Development Paths in a Settler Society: The Challenges of the Communist Movement in Brazil

Introduction

The challenges faced by the Communist movement in Brazil require reviewing the contradictions inherited from the colonial mode of accumulation. This was originally a class system based on slavery and composed of the metropolitan colonizer, the settler, and the colonized class. In this article, we aim to recast the contradictions of Brazilian society with a view to understand the challenges of the present and argue that an alliance with the settler bourgeoisie is impossible.

Independence from the metropolitan colonizer in 1822 entailed a settler rebellion but also the continued exploitation of the colonized, given that the settlers reproduced the colonial mode of accumulation internally and oversaw the transition to a capitalist mode of production. It is argued here that the interclass, bourgeois–labor alliance which occurred in the mid-twentieth century was limited to the ranks of the settlers, mobilizing ideologically the myth of “racial democracy” to underpin the national-settler project. This included a degree of confrontation with imperialism coupled with industrial development but reproduced the colonial mode of accumulation internally.

This article sheds light on the contradictions that followed, including the military regime installed in 1964 and the neo-colonial transition in the 1990s, under finance capital. Class analysis is deployed to argue that, in light of the bourgeoisie’s shifting alliances at the expense of the sovereign aspirations of working people, an interclass alliance has become impossible for the Communist movement in Brazil.

The Colonial Mode of Accumulation and the Foundations of Settler Independence

As opposed to later African and Asian national liberation movements, nineteenth-century Latin American independence movements were built by local-born white settlers. In Spanish-speaking America, they were called criollos, who consisted of the privileged class and the internal beneficiaries of the colonial regime, similar to Brazil and its own local colonists of the white landed class and associates. As noted by de Mattos (1987) in reference to Brazil, the settlers were in contradiction with both the metropolitan colonizers—the Portuguese merchants and Crown bureaucrats—by whom they were dominated, and the colonized— African or Brazilian-born black slaves and indigenous peoples—whose labor they exploited.

The aforementioned domination constitutes a division of the products of the exploitation of colonized labor between the colonizers and the settlers. The settler class organized the exploitation of labor inside the colony, while the colonizer class organized the colonial regime globally; these two classes divided among themselves the value produced by labor. But the latter, as the politically dominant class, got the most of it. This alliance was broken at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the settlers then reorganized Brazilian polity to, in de Mattos’s words, “re-mint the colonial coin” in their favor. In other words: to cut the Portuguese off and reproduce what we are calling here the colonial mode of accumulation, which was based on enslaved labor, in a new phase, while establishing an independent national state. To this political solution was later added the substitution of Pedro I, the Portuguese-born first Emperor of Brazil, for a regency made up of three settlers, and then for Pedro II, son of the first and thus a settler himself.

The colonial mode of accumulation was founded upon two “primitive” forms of accumulation, in the sense of being a straightforward spoliation of land and labor, as opposed to exploitation of the latter within the cycle of capital. ¹ On the one hand, previous inhabitants of the land have been continuously deprived of land and the fruits of their labor, in a process of an ever-expanding agricultural frontier by either expelling or massively killing them; on the other, goods have been produced by labor (including the labor of part of those who have been deprived of land) which is remunerated under its rate of natural reproduction. This pattern, which Marini (2000) named “superexploitation of labor,” persisted under peripheral capitalism. Both processes lead to the production of capital outside of its cycle of reproduction because they amount to the exhaustion of land and labor—that is, not reintroducing them into the cycle by paying for their conditions of reproduction—but rather spoiling land and labor and adding them again in the next phase of the “cycle.” Yet, this is not really a cycle, since it does not reproduce its own conditions, requiring more and more primitive accumulation of land and labor.

The main victims of primitive accumulation of labor have been the enslaved African and African-Brazilian people, but also the Indigenous peoples; the latter, in turn, have been the main victims of primitive accumulation of land, together too with Africans and African-Brazilians who fled slavery and took hold of the land by establishing quilombos (da Silva & Souza, 2022). Needless to say, all these people have merged somewhat in different places at different times. As a result, this mode of accumulation is structurally dependent on the idea of race conforming racialized superexplotation of labor, but also the appropriation of land which is founded upon genocide.

The reason primitive accumulation exhausts land and labor is that it does not pay for the costs of their reproduction. The case of labor was examined by Marini, and it amounts to paying labor below the value of labor power, that is, the value that would permit its reproduction. Most of the time, this means undermining the laborers’ own physical reproduction, resulting in their premature death or otherwise inability to keep working. As for land, it amounts to exhausting productive land over a few seasons by means of the use of unsustainable predatory cultivation techniques. It also means, today, using nonrenewable natural, chemical, and energy resources as inputs of production and of the economy more generally. ²

The first historical form of racial superexploitation of labor was slavery, which appropriated labor by force and exhausted it by overwork and underpayment ³ and also resorted to murder for disciplinary reasons. Consequently, it constantly required kidnapping more laborers from Africa. Thus, slavery never paid the costs of the reproduction of labor, the burden of which remained within the African societies that raised, fed, and socialized their workers only to lose them to slavery. The result of this was a systematic and secular process of the drain of value from the African societies toward the settler and the metropolitan societies, which shared this looted value.

Nevertheless, this process did not end with the abolition of slavery but assumed new forms. Both superexploitation of labor and genocide of blacks continued after abolition and indeed continue to this day, as if there were, in countries such as Brazil, two different and parallel societies, the settler and the colonized—there are classes within and across these categories, as we will see—the first of which drains the second of value. This situation is similar to that of the “Black Belt” of the Southern United States (Haywood, 1948) and the formation of Bantustans in South Africa (Magubane, 1979). From another angle, the category “internal colonialism” has a less prominent geographical dimension—keeping the racial one—and in that sense, it has been applied to Latin American trajectories (Cesarino, 2017).

Primitive accumulation of land has also not ended, as might be believed, in the remote past. In fact, it has never stopped, and there is a surge of it from time to time, as in the project pursued by the Brazilian military regime in the center-west region, which was explicitly termed colonização, and, recently, the spread of fires in the Amazon, illegal mining (garimpo), and the like. Also, globally, it is evident that the whole of the economic growth of the twentieth century was based on cheap energy and natural resources, the supply of which was guaranteed by imperialist oppression of the global South, including Brazil, and ultimately by looting nature. The so-called Green Revolution, amounting to the use of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides in agriculture, and finally genetically modified crops, must also be seen as a historical form of looting the resources accumulated naturally over millennia (Moore, 2015).

The reason reproduction—or production—of capital is based on primitive accumulation is that, in the context of a big pool of resources seen as inextinguishable, it is cheaper to simply consume them than to pay for their cost of reproduction. Luxemburg (1951) argued that Marx’s (2004) cycle of expanded reproduction is logically impossible and that expanded reproduction is necessarily based on this kind of spoliation. In Brazilian history, as land got exhausted, the settlers had to expand systematically the agricultural frontier at the expense of the indigenous peoples. Different forms of primitive accumulation would be inseparable from the “cycle” of capital, as the settlers had to bring more kidnapped labor from Africa or, after abolition, either from internal labor reserves that were formed at the margins of society, or from abroad, which were to be “superexploited” (Marini, 2000). ⁴

This structure had its colonial phase when crystallized in the slavery mode of production. The colonizers, the settlers, and the colonized were, then, social classes in the full meaning of the term: if slavery is the dominant mode of production, landlords and poor white workers should be regarded as sectors of the settler class. ⁵ The transition to capitalism in Brazil was controlled by the settlers in order to achieve the reproduction of the colonial mode of accumulation in the capitalist mode of production. As a result, we can speak of a capitalist phase of the colonial mode of accumulation. In the sense that this structure implies a mode of accumulation within the capitalist mode of production, we can speak of settlers and colonized as classes, a category reserved to imply a position that a social group occupies within the system of relations of production. In addition to them, there are the colonizers of the colonial phase of the colonial mode of accumulation. In the capitalist phase, they are represented by imperialism and monopoly capital.

Also, as Stalin has noted, the capitalist mode of production is made up not only by the exploration of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie, which is internal to the nation-state, but also the exploration of the oppressed nations by the imperialist ones. In Stalin’s words:

…the world is divided into two camps: the camp of a handful of civilized nations, which possess finance capital and exploit the vast majority of the population of the globe; and the camp of the oppressed and exploited peoples in the colonies and dependent countries, which constitute the majority (Stalin, 1953, n.p.).

Therefore, the perspective by which imperialism is relegated to a secondary type of oppression has, in Stalin’s view, “been exposed” by Leninism more than a century ago: “[t]he national question is a part of the general question of the proletarian revolution, a part of the question of the dictator (sic) of the proletariat.” Moreover, imperialism is, in this regard, elevated to the “common enemy” of both the revolutionary liberation movement of the oppressed countries and the proletarian revolution, which amounts to saying it is the main enemy, and that capital and imperialism are the same thing (Stalin, 1953, n.p.). In our framework, imperialist exploitation has its internal dimension as well, which is materialized in the struggle opposing the settlers and the colonized. This struggle is an integral part of the national question and, consequently, an integral part of the proletarian revolution, and the defeat of the settlers is, together with the defeat of the colonizers, part of the defeat of imperialism.

The National-settler Development Project and Experimentation with Interclass Alliance

As shown by Yeros et al. (2019), by the 1930s, an alliance emerged as a result of intraclass conflict among the settler class, between the industrialist and landed sectors, that strove for industrial development for the settler society. Being in contradiction with both imperialism and the colonized, the settlers aspired for development akin to that of their kin in Europe, but it was “national” only within the confines of settler society, that is, only if we take into account that “the nation” is constituted by the settlers and not by other nations present in the territory that they internally colonize. The project was that of building a European nation in South America. The clearest evidence of this is that industrial development from the 1930s onward was, in contrast to the European path, conditioned upon the maintenance of the agrarian structure that privileged the whites and excluded blacks and indigenous from access to land. In other terms, the emergence of this intraclass alliance unifying agrarian and industrial power was possible only with a veto against agrarian reform and the maintenance of the whites’ monopoly of land.

Although the concrete emergence of that alliance happened only in the 1930s, this was not the first time its development program appeared as an idea, which had already appeared within the 1822 independence movement. Symptomatically, an important proponent of this idea and considered the “patriarch of independence,” José Bonifácio, defended industrial development for Brazil while being for the abolition of slavery not because that institution was repugnant but because it brought a gigantic contingent of alien peoples inside the country and threatened the (settler) society’s security (Bonifácio d’Andrada e Silva, 1825). ⁶

When, in 1964, the industrialist project began to spin out of control and risked agrarian reform and people’s power, the settler class resorted to a fascist coup—not to put an end to industrialism and reestablish pre-1930 agrarian society but to resume the industrialist project coupled with settler agrarian power in a more controlled environment. After securing a period of a few years in which an austere economic policy was implemented, the development project resumed in a clear national-settler fashion. This period corresponded to the stabilization of settler political power: with the political dimension secured, the country could venture into bolder economics. In other words, with the colonized firmly controlled, the settlers could challenge imperialism. The experience of the 1950s and early 1960s showed that, if that condition was not met, the settlers risked losing control and political power altogether.

A similar trajectory is to be found in foreign policy. In the early 1960s, before the military coup, as the anticolonial movement gained momentum globally, Brasília was making daring moves by visiting Mao Zedong and receiving a visit from Che Guevara. 1964 marked a shift toward automatic alignment with the United States as well as Portugal in relation to the issue of national liberation in the latter’s African colonies. Nevertheless, the trend eventually moved back to a supposedly more anticolonial foreign policy once settler political power was secured, with a new doctrine called “responsible and ecumenical pragmatism” issued by Foreign Minister Azeredo da Silveira under President Gen. Ernesto Geisel. It is often vaunted that, under this doctrine, Brazil was the first country to recognize the independences of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique—more on which later.

All this bears striking resemblance to the trajectories seen in Southern Africa, where the settlers eventually got themselves in irreconcilable contradictions with the imperial powers (the metropolitan colonizers) and arranged “national” independence and industrial development programs coupled with state structures designed to oppress the African people, secure white privilege over land, and produce and superexploit labor reserves, as the cases of Rhodesia and South Africa clearly show. From a different perspective, this meant the abortion of genuine national liberation that was sweeping across Africa by the beginning of the 1960s; therefore, the settlers arranged a way to block this trend and resume their exploitation of colonized labor. They were successful for about three decades, notwithstanding ensuing conflicts and wars.

The settlers also formed a kind of settler international that organized military expeditions to repress national liberation movements regionally. The most notable example of this in Africa is the Alcora Exercise—the Portuguese acronym for Alliance Against the Rebellions in Africa—a secret military alliance between Portugal, Rhodesia, and South Africa formally in force between 1970 and 1974. The alliance promoted cooperation among the white-settler regimes in the Angolan, Mozambican, Zimbabwean, and Namibian wars of national liberation. After the collapse of the Portuguese right-wing regime in Lisbon, and thus Alcora, following the Carnation Revolution in April 1974, cooperation between Portuguese settlers acting independently and the Rhodesian and South African governments continued in the Angolan and Mozambican Civil Wars. ⁷

The settler international expedient was also used in South America in an extensive number of cases since at least the Paraguayan War in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth century most notably in Operation Condor (Yeros et al., 2019)—and, most interestingly, where South Atlantic settler connections were formed. Gisele Lobato (2017) has discovered and traced the steps of a group of Rio de Janeiro policemen connected to state repression that were sent in a “semi-official” mission to Ambriz to fight alongside FNLA (Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola), Zairean, and South African troops against MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola) forces in Angola. The FNLA was helped by Portuguese-Angolan white settlers, Portuguese Army men who deserted after the Carnation Revolution, and the Apartheid regime, while the MPLA would receive substantial support from the Soviet Union and, especially, Cuba. As Lobato states, it is presently not possible to assert whether this mission was known to the Brazilian Presidency, but most probably it was known to at least some of the policemen’s superiors (Lobato, 2017). These could even be high figures in Brasília dissatisfied with Geisel’s policy, such as Army Minister Sylvio Frota, fired by the President in 1977.

In any case, this pseudo-national—or national-settler—development project did signify a departure from a foreign policy subservient to the interests of imperialism, as well as with the economic structure oriented to supply European countries with agricultural and mineral products—although not with the race, class, and agrarian structure associated with the latter. What is more, it is fair to say that this alignment produced, or at least concluded, the transition to capitalism in Brazil and the formation of the bourgeois and proletarian classes, the former being composed of its agrarian and industrial sectors and the latter traversed by race contradictions that reproduced the settler-colonized contradiction among the workers.

On account of that, many within the Communist movement in Brazil believed that a national bourgeoisie had developed and was interested in liquidating the country’s dependent position within the global economy and, eventually, the landed class itself. As there was, in this view, a confluence of interests between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the conclusion was that it was now possible for these classes to form an alliance for national development against the inherited agrarian structure, whether classified as “feudal” or not.

Thus, an inter-class alliance was also formed, resulting in the support by the Communist Party of Brazil (PCB) for President Getúlio Vargas’s presidential bid in 1950 and, most notably, in the famous 1958 “Declaration of March” establishing a party program of alliance with the national sectors of the bourgeoisie (PCB, 1980, see also Prestes, 1980). This ultimately led to a schism, in the context of the 1956 “de-stalinization” occurring in the Soviet Union, and the reorganization of the movement into a renamed Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) and a reorganized Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB) in 1962. Both parties exist to this day, with PCB itself having been reorganized in a revolutionary strategy line since an allegedly fraudulent congress in 1992 tried to liquidate the party by rebranding it “People’s Socialist Party” and abandoning Marxism–Leninism.

This alliance between sectors of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and class conflict, more generally, were traversed by the conflict opposing the settlers and the colonized, since among the former ranked both the bourgeoisie and part of the proletariat, and among the latter, of course, the colonized. Clearly, white workers have immediate material interests in assuming their settler position and reproducing the exploitation of the colonized. That gives them some privileges and puts them in a relatively better position in the division of labor among the workers. The cost is, however, that of reproducing bourgeois dominance, for proletarian revolution is inseparable from colonized revolution. Therefore, the colonial mode of accumulation serves, politically speaking, the purpose of blocking the proletarian revolution by means of buying off the settler workers, in an internal expression of the arrangement by which imperialism has bought off white workers in the system’s center (Przeworski, 2002).

The formation of labor reserves associated with the colonial mode of accumulation puts permanent pressure on the relative privileges of the settler workers, but this, instead of aligning the proletariat as a whole, may well reproduce the model by reproducing the settler workers’ neurosis. Quite often, this relatively privileged sector of the proletariat, pressured toward the material situation of the colonized masses, assumes a neurotic and phobic reactionary position which actually appears to be to the right of that of the bourgeoisie—which is clear in Bolsonaro’s case (a mainly lower class political phenomenon), and Malan’s South Africa and Trump’s United States for that matter. Nevertheless, that position is really that of the bourgeoisie, which thanks to its existence may block revolution while posing as the proponent of a cleaner and more democratic form of capitalism.

The question of the political position of white workers is at the nucleus of the challenges of the Communist movement in Brazil. As the vanguard of the proletariat, the movement expects to represent that class, the majority of which is composed of non-whites. Nevertheless, the major trend in the society is that power positions will be held by whites, and the Communist movement is no exception. Therefore, its leaders are prone to reproduce the contradictions of the settler proletariat and frequently embrace the settlers’ interests. Especially when a bourgeois–proletarian alliance was enacted as a means to build a national development project and conclude national liberation, the meaning of “national” was understood mainly within the lines proposed by the settlers, that is, materializing their opposition toward imperialism, and obscuring the internal opposition between the settlers and the colonized. In that way, this is a colonialist position, for it fights imperialism against the settler nation only to reproduce it internally.

Since the foundation of PCB in 1922, the settlers’ interests appeared within the Communist movement in the form of the negation of race contradictions within Brazilian society, the posing of a false opposition between the categories of class and race, and the disregard of the latter altogether (Chadarevian, 2012)—despite, on the other hand, theoretical developments in the opposite direction, put forward mainly by black communists such as Edison Carneiro and Clóvis Moura, starting in the 1930s and 1950s, respectively (Rocha, 2021). It is important to note, however, that up until the foundation of the Brazilian Black Front (FNB), in 1931, the organizations of the black movement had mainly a welfarist, recreational, and cultural character and therefore did not contest the communist reading of society. Starting in the 1900s, these organizations proliferated alongside the so-called black press. The FNB, on the other hand, had “more deliberate political demands”—and over 20,000 associates, consisting of the greatest black organization of the period—but these were right-biased and close to the Brazilian fascist movement (Domingues, 2007, p. 106, own translation, see also Moura, 1994).

Of course, the national project of the 1930s–1950s itself reflected societal conflicts and was contradictory in character, and the Communists were not the only ones put in that position. These contradictions were a consequence of the conflicts within the bourgeoisie-proletariat settler alliance, which kept open the possibility of an evolution toward an antisettler project. ⁸ They reached their peak in 1964 when only one out of the two possibilities could continue to be pursued. The coup d’état on April 1st meant the solution to the crisis by the resumption of settler power with a renewed security apparatus that was to keep the colonized in check and repress any attempt to break that power. Industrial development was to continue without threatening white privileges and land monopoly.

The contradictory character of 1930 thus evolved, in 1964, toward a clearly national-settler project that was at the same time developmentalist and antilabor, national and internal colonialist, or, better yet, settlerist. This point is often missed in the analyses within the left, which is the reason why the latter is usually sympathetic to the economic policies of the military regime that followed the 1964 coup while profoundly against it politically. To see it in light of the tri-polar contradiction between imperialism, the settlers, and the colonized helps to apprehend this character.

Also, this is not unique to Brazil: by the same time, South Africa was becoming a republic and withdrawing from the Commonwealth of Nations (1961), while deepening apartheid violence, and Rhodesia was issuing its unilateral declaration of independence from the United Kingdom (1965), while repressing the Second Chimurenga. Indeed, this trend has been present since at least the American Revolution, which was national-settler and had the same tri-modular character. It suffices to remember that the indigenous peoples of North America allied, then, with the British.

Racial Democracy: Ideology of National-settlerism

The national project that prevailed from 1930 to 1980 obtained its ideological counterpart in the emergence and hegemony of the myth of racial democracy. This ideology assumes the nonexistence of racial inequality and racism, more generally, in Brazilian society, or at least a trend in this direction. Although this is a complex theme, for much of the thinking on racial democracy the sole place of racism is in “color” prejudice, but this is seen as a personal deviation in those who practice it and not as a social pathology. ⁹ That ideology contrasts sharply with the one prevailing in the previous period, which was marked by open racism, usually with scientific claims, and a political project aimed at whitening the population by fomenting European immigration.

The supposedly more progressive character of racial democracy in comparison to scientific racism led the Communist movement to adhere to it, at least initially, almost completely (Chadarevian, 2012). This went well with the movement’s eventual embrace of Vargas’ and subsequent governments. Indeed, racial democracy seemed the touchstone of industrial society, and even when a racial question was perceived, as in the early studies of progressive sociologist Florestan Fernandes, this was deemed to be subject to its eventual overcoming by modernization (Fernandes, 1969).

There were, along these lines, more progressive formulations of the concept of racial democracy by black activists in the 1950s. Agreeing with the scholars and the cultural establishment of the time that there had been a legacy of racial democracy, in the legal sense, since Abolition—in contrast with the legal racism present in the United States—they thought, nevertheless, that Abolition had not been complete, insofar as blacks had not been economically and socially integrated in the new capitalist order. It was necessary, therefore, to promote a “second Abolition” (Guimarães, 2001).

“Racial democracy,” in this context, has, according to Guimarães, a contradictory character, for it is the “right to something not materialized.” In the context of the 1952–55 UNESCO research project on race relations in Brazil, Roger Bastide and Florestan Fernandes, both white scholars, formulated “racial democracy” as an “ideal pattern of behavior” that co-exists contradictorily and concomitantly with “color prejudice” as the norm and social practice, respectively. This formulation had already been advanced by black activists such as Abdias do Nascimento and Guerreiro Ramos in opposition to conservative variants that argued for the non-existence of “color prejudice” in Brazil. But they did not contest the “consensus on ‘racial democracy,’ even if [they] pollarized its meaning” (Guimarães, 2001, pp. 151–52, own translation).

According to Guimarães, the “populist” or “national-developmentalist” pact was in force from 1930 to 1964. Under this pact:

[t]he blacks were completely integrated into the Brazilian nation, in symbolic terms, by the means of the adoption of a mestizo or syncretic national culture, and, in material terms, at least partially, by the means of the regulation of the labor market and social security, reversing the framework of exclusion and lack of commitment sponsored by the First Republic (Guimarães, 2001, p, 161, own translation).

The “rupture of the democratic pact,” in Guimarães’s words, in 1964, led the black movement to emphasize the African roots of black culture—in opposition to mestizo values—and to progressively denounce racial democracy as a myth. Abdias initiated this denunciation in 1968 before going into exile and continued it after his return in 1977. The process culminated in the emergence of the Unified Black Movement (MNU), founded in 1978.

What is missing in this description is that the 1964 “rupture” is only partial in the sense that it signifies the resumption of the same settler views regarding national formation. Symptomatically, neither the “regulation of the labor market and social security” was extended to rural and domestic labor nor did the illiterate have the right to vote before 1988—the latter, of course, targeting rural workers, and, in both cases, the colonized, disproportionately. This amounts to the absence of universal suffrage, with citizens being qualified not through their race but through their literacy status—a bypass typical of “racial democracy.” Therefore, it needs to be asked what kind of “pact” this was and among whom. Isn’t this positive analysis of the period in itself an example of the myth of racial democracy?

What had indeed changed in 1964 is that the relative democratic conditions in which the national-settler project was pursued until then, and that were tensioning it by the growth of a rival colonized narrative, were lifted. Accordingly, the black movement would be dismantled, and the foundation of MNU would happen only when the political repression started to de-escalate, with the return of the exiled. Interestingly enough, even before the denunciation of the myth of racial democracy by the new black movement, the military regime, interested in developing its relations with African countries, was promoting Afro-Brazilian culture (Guimarães, 2001). While it framed this as yet another example of Brazilian racial democracy, it still signified a departure from the latter by rooting it in racial miscegenation and the negation of racial particularities—other than white.

Neo-colonial Transition and the Decay of National-settlerism

The concept of “neo-colonialism” was developed by Nkrumah (1965) at the time of Africa’s decolonization to underscore the contradictory process by which imperialism’s widespread “retreat” from direct political domination of the colonies was accompanied by direction from the outside of their economic system. Summarizing the argument, neo- colonialism amounts to both political liberalization and economic subjugation. As national liberation advances in the periphery, especially after Ghanaian Independence in 1957, and territories become “nominally independent,” economic means are employed by the core to subjugate their economies and, consequently, control their policies.

It is not the case that Nkrumah believed that this type of economic subjugation of independent polities constituted a novelty in the second half of the twentieth century. The author mentioned the case of Egypt, in which such a situation could actually be converted into direct colonization in the nineteenth century. But then in the 1960s, a similar type of reconversion was, following Nkrumah’s argument, not possible anymore. Independence had come for good—and neo-colonialism was turned into the strategy of the day. Thus, the phenomenon matured to constitute a “stage of imperialism”—as the book’s name, resonating Lenin directly states—while former colonies transitioned to neo-colonial states.

Nevertheless, as Yeros and Jha (2020) suggest, in the countries characterized by significant white settler populations, the neo-colonial transition was “aborted” at this time. In these cases, political conditions aggravated against the neo-colonial trend of liberalization but, on the other hand, the settler minorities also sought economic and industrial development and geopolitical expansionism in accordance with their own settler agenda. This development was, of course, based on the superexploitation of their respective colonized populations and thus did not amount to either neo-colonialism, where politics is released but economics is blocked, nor a true national development project, where both are sought in benefit of the whole of the national population. As with Brazilian Independence in 1822, it amounted to the reminting of colonialism by action of the internal settler class.

In accordance with this vision, decolonization for countries such as South Africa, Namibia, and Zimbabwe did not occur at the time of their juridical separation from the British or German empires, but when white minority regimes were finally defeated in the 1980s and 1990s. In the case of the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique, the trend is very similar, with the Portuguese state and white settlers refusing decolonization in the 1960s and delaying it up until 1975, at which point a civil war was promoted by imperialism to prevent national liberation for another twenty years. In most of the other ex-colonies, some degree of a truly national development project could be pursued by non-white majority regimes in the years between the achievement of independence and the maturation of the neoliberal conditions. Therefore, the settler regimes and Portuguese imperialism in Angola and Mozambique awaited these conditions to be fully in place before negotiating a transition to majority rule. All these cases present a strikingly simultaneous trajectory, which need not be recounted here. Perhaps aided by the defeat of the Soviet camp, the transition to majority rule was permitted in the late 1980s and early 1990s but was conditioned upon the neo-colonial transition which kept sovereignty in check by other means.

As for Brazil, elections were held in 1989 under the new Constitution of 1988. This “Citizen Constitution,” as it is called, may be regarded as a hallmark of both the country’s neo-colonial transition and its transition to majority rule, albeit imperfectly. For the first time in its history, Brazil—as well as the African countries mentioned—obtained universal suffrage, permitting the vote of the illiterate. It also criminalized racism and instituted a universal system to secure social rights comprising public health, social security, and social assistance, as well as a whole series of economic, social, and labor rights. Slave labor, which has never ceased to exist, began to be actively combated by the government in 1995, with the creation of the Special Mobile Inspection Group within the labor inspection structure. As to the indigenous question, it instituted a juridical, administrative, and organizational framework aiming to preserve indigenous peoples’ rights to their ancestral lands. Later on, policies on affirmative action were instituted as well.

These legal advancements may be regarded as the burial of the myth of racial democracy at the state level, ¹⁰ after it had been denounced by the black movement, although this idea must be contrasted with the official promotion of black culture by the late military regime, already referred to. Also, it was during that regime that rural labor was regulated for the first time, in 1973, while domestic labor had to wait until 2013, despite its struggle during the Constitutional Assembly. In any case, the moment could be compared to South Africa’s myth of “rainbow nation,” and several declarations by post-Apartheid presidents that Afrikaners were Africans in full right. Lula’s first-term motto, by its turn, read “Brazil: a country of everyone.” That kind of incorporation of the colonized into the nation also functions in reverse, by stating the country is of the settlers too. This could be seen as a renewed national ideology for the neo-colonial transition, a type of political liberation that preserves property rights, especially land property—the exception, to date, being Zimbabwe after its Fast-Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) in 2000. ¹¹

Accordingly, the state financial structure organized by the 1988 Constitution and subsequent legislation, which should provide for the materialization of its own welfare agenda, actually squeezed the public fund with several neoliberal institutions that made the social-democratic project idealized in the Constitution impossible to pursue (Bercovici & Massonetto, 2006). Even worse, there has been a spike in state violence and incarceration of the colonized, which seems to be a management technique of the growing labor reserves for primitive accumulation in late neo-colonialism (Yeros & Jha, 2020)—an ever-increasing phenomenon, by the way, in the context of the so-called gig economy. Also, although public service regulated the state’s contact with the indigenous peoples by the principle of the latter’s wishes to establish contact or not, actual land grabbing by various agents is an ongoing process. This is the hallmark of a settler society: from the indigenous perspective, there is a continuity of the colonization process, be it perpetrated by the Portuguese or by the Brazilian.

In sum, during the 1980s, the settlers agreed to a political overture, but only after ensuring that the economic mechanisms destined to maintain the colonized subjugated to primitive accumulation were put in place. Indeed, as has been suggested by Yeros and Jha (2020), a very similar pattern can be found in Southern Africa and Latin America: the presence of a large community of white settlers; the trend toward decolonization being aborted in the 1960s (with previous settler independence—which in the Americas occurred 100–150 years earlier in most cases—not amounting to the same thing); then escalation of political repression coupled with a national-settler development project; and political liberalization in the 1980s and 1990s coupled with neoliberalism and adhesion to the Washington Consensus.

The failure to apprehend this “settler-colonial mode of political domination,” to borrow Yeros and Jha’s expression, is at the root of the Brazilian Communist movement and actually almost the whole of the left’s positive view of the economic development of the period 1964–1985. Even the assertive international positions of Geisel’s presidency (1974–1979) are well regarded. Mention is often made of Brazil’s “pioneering” recognition of Angolan Independence declared by the Marxist-Leninist MPLA on November 11, 1975. This is as contradictory as the US support for national liberation in Africa and elsewhere. The point for national-settlerism is that its sovereign aspirations usually mean to defy imperialism, provided, nevertheless, that the colonized are controlled at home and settler power is secured. What is more, Brazil reversed its former policy of standing with Portugal in the latter’s refusal to decolonize only when Lisbon itself decided to grant its colonies independence in the wake of the Carnation Revolution on April 25, 1974. And even then, this allegedly moderate position—Geisel often being regarded as a moderate president within the military regime—was not met with acquiescence by settler hardliners, as the case narrated by Lobato (2017) clearly shows.

The flip side of the coin is the left’s usual defense of the 1988 Constitution’s political, social, and economic rights while regarding the neoliberal hege- mony of the period as of “national decay.” Thus, the Program of PCdoB (PCdoB, n.d., own translation), in spite of saying that the 1964 coup “puts a break on the reforms that would energize development” and that it “symbolizes internal adversities and the impositions of imperialism against the national project,” refers to the whole of the period 1930–80 as the “second civilizational cycle”—the first being comprised by slavery and the colonial period. Also, while recognizing the “positive legacy of re-democratization conquered in 1985 after great popular mobilizations for democratic liberties” and that the Constitution “has given the country a democratic juridical-political framework, besides incorporating important social conquests,” the Program has a mainly negative view of the period 1981–2002, which is termed as “two ‘lost decades’” and of “national decay.”

This view is understandable only as the country has really abandoned any national development project and assertive foreign policy. But both the “national” character of previous development must be challenged and the truly national and democratic conquests of the 1980s democratization movements must be properly addressed. For the purpose of the Communists, the central issue is that political liberalization was conditioned upon imperialist economic domination. This is, indeed, the contradictory essence of the neo-colonial project in the periphery as a whole, as illuminated by Nkrumah. In any case, to be nostalgic for national-settler development is pointless since it should be obvious that national development and liberation must be, in our view, for the nation, and not for the white settler class. We do not want to “re-mint the colonial coin” once again, but to root out colonialism altogether.

Two Axes of Political Cleavage

The settler class historically has struggled for sovereignty on the world stage while simultaneously reinforcing colonialism internally, which we have called the “national-settler” project. We can thus develop, for countries such as Brazil, two axes of political cleavage that counterpose forces in accordance with their degree of alignment with internal colonialism, on the one hand, and external colonialism or neo-colonialism, on the other. Overall, global monopoly capital and imperialism are the forces that seek to deepen both external and internal oppressions.

The Brazilian bourgeoisie, now fully transformed from a national-settler bourgeoisie into a comprador bourgeoisie, mainly adopts the position of imperialism, that is, to maintain the neo-colonial mode of accumulation to its maximum extent—this being the neo-colonial right. As in the previous stage, in the present one, the peripheral bourgeoises have to share most of the value extracted from peripheral labor with the imperial bourgeoisies at the core. Nevertheless, they now compensate for this only by accelerating primitive accumulation in the periphery, by means of more internal colonialism, which is of interest to both the peripheral and imperialist bourgeoisies, and not by coupling that with, as before, a national-settler project aimed at ascending the ladder of global capitalism and augmenting its share of value extracted.

This explains the more recent rise of Jair Bolsonaro as a representative of the bourgeois comprador-settler project and of imperialism, but also attracting ample sectors of settler labor interested in maintaining relative privileges in the face of the colonized masses. For the latter, Bolsonaro appears as a representative of national-settlerism, and this chameleon capacity is part of the explanation of his successes. Yet, this is also part of the explanation why the bourgeoisie eventually abandoned him, for contemporary bourgeoisies cannot afford radically racist and misogynist positions, nor is the majority of the Brazilian bourgeoisie willing to dump the democratic state. Thus, most of it has abandoned Bolsonaro, as its imperialist ally at the core has also done.

Nonetheless, in the neo-colonial stage, a position has emerged among a leftist sector of the settlers and a petty-bourgeois sector of the colonized “classes,” who now espouse both neo-colonialism and identity politics in a manner that actually maintains the material exploration of the majority of the oppressed, that is, the neo-colonial mode of accumulation. To denounce this agenda as “identitarian,” as is common, is racist because it presupposes that the settlers and the whites have no identity, or that identity is not a legitimate component of the anticolonial struggle. It shall be more properly called the “neo-colonial left” or “imperialist left” position, for it embraces a leftist identity politics agenda coupled with neo-colonial exploitation. This position is fiercely criticized by those who espouse the diametrically opposed one, that is, the revival of the national-settler development project—the anti-imperialist right. But the former is actually the flip side of the latter: both are marked by the internal contradiction of confronting only one dimension of domination, either internal (internal colonialism) or external (neo-colonialism), while completely embracing the other. No anti-imperialist struggle of consequence is to come out of either one.

The neo-colonial left and right are, anyhow, different expressions of neo-colonialism, which consists of imperialism enforced through economic means. Neo-colonialism is the contemporary form of the colonial mode of accumulation, and since for it to accomplish its objectives it suffices to choke nations economically, it is sufficient for the settler class to exploit the colonized only economically as well. Some degree of political liberation is, therefore, not only acceptable but also preferable, for it allows for absorbing social demands up to a point. This point is the hallmark of the neo-colonial transition and explains the 1988 Constitution, identity politics, and ultimately Bolsonaro’s fall. People like him, nevertheless, will be the bourgeoisie’s choice whenever it sees even a remote possibility of advancement toward national liberation of the colonized.

Conclusion

The unambiguously settler character of the Brazilian bourgeoisie is expressed not only in its racial character but also in the mode of accumulation it pursues, which is based on the dual primitive accumulation over land and labor. As we have seen, in its national-settlerist stage, the Brazilian bourgeoisie showed some interest in national development of the settler type. When this threatened to spin out of its control, to evolve toward a truly national and anticolonial project, it did not hesitate to assert violently its political control over the colonized. This decisive position was taken in spite of any contradictions between the agrarian and industrial fractions of the bourgeoisie. In fact, the latter contradictions became sharper in relatively democratic periods, when tensions as to the possibilities of colonized liberation increased. Both in the 1930s and 1960s, these contradictions were solved by the accommodation of industrialist interests within settler agrarian power and monopoly of land. This monopoly is a condition sine qua non for the reproduction of the colonial mode of accumulation, which is in the best interest of both fractions. Authoritarian periods, therefore, appear as the necessary way to promote industrial development and settler power simultaneously.

Until the late 1980s, the Brazilian bourgeoisie had positioned itself in a national-settlerist project. Then, when this kind of authoritarian political control over the colonized turned impossible to carry on, it traded national-settler development for settler privilege and abandoned the former altogether. Ever since, it has continued to expropriate land and superexploit labor, while being content with its subordinated character in the global sphere, because with this it preserves its position within the country and reproduces the neo-colonial mode of accumulation. It is thus strongly aligned with the imperialist bourgeoisie and has shifted to a neo-colonial project under the wing of imperialism.

At the time of the settler bourgeois–labor alliance, labor had also stood against imperialism and for internal colonialism. This was the material base for the alliance, which underpinned national-settler development in the mid-twentieth century. The alliance started to break in 1964 and the process was completed in 1985, when the national-settler bourgeoisie committed “class suicide” and became a comprador bourgeoisie. Settler labor has ever since been oscillating between the national-settler position and the neo-colonial left position. Part of it feels abandoned and has resorted to neo-fascist alternatives. Although this has been a solution for the bourgeoisie to co-opt settler labor, with the former destroying national and progressive state structures, this option has grown increasingly unappealing to the latter. The bourgeois–labor alliance within the settler sphere has thus become impossible. Any strategy for national development on that basis is destined to fail and, moreover, must be exposed as settler decrepitude.

Then there are the movements of the colonized, part of which fail to engage against imperialism and do not transcend an incipient criticism of internal colonialism. As with the native elites who took power in parts of the periphery after decolonization with the neo-colonial transition, this amounts to some emerging to prominent positions but not to overthrowing capitalism. In this manner, by the agency of these neo-colonial and petty-bourgeois sectors of the movements, in alliance with monopoly capital as sponsors, there has been a co-optation of the colonized, whose objective is to prevent them from developing an anti-imperialist agenda. Thus, they stay within the sphere of the neo-colonial left opposing only the internal dimension of colonialism.

These are the forces that have been criticized by part of the Communist movement for being “identitarian.” Nevertheless, the Communists, instead of producing a dialectical synthesis, by abstracting colonized protest from its neo-colonial and petty-bourgeois elements and reintegrating it into a radical of colonialism globally and internally have retreated to the settler position, rejecting colonized protest altogether. While accusing the black movement of fracturing the working class, these Communists actually perpetrated this fracturing by assuming an unequivocal settler position that antagonizes the colonized. There is no excuse for this politically and intellectually miserable formulation, since, even more than promoting settlerism, it also promotes capitalism by blocking proletarian unity among black and white workers.

Neither the neo-colonial leftist nor the national-settlerist strategies will produce a political alignment capable of conducting national liberation. Some are trying to make the Communist movement embrace one of these positions, which would lead it to dissolve itself among either the neo- colonial left or the national-settler right. What is striking, in this view, is that the place of the anti-imperialist left is mainly politically void. There are only a few minority forces within the black, indigenous, and Communist movements that occupy this place, but they are still too small to make a difference. In the face of the absence of a great, coherent, and organized political force that advances the strategy of the colonized, the latter are deceived by its petty-bourgeois component and the neo-colonial left.

The path of the Brazilian communist movement will be that of fighting both neo-colonialism and internal colonialism, or it will be none. Only a truly popular political project, meaning one that fights both imperialism and its proxy, the settler bourgeoisie, is capable of developing the nation’s potential, and that’s the only one the Communists should espouse. The time has come to shout with our colonized comrades in all three continents: “Down with colonialism!” (Minh, 2007).