, or the violence against populations that succumbed to forced labor—that is, indigenous people and Africans. This way of conceiving social relations in the country demonstrates that the objectification of the ideology of racism, as a weapon of class domination, was not ‘codified and institutionalized, although it has acted dynamically for almost five hundred years’ (Moura, 1994, p. 158, our translation).

The sophistication of Brazilian elites in this aspect is evidenced by Moura (1994, p. 158–59, our translation) when stating that, in Brazil, “the dominant classes, their power structures and deliberating elites applied this discriminatory strategy through a series of tactics working in different levels and degrees of the structure,” thus configuring the ideology of branqueamento, or whitening. This turned racism into an autonomous practice, while also propagating an idea of the country as a “pilot laboratory of racial fraternization, whose example should be followed by other polyethnic countries” (Moura, 1994).

Implicit in the project of the dominant classes have been the consolidated means to exploit and destroy the social groups that made up the working class in Brazil, natives and Africans. With regard to the original peoples of America, the genocidal process occurred in two ways: the violent destruction of these populations, a practice that resulted in the extermination of millions; and the Christianization/catechization and other practices of deliberate annihilation of groups adversely conceived as indigenous—a process disguised by the Catholic institution as evangelization—followed by the destruction of their religions and imposition of restrictions on those who did not accept submitting themselves to the religion of the colonizer.

Moura (1994, p. 159) affirmed that, after invading American lands, the European colonizers destroyed native groups and consolidated the Indian Statute, a document in which the rights were proposed by whites, disregarding the ability to draft laws and the organization of the natives, preventing them from acting decisively in the cultural and social dynamics of Brazil, although they maintained their resistance and identity, even facing control and appropriation by Brazilian elites.

The strategies and tactics of domination and implementation of racism in relation to African descendants in Brazil, according to Moura’s approach, differed from the situation of the original peoples, since the attack on black people has had a particularity, in that they were transported to Brazilian territory as slaves. They were forced to speak another language and stopped cultivating their own languages, culminating in the disarticulation of families and ethnic groups as a whole. African religions, due to the colonization process, suffered disarticulations, that is, they were dismantled with the aim of cutting all ties with their ancestry.

Moura affirmed that, even after the abolition of slavery, the situation of Africans practically did not change. Black people were now considered to be ‘citizens’ before the law; however, within the competitive society of the subordinate capitalist mode of production, the legal equality to which the descendants of enslaved workers were subsumed was nothing more than a strategy to hide the persistence of racism and contradictions in class society, that is, economic and ethnic-racial inequalities. In the words of Moura (1994, p. 160, our translation):

Black people were forced to fight for their social, cultural and even biological survival in a secularly racist society, in which professional, cultural, political and ethnic selection techniques are designed to ensure that they remain immobilized in the most oppressed, exploited and subordinated layers. We can say that the problems of race and class are intertwined in this process of competition of Black people because the interest of the dominant classes is to see them marginalized in order to lower the wages of workers as a whole.

According to Moura, understanding the situation to which the descendants of enslaved Africans were subjected in the post-abolition period—of oppression, marginalization, and subalternization—is the key to identifying the objectification of the ideology of racism and its foundation in Brazilian society. For this reason, it is not possible, in Brazil, to dissociate race and class as an expression of class contradictions, of the social, racial, and hierarchical division of labor. The omission of the existence of ethnic–racial differences in Brazil, and its particularity, makes the implementation of Brazilian-style racism “ambiguous, sappy, sticky but highly efficient in its objectives” (Moura, 1994, p. 160, our translation).

By explaining the above aspects, Moura affirmed that class and ethnic––racial inequality could only be overcome with the end of class society. He believed that the first step toward realizing democracy in Brazil must be taken by the democratization of production relations, to decentralize the poles of power, mainly with the end of land ownership, that is, by the decisive participation of the people in the seizure of power. Real democracy, according to Moura, could only be realized when the workers emancipate themselves from this savage society of “competition and conflict”; when “we create a society of planning and cooperation, then we will have that racial democracy that we all long for” (Moura, 1994, p. 160, our translation).

The Brazilian Social Formation and Its Retrograde Bourgeoisie

To capture the nature of the class struggle and the implementation of racism in Brazil, it is necessary to identify the causal links related to the objectives of the Brazilian social formation and the conservative thinking of its elites. It is with this concern that Moura studied Brazil, conceiving it as a social formation linked to the form of exploitation that begins with enslaved labor.

In his work Brazil: As Raízes do Protesto Negro (Brazil: The Roots of Black Protest, 1983), Moura stressed that Brazil, since its inception, has been a country subordinated to external capital. When comparing Brazil’s backwardness to the countries of the classic European formation—England and France—he did so by comparing the dynamics around two events of the nineteenth century: the publication of the Communist Manifesto of 1848, written by Marx and Engels, and the Paris Commune of 1871.

Regarding the first, Moura reminded us that while on the European continent there were struggles of the industrial working class against the exploitation of the workforce, inspired by that significant document calling for the international union of workers against capitalism, in Brazil it was still necessary to conquer civil freedoms and promote the abolition of African trafficking through the Law of Eusébio de Queiroz of 1850. With regard to the second: while the Paris Commune was a landmark in demonstrating the potential of workers in appropriating social wealth, in Brazil the Law of the “Free Womb” (Ventre Livre) in the same year, which freed the children of enslaved women, again demonstrated the retrograde character of the Brazilian elite. These disparities expressed the feebleness of Brazil’s elite and its conservatism in facing the abolition of slavery, which was occurring gradually.

In the context of the aforementioned events, the conservative sector obstructed the completeness of national and modernizing bourgeois relations, remaining at the mercy of foreign banks and industries (for ports, railways, urban transport, and electricity), resulting in a country that remained culturally, politically, and economically subordinate. This translated into the lack of a productive base capable of ensuring national autonomy and the preservation of land ownership in the hands of oligarchies subordinate to imperialist nations. Moreover, in order to ensure the privilege of native elites and foreign interests, this situation required the permanence of a repressive state apparatus to prevent popular demonstrations, thus reconciling archaic and modern forms of production and domination, deepening internal problems, and causing a highly concentrated distribution of income (Moura, 1983).

This controversy was taken up again in 1994, when Moura published his Radical Dialectic of Black Brazil. In this work, he aimed to expose the relations of production and the Brazilian social formation as a whole by reference to slave production as a constitutive element of the capitalist mode of production. Furthermore, Moura argued that in Brazil there were two distinct but interconnected moments in which slavery evolved: those of full slavery and late slavery.

The first long phase begins in the 1500s until approximately 1850, that is, in the colonial period, in the reign of D. João VI, and in the empire of D. Pedro I and D. Pedro II. In this context, the economic dynamic is based on slave production anchored in the contradiction among two distinct classes, of masters and slaves, although there were other segments in their midst, for example, free men and women who were closely subordinated to these masters.

The colonial administration was subject to the orders of Portugal and conducted by the governor-general. It was necessary to ensure obedience to the laws of the kingdom, maintain public order, manage relations between Portuguese and indigenous people, conduct general defense, ensure that sesmaria (land grant) concession-holders built fortifications, boost shipbuilding, and in Moura’s words (1994, p. 36, our translation), “distribute sesmarias around the new city [Salvador], control the penetration of the interior, provide public positions and grant knighthoods to those deemed worthy.” The link between slavery and capitalism aimed at the permanence and maintenance of the world market. However, to guarantee commercialization and the market, slave production was necessary; colonization was what drove and maintained the capitalist mode of production. For this reason, a “commercial company” was established whose fundamental commodity for its existence was the slave. On the one hand, “without the permanent flow of purchases of this living commodity, the system could not survive and develop” (Moura, 1994, p. 38, our translation). On the other hand, the colonies purchased only perishable goods from the metropolises, such as “wines, cheeses, fabrics, cod, wheat and other products to maintain the production machine for the subsistence of the noble class” (Moura, 1994, p. 39, our translation).

Thus, we are dealing with a bourgeoisie that is born subaltern and performs subordinate functions and “would never assume its social and political role of transforming a new historical stage of our society through a proposal for a new social order” (Moura, 1994, p. 47, our translation). It is in this context that a structure of Brazilian society takes shape to place the country in the subsequent phase, which Moura calls “late slavery.” Late slavery is the period that marks the process of modernization, transforming slavery in the technological sphere without modifying, however, the fundamental structure to maintain the commercial dynamic in the world market. Brazil modernized, but remained dependent, since the capital installed here was external. The locations chosen for investments, instead of being led by the local bourgeoisie, were defined by a foreign bourgeoisie, especially the English. Thus, the foreign capital introduced into the country did not enable the development of the Brazilian economy; on the contrary, it consolidated the underdevelopment that continues to this day.

This process of modernization coincides with the period of imperialism, when the volume of investments made, as well as the pressure to put an end to slave labor in Brazil, relied on the initiatives of the English bourgeoisie, which boosted the development of the Brazilian national economy, although subordinately to international capital (Moura, 1994, p. 54). The English bourgeoisie occupied strategic positions in the Brazilian economy and, concomitantly, maintained Brazil subordinate, which resulted in an attached, conciliatory bourgeoisie, incapable of driving the changes that occurred, hindering autonomous industrialization (Moura, 1994, p. 54, our translation).

In late slavery, as Brazil modernized, a series of measures were created to ensure the development of the capitalist mode of production linked to the interests of foreign capital, favoring the rise of the national bourgeoisie solely as a class. Such initiatives were manifest in the Alves Branco Tariff, created in 1844, with the aim of stimulating national industries, forcing England to modify its tariff on Brazilian sugar, create new job markets, and increase revenue. But it created new job markets by devaluing Brazilian workers and boosting the immigration of European workers. After the Alves Branco Tariff, the Eusébio de Queiroz Law was instituted in 1850 which, in addition to prohibiting the international trafficking of Africans, aimed to supplant the period of full slavery and encourage the arrival of European immigrants, heralding the replacement of the African workforce. In this context, with the prohibition of trafficking, the purchase price of Africans rose exorbitantly, stimulating the immigration of workers from the interior of Europe (Moura, 1994).

In the course of these transformations pointed out by Moura, in the same year that the law prohibiting international trafficking was ratified, the Land Law was also consolidated, with the purpose of changing the land concession policy, since, before the prohibition of slave trafficking by the Eusébio de Queiroz Law, lands were granted through a policy of loyalty, by merit or good deed. With the prohibition of international trade in Africans, the imperial government believed that slavery was close to extinction, so lands began to be commercialized, enabling those with resources to buy land, regardless of location, thus deepening land concentration. Such purposes culminated in the consolidation of landless people in Brazil. This measure enabled a liberal policy whose aim was to prevent a radicalized abolition of slavery; thus, the state would not become responsible for compensating Africans after slavery. The Land Law was a strategy to prevent the poor from obtaining land and enable coffee farmers to acquire portions of properties, securing their businesses.

Finally, the Paraguayan War (1864–1870) was another strategy to promote the transition from late slavery to free labor. In addition to British interests, Africans participated in the war with the purpose of receiving manumission after their return. However, the war was the way found by the elites to decimate the Africans, toward the whitening of Brazil. ²

It is necessary to note that the transformations were carried out based on enslaved labor, which only began to be fought by the English bourgeoisie because it became a barrier to the realization of value. For this reason, Moura states that, in the period of late slavery, the modern began to serve the old, subsidizing the new. In this dialectic, the communication system installed in Brazil, from 1850 onwards, served, on the one hand, to rationalize the surveillance of illegal trafficking, since, once the illicit trade in Africans was reported, with this tool it was possible to communicate with the English Navy Guard and prevent ships from reaching their expected destinations. On the other hand, the same communication system used to combat international trafficking began to be applied by landowners to pursue and arrest Africans who managed to escape the oppression of their masters, making control and repression over black people more efficient. Similarly, the steamship modernized the movement of capital, but the trafficking of Africans also became faster, shortening the journey from Europe to Africa and Brazil. And the railways, in addition to facilitating the flow of goods, also made it possible to transport troops to sites in order to combat quilombolas and capture fugitives in the different regions of the state of São Paulo (Moura, 1994).

The factors mentioned highlight the nature of the Brazilian bourgeoisies, one that was contrary to any manifestation of a popular nature and which exploited the worker so as to maintain a tiny portion of the wealth produced, sending the bulk of it to the foreign bourgeoisie. It was necessary to be conservative, but also to receive the “modernization” provided by investments, especially from England. In the words of Moura (1994, p. 103, our translation): “[a]rchaic Brazil preserved its instruments of domination, prestige, and exploitation and modern Brazil was absorbed by the dynamic forces of imperialism that also preceded Abolition in its strategy of domination.” In this sense, it can be affirmed, based on Moura’s research, that the Brazilian bourgeoisie is a class that, in its essence, is born conservative, a characteristic that is necessary to ensure its privileges and its hegemony against the working class.

After the abolition of slavery and with the consolidation of the Republic, theorists of conservative thought began to discuss proposals on national identity. For them, Brazil presented a diversity of social groups, in a way different from the models and standards known and theorized by the academic intelligentsia of the time. In this context, the ideas of traveling intellectuals, artists, and scientists who visited or wrote about Brazil were imported and reproduced by representatives of the elites. The ideologues of conservatism were to develop solutions not to overcome class contradictions, but on the contrary, to conceive a Brazil mirrored in the values of European countries, preserving the patrimonial traditions cultivated in the Brazilian reality. Conservative thought sought to “go beyond the simple demand for a carbon transplant of European-type liberal democracy and, in search of this authentic national identity, advocates a conservative revolution” (Assunção, 1999, p. 29, emphasis in original, our translation). It is in this environment that the ideology of racism is consolidated within conservative thought.

The Ideology of Racism

There was an extensive number of Brazilian conservative ideologues at the turn of the twentieth century who focused on the paths that Brazil should take in order to emerge as a nation. Two among them, Azevedo Amaral (1881–1942) and Oliveira Vianna (1883–1951), were especially rigorous and influential in articulating the ideology of racism and, in turn, were taken up by Clóvis Moura in his critique of the ideology of racism in Brazil.

Azevedo Amaral defended the policy of whitening. In 1929, at the First Brazilian Congress of Eugenics, in Rio de Janeiro, ³ he presented his thesis entitled O Problema Eugênico da Imigração (The Eugenic Problem of Immigration). In this thesis, Amaral provided a historical overview of immigration in the country and presented his main objective to be the “problem” with the “racial issue” (Amaral, 1929, p. 379). His concern was with the building of a “national race”, that is, “a new ethnic type through the systematic selection of elite elements found in the national population itself and those imported from other lands” (Amaral, 1929, p. 330). Accordingly, immigration in Brazil should be systematic in order to stop the entry of “dysgenic” individuals or groups, arguing that there was hitherto no rigid policy on immigration. To ensure the construction of a “superior race”, it would be necessary, he argued, to define means to guarantee the most effective processes for choosing foreigners, “whose entry into the country will contribute to raising the level of the superior characters of the breed and, at the same time, prohibiting access to our territory to all those whose dysgenic influence is recognized” (Amaral, 1929, p. 331, our translation).

According to Amaral, immigration policy, especially after the end of slavery, had to meet the need for labor. With the development of machinery and technical improvements, it was seen as necessary to develop an immigration policy whose criterion would not be merely procuring “hands” for production (Amaral, 1929, p. 332). He argued that priority should be given to “Germany and the Scandinavian countries, because other northern races, such as the Poles and Russians are, judging by the tests we refer to, intellectually, therefore, racially even more undesirable than immigrants from southern Europe” (Amaral, 1929, our translation). In a later book entitled Estado Autoritário e a Realidade Brasileira (Authoritarian State and Brazilian Reality), Amaral (2023, p. 245–251, our translation) defended the same policy stating that “it is no exaggeration to say literally that the future of nationality depends on the number of white immigrants that we assimilate in the coming decades.”

Oliveira Vianna was a member of the International Institute of Anthropology, among other organizations abroad. In Race and Assimilation (1934), Vianna conducted extensive research on the “anthropology of races” and focused on eugenic methods using historical data. His research followed the work of Francis Galton, ⁴ including the use of mathematical calculations, in the specific areas of Phrenology and Physiognomy, as well as the landmark classifications frequently used by anthropologists of the time. The book also delved into studies of “mestizos,” based on the analysis of the three censuses carried out in Brazil in the years 1872, 1990 and 1920. Sharing the same concerns as Amaral, Vianna defended that Africans were incapable of consolidating civilization without the contribution of other peoples, notably the “Aryans” and “Semites.” He further defended that “for black people to assume the role of ‘civilizer’ in our society, they must mix with other races, especially the Aryan or Semitic races, and lose their purity” (Vianna, 1934, p. 285, our translation). Although he cautioned that his research at that point was conjectural, he continued to develop this line of argument. In Southern Populations of Brazil (1952), he exalted the Brazilian “rural aristocracy” in order to explain the characteristics of Brazil through a detailed study aiming to prove the superiority of the “Aryan” race.

Vianna condemned the mestizo population, stating that mestizos do not deserve respectability because they are a disqualified people of an inferior class, a race of idle people, dangerous and degraded by corruption, living by the morbid impulse of abnormality itself (Vianna, 1952). The mestizos, as the result of miscegenation, did not have Aryan blood, or had lost it through miscegenation. The Aryans—the rural aristocratic elite—possessed spiritual elegance, finesse, and intelligence. In this way, Vianna (1952) considered the rural aristocracy, due to their qualities, as “Athenians of politics and letters.” This was reiterated in his subsequent book, Evolução do Povo Brasileiro (Evolution of the Brazilian People, 1956), where he stated that “it is in the countryside that our race is formed and the intimate forces of our civilization are developed. From the countryside, the foundations on which the admirable stability of our society in the imperial period was based” (Vianna, 1956, p. 55). In addition to defending “large property,” that is, large estates, he asserted that the Portuguese were not only chosen to explore and “build” Brazil, but to be the representatives of the “superior” people. As with Amaral, Vianna also defended the continuation of an authoritarian state in his book Instituições Políticas Brasileiras (Brazilian Political Institutions, 1987), arguing that in Brazil, due to the constitution of the “mass of people,” incapable of participating in democratic bodies, there is no “popular” tradition in the realm of political decision-making.

Against the propositions above, Moura (1988) captured the connection between racism and autocracy as a constitutive part of the Brazilian social formation. Moura affirmed that, for the Brazilian bourgeoisie, it is not enough to consolidate a state with a restricted democracy, but the practice of racism must also accompany it. Moura demonstrated, in his critique of Amaral, “how the Brazilian elites who elaborate this thought find themselves partially or totally alienated due to having assimilated and developed the ideology of whitening;” this thought, he continued, is followed by “administrative, political and even repressive measures to stem the black demographic flow and encourage the entry of ‘civilized’ whites” (Moura, 1988, p. 25, our translation). Thus, the ideology of racism is shown to be an essential component of the retrograde Brazilian bourgeoisie, an expression of the perspective of the class that needs to make use of an autocratic state to ensure the flow of surplus value to the native and foreign bourgeoisies.

In his book As Injustiças de Clio (The Injustices of Cleo, 1990), Moura aimed his critique at Vianna’s method, affirming that it did not constitute “an objective contribution to the knowledge of our people, but a violent and deformed anathema against them” (Moura, 1990, p. 211), adding that:

[i]nfluenced by the Aryanizing scientism of the Eurocentric science of his time, he left a work that is a monument of exaltation to the ruling elites and a libel against the popular components: blacks, Indians, curibocas and other non-whites. A work that has nothing scientific about it and also serves to justify abuses against these popular strata which, for him, were a ‘race of mestizos’ incapable of being part of the civilizing process. A book that deforms and distorts facts to defend elites and racism.

Black Organizations: Politics and Resistance

Moura’s contribution to the critique of white supremacy was further based on bringing to light the diverse forms of black sociability and resistance among black organizations. He demonstrated in historical detail that since the first Africans set foot on American lands, they consolidated means to resist slavery, such as the formation of quilombos, religious organizations, brotherhoods, communities around churches, insurrections, and guerrilla war.

In São Paulo, for example, important places of black sociability were consolidated, as Moura showed. The street always functioned as a location of exchange and trade among this population, since the time of slavery. Black women and men sold products secretly, black greengrocers traded in the streets and squares, freed black women washed clothes. The ranches and resting places for drivers and travelers were also places of sociability, and some of them were maintained by the freed black population. Black Brotherhoods, such as Nossa Senhora do Rosário, and those of Remédios, Santa Efigênia, and São Elesbão, were spaces of struggle and resistance, as well as meeting places for leaders of the abolitionist movement, such as Luiz Gama and Antônio Bento (Moura, 1980, 1988).

Black festivities existed in the midst of white culture and were often persecuted by the authorities, such as the coronations of kings and queens of Congo, samba schools, and carnival groups. As for religions of African origin, one of the oldest on record according to the studies of Bastide (1975), dates from 1839, was the so-called “Macumba Paulista.” It was a set of practices in isolation, centered on the figure of a priest, who, in general, was called a sorcerer or healer. The presence of black men and women sorcerers and healers is recorded in various places in the city, such as Largo do Arouche—where the herb market was concentrated—and in many other houses in the center, or in isolated parts of the city.

From the end of the nineteenth century, as a result of urbanization, all these territories went through a slow and gradual process of racial and social segregation, due to the city’s works in building infrastructure. The Brotherhood of Rosário, which had been the first, was expropriated by Mayor Antônio Prado, moving in 1920 to its current headquarters in the Paissandu neighborhood. The Penal Code of 1893, which criminalized conduct such as witchcraft, sorcery, and capoeira, ⁵ served for the state to restrict legally all these black practices and territories. Thus, public places underwent reorganization recommended by the “Municipal Code of Postures” of 1896, prohibiting, inter alia, the presence of herbalists and healers in various parts of the city (Moura, 1988).

In his famous text Black Organizations (1980), Moura states that, in the São Paulo region, after Macumba Paulista disintegrated, Umbanda was conceived as a place where black people from São Paulo began to organize themselves in order to affirm their prestige and rearticulate their religious standards. In this sense, noted Moura (1980, p. 163, our translation), “ [t]his potential for religious organization of urban black people in São Paulo is linked to the anxiety of a marginalized population, largely coming from the countryside to the metropolis, without support centers capable of adjusting them to the standards of this society.”

Despite the aggression by churches against the followers of religions of African origin, it is in these large metropolitan outskirts of São Paulo that the proliferation of Umbanda places of worship, or terreiros, occurred. The terreiros became places where black people sought to “rediscover themselves ethnically and culturally, but, at the same time, given that they were embedded in an oppressive class society, they used their religious places to preserve and recompose themselves socially” (Moura, 1980, our translation). In other words, black people found in these spaces a place to assert themselves and combat the form of discrimination that existed in the society in which they were inserted. Religions of African origin fulfilled a significant function for poor populations, going beyond the scope of religion in the face of a social reality that, through healing practices, the fathers and mothers of saints played an expressive role in a country where “the people do not have doctor,” transforming Umbanda and Candomblé centers into “large public hospitals in Brazil” (Moura, 1988, p. 126, our translation).

After the transition from compulsory to free work, black people continued to resist in this way, since no compensation plan existed for workers after the abolition of slavery. It is in this environment that the descendants of enslaved workers went on to create new resistance strategies such as newspapers, clubs, and organizations of a political and ideological nature, namely the Brazilian Black Front (Frente Negra Brasileira) and the Black Experimental Theatre (Teatro Experimental do Negro). ⁶

Conclusion

We see in Clóvis Moura the elements that make it possible to understand the nature of racism and class struggle in the Brazilian social formation. Moura identified enslaved labor as a component of the larger capitalist mode of production and was also able to specify the manner in which the bourgeoisie was constituted and attached to the external market. These conditions rendered the bourgeoisie incapable of developing the productive forces and leading the development of an autonomous Brazilian capitalism without the intervention of a foreign bourgeoisie.

Moura’s work revealed that the bourgeoisie in Brazil was consolidated as an appendage of external capital, subordinate and timid, and due to its weakness had to rely on tactics and strategies to guarantee its class privileges, especially by land concentration and the configuration of a militarized state, contrary to the demands of the subordinate classes. The hierarchical and ethnic–racial division of labor encouraged a struggle within the working class, especially between whites and blacks, to make the workforce cheaper and ensure the intensification of the exploitation of workers. These factors make it possible to understand the functioning of Brazilian racism to this day.

Moura demonstrated that the process of transition from slave labor to wage labor occurred late, due to the retrograde character of Brazilian elites. The change from compulsory labor to wage labor did not bring substantial changes with regard to the reality of the descendants of enslaved Africans. The representatives of the oligarchies maintained their class privileges and perpetuated aspects of slavery and colonialism. It is thus also that Moura situated the ideological projects of the Brazilian bourgeoisie, as articulated by Amaral and Vianna, after the consolidation of the First Republic, whose conservatism made racism and autocracy inseparable in the “civilization” of the country.

Moura illuminated the Aryanization policy that marked Brazil’s transition to wage labor. Specifically, the rationalization of immigration policy sought to encourage the arrival of white people and transform Brazilian society into the standard of European countries, particularly England and France, at the same time as it sought to prevent the reproduction of African descendants in Brazil. The aim was to enhance the multiplication of white people, conceived as synonymous with modernity and civility. The policy thus proposed a modernization of Brazil through the traditions of the old Brazilian elites forged in the colonial path.

Recuperating Moura’s historiographical and theoretical contributions is not an exercise aimed at staying in the past. On the contrary, it is an undertaking that contributes to the understanding of the present. The reaction of capital today against labor is marked by the exorbitant mortality rates of the working class in Brazil, whether through the actions of the military apparatus or mass incarceration policies, specifically of populations descendant from enslaved Africans. Ultra-conservative forces are bent on dismantling social policies, increase unemployment, end social security, and many other actions of this sort. Clóvis Moura captured well what is at stake in this class struggle and the precise character of the Brazilian bourgeoisie, which is nothing more than a partner to foreign capital in the interest of maintaining its class privilege and bleeding the working class.