Introduction

In 1966, Senegal, governed by Léopold Senghor, promoted the 1st World Festival of Black Arts (FESMAN). The conception of the event represented an attempt to materialize and disseminate the Senghorian version of Negritude, with its strong culturalist traits. FESMAN, however, went much further and became the occasion for a widespread exchange of ideas and experiences between independent African countries and the main African diasporas. It was, therefore, an opportunity to materialize the pan-African identity, carrying strong political meanings, whether President Senghor wanted it or not.

The delegation sent by the Brazilian government to the festival, however, was set up with the opposite intention. The Brazilian organization committee expressly wanted to demonstrate that Brazilian culture had already transformed into something distinct from the African influences it received. The Brazilian committee sought to prove that African assimilation in the country was so complete that all artistic manifestations in Brazil integrated, in some way, elements from Africa, which was equivalent to proclaiming that there was no particularly African Brazilian art. Therefore, the exhibitions and presentations selected by the committee insisted on the exceptionality of racial¹ relations in Brazil, which would have produced a unique result in the world, an assumption prone to isolate the Afro-Brazilians from the Pan-African community. The committee’s choices were subject to disagreements with the Senegalese government, almost leading to the cancellation of Brazilian participation. Besides, Abdias Nascimento, founder, and leader of Teatro Experimental do Negro (TEN), was prevented from participating in FESMAN² and exposed, in a letter published in newspapers from Senegal and France, the flaws of the Brazilian position.

The present article explores why the Brazilian government was committed to defending racial exceptionality, which at that time was presented under the label of racial democracy. To achieve this task, the piece seeks to situate this controversial decision within the framework of the role played by the State in the intrinsic relationship between racism and capital reproduction. To do so, I analyse how this particular relationship takes form in Brazil. Following a Marxist tradition, the article will refer to the debate on how the production of difference, especially in terms of race and gender, enables and maximizes the reproduction of capital. Poulantzas’s theory of the State will be used to describe the role of the State apparatus in capitalist reproduction and, accordingly, in the production of difference. In order to explore how a given structural orientation is converted into concrete action, I will employ the concept of strategic selectivity formulated by Bob Jessop, as it allows a satisfactory depiction of the agency/structure dynamics by proposing that the structural fabric favours and rewards certain actions, which, in turn, reinforce and recompose structural biases.

Brazilian government’s commitment to defending the exceptionality of racial relations in Brazil will be examined in terms of the interconnection between four elements – at decreasing levels of abstraction – presented throughout the text. The first of these elements is the intrinsic relationship between capitalism and inequality, which places the production of hierarchies as indispensable for the reproduction of capital. The second element is the necessary role of the State in managing that relationship through structurally conditioned actions. The third element is the configuration of the racism-capital relationship in Brazilian social formation in the post-abolition period and during industrialization. The fourth and final element is the position adopted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MRE, in the Portuguese acronym) regarding the delegation’s composition, which, in the proposed hypothesis, resulted from the three previous elements. Thusly, the article aims to contribute to theoretical reflection on the reasons and ways racism affects the content of Brazilian foreign policy. The analysis uses primary sources produced by the MRE to prepare to Senghor’s visit in 1964 and related to the Brazilian participation at FESMAN. Additionally, it makes use of Brazilian foreign ministry’s documents that broadly speak on the decolonization process, as well as promotional material about Brazilian characteristics. The article draws from records both from Senghor’s and Brazilian authorities’ public speeches on newspaper articles and their repercussions during the 1964 visit, in addition to secondary sources on the activities promoted by Brazil at FESMAN.

Based on that methodological perspective, the article argues that the racism intrinsic to capitalist relations of production inscribes strategic selectivities (Jessop 1985) in the State, understood as the materialization of the dynamics of class forces and class fractions of a social formation (Poulantzas [1978] 2014). Concerning Brazilian social formation, the argued exceptionality of racial relations, more generally, and racial democracy, in particular, became the discursive references that mediated these racist selectivities (Heigl 2011; Jessop 2016). As such, these strategic selectivities guided the actions and conscious choices of actors in the State apparatus. Visibly, the debate over the promotion of the purported exceptionality of Brazilian racial relations – in defence of which the MRE actively mobilized in the case studied – externally expressed a dispute about the prospect of incorporation of Afro-Brazilians into the diaspora and transnational spaces of production of pan-African identities and, internally, on the possibility of identification and affirmation of Afro-descendants as a specific group of the Brazilian population. To the extent that the MRE acted to safeguard the racial democracy farce, it worked as a tool for the continuous reconstitution of racism and inequality integral to capital accumulation.

The present article is divided into three parts. The first section describes Senghor’s visit to Brazil and the Brazilian participation in FESMAN. The second part explores the relationship between capitalism and racism and the role played by the State in the conservation and reproduction of such relationship, both in general and specifically in the Brazilian case. The final segment briefly summarizes the arguments, presents the conclusions resulted from this inquiry, and suggests possibilities for using this theoretical framework.

Senghor’s visit to Brazil and FESMAN ’66

In September 1964, Senegal’s president, Leopold Senghor, landed in Rio de Janeiro for an official visit, to which he had been invited in 1962, and which the governments of both countries postponed on multiple occasions.³ Senegal’s president’s visit to Brazil represented a historic moment in the relations between Brazil and Africa: Senghor was the second head of state from that continent to visit Brazil⁴ and the first president of one of the newly independent countries.

Two disagreements mark the trip. The first concerned the framing of the visit. From the Brazilian government’s point of view, coordination with Senegal responded to geopolitical concerns about the security of the South Atlantic, which has its narrowest point on the line between Dakar and Natal (Saraiva 1996: 107; Selcher 1970: 117-120). This proximity, was then argued to be not only geographical, through the South Atlantic Ocean, but cultural. As Brazil’s then president Castello Branco argued to Senghor in his welcoming discourse to the Senegalese president, the countries were both ‘Western and Christian’ nations at the risk of exchanging colonial submission by ‘other submission,’ meaning to the communist sphere (Correio da Manhã 1964b).5

Additionally, there was a matter of interest on the Brazil’s part in exploring the commercial potential of the relationship with the new African countries, which had gained independence from 1957 onwards. During Senegal’s president visit, both governments signed a commercial agreement that would later serve as a model for similar documents proposed to other African nations (MRE 1965; Cervo 1992: 342).⁶ The following year, the MRE organized an unprecedented commercial mission to Africa that travelled through Senegal, Liberia, Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, and Ivory Coast for 40 days (MRE 1966a: 61).

The second disagreement concerned colonialism. From Senegal’s standpoint, Brazil could become a pivotal actor to Lusophone Africa’s independence process, a topic mentioned by the Senegalese guest, at different levels of assertiveness throughout his visit (Correio da Manhã 1964a; Correio da Manhã 1964c; O Globo 1964). The outcome of this trip mattered to Senegal both in principle and because of the consequences of the guerrilla warfare in Portuguese Guinea, from where more than 55,000 refugees escaped to their independent neighbour, Senegal, many of whom settled in the sensitive region of Casamance (Chaliand 1969: 24; Matthews 1972: 64). Consequently, if the Brazilian government cared about security, understood in geopolitical terms, and about the increase in the trade flows, the visitor was interested in discussing the decolonization of territories controlled by Portugal on the African continent.

According to Senghor, if Brazil, as its official interlocutors insisted, had managed to achieve independence, maintaining cultural ties with Portugal, and, on top of that, overcoming racism through peaceful miscegenation, why couldn’t the same happen to other territories colonized by Portugal (Correio da Manhã 1964a; O Globo 1964)? Following this logic, Senegal’s president repeatedly insisted on creating what he called the Luso-Afro-Brazilian community (Johann Scholl 2021). For the hosts, however, the Brazilian experience demonstrated the benevolence of Portuguese colonization, which, in the case of African territories, could be prolonged to benefit the development of the colonies. In any case, for the Brazilian government, the debate on decolonization should be held considering Portugal’s purposes, a vision repeatedly defended in bilateral dialogues and in multilateral fora, despite the well-known risk of international isolation.7

The presence of the African leader and the references to decolonization made several times during his stay brought to the fore assessments about the influence of Africa in Brazil, and the role of African Brazilians in the local society. In this aspect, the disagreements were made converge for political gains. Invariably, Brazilian authorities highlighted the exemplary aspect of Brazilian miscegenation, which would have allowed the country to create a society free from systematic prejudices. Even Senghor did not fail to welcome the Brazilian model in a likely effort to please the hosts and build the argument in favour of decolonization.

In addition to moments of rhetoric contention and reaffirmations of Brazilian racial harmony, the visit was an opportunity for the Senegalese president to invite Brazil to FESMAN in Dakar.

The festival

The proposal to hold a Black Arts Festival is intrinsically related to the intellectual and political trajectory of Leopold Senghor, both intimately connected with Negritude. The movement originated in France during the interwar period had in Aime Césaire (from Martinique), León Damas (from French Guiana) and in Senghor himself, its founders, and initial promoters. The denouncement of racism added to the pursuit of an aesthetic and epistemological revaluation of African art and thought were distinctive features of the movement. With regard specifically to Senghor’s contribution, of interest here, Janice Spleth proposed its dissection into three moments: an initial phase(in 1930s and 1940s), which corresponds to the identification of colonialism and racism and the affirmation of ‘Africanité’ as an anti-colonial identity; a second phase (corresponding to the period between the Second World War and Senegalese independence), when Senghor’s Negritude would focus more directly on the need to conquer political autonomy, albeit with an emphasis on the cultural identity of new independent nations; finally, in the 1960s, for Senghor, Negritude would become an instrument for what he conceived as the cultural development of the new country. In this third phase, Senghor began to explicitly vindicate the complementarity between what he identified as the cultural values ​​of Africa and Europe. From his vantage point, such complementarity would allow Negritude to reach the ‘Civilisation de l’Universel,’ a horizon in which different cultural expressions and philosophical aspects of humanity would connect (Spleth 1985, p. 21-27).

It is fair to argue that, throughout its different expressions, the culturalist emphasis of Senghorian Negritude weakened the denunciation of more material aspects of colonial domination (Hountondji 1996: 160). When formulating his version of Negritude, Senghor focused on the indispensable reassessment and positive appraisement of African cultures. However, regarding the economic implications of imperialism on several opportunities, including in Brazil, he would even risk a positive evaluation (O Globo 1964).

It is equally pertinent to criticize that when seeking to outline an African epistemology complementary to European epistemology, Senghor neglected specificities of different African cultures in the name of a condensed conception of Negritude, that, throughout history, has been more beneficial to non-Africans than to Africans themselves (Rabaka 2015: 204). In other words, it is possible to claim that the essentialism of Senghorian Negritude described the African culture as an immanent unity, a reduction akin to that used by the colonizers themselves to construct the African ‘Other.’ Insofar as it restricted the relevance of historical dynamics in its conceptualization, Senghorian Negritude posed a permanent challenge to the description of the reaction to external violence as a central feature in the emergence of Pan-Africanism.

However, even if Senghor wanted to control the aesthetic and political options of the event, and there is no evidence to demonstrate this, the very scale of FESMAN meant the diffusion of different perspectives on African identity, artistic production, and the relations between the African populations of the continent and the diaspora. Thirty African countries and six non-African countries with large diasporas – Brazil, USA, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, France, and the United Kingdom – sent more than 2,500 artists to Dakar to participate in almost a month of presentations (Murphy 2016). In addition to the main event, the Black Art Exhibition, theatre, dance, and music had specific sessions. In parallel to the artistic presentations, there was a colloquium entitled ‘Function and Meaning of Black Art in the Life of the People and for the People.’

Despite the extensive participation of African and diaspora artists, personalities such as James Baldwin, Sidney Poitier, and Harry Belafonte boycotted the festival in protest against the excessive emphasis on Negritude, considered an accomplice of French neocolonialism for the reasons pointed out above. The criticism of the movement even involved event participants, such as Wole Soyinka and Katherine Dunham, who declared that the concept of Negritude was meaningless. The organization, set up around official representations of the invited countries, prevented the participation of liberation movements active on the African continent, reinforcing the festival’s official character. Most flagrantly, FESMAN ignored the military coups in Congo and Ghana in late 1965 and early 1966, just a few months before the Festival held in April 1966 (Adi 2018: 192).

Notwithstanding the risk that FESMAN’s political profile could be reduced, the size and ambition of the Festival transformed it into a unique event in the process of building a transnational black identity. The intensification of the connection among different cultures in the African continent and the diaspora highlighted the shared experience of racialization and, therefore, oppression (McEachrane 2020: 232). Thus, it became an opportunity for the ‘performance’ of shared identity and a milestone in the permanent production/reproduction of pan-African identity (Hall 2018: 235). By bringing Africans from the continent and the diaspora closer together, FESMAN generated space for the historical exchange of the ‘vertices of continuity and rupture’ around which, to Hall, pan-African identity is organized (Hall 2018: 226).

Brazil’s participation in FESMAN

Senghor’s invitation to participate in the Festival was accepted by the Brazilian government and led to the constitution of a specific commission to define the characteristics of the country’s delegation and choose the artists who would go to Dakar. For the group’s presidency, MRE appointed Clarival do Prado Valladares, research assistant to Gilberto Freyre at the beginning of his academic career and collaborator of the writer from Pernambuco in the magazine Cadernos Brasileiros. In his analysis of Valladares’ work, Menezes Neto argues that Freyre’s influence on Valladares is noticeable in his denial of the existence of racism in Brazilian cultural production and in defence that Afro-Brazilian art could embrace blacks and whites (Menezes Neto 2018). Therefore, his vision of Afro-Brazilian art was ‘guided by the perspective of integration and cultural amalgamation’ (Menezes Neto 2018: 70), a conviction that he applied methodically in forming the Brazilian delegation to FESMAN.

The commission, originally composed of five members, one Afro-Brazilian and four white people, was the first object of complaints from Senegal’s ambassador in Brazil, Henri Senghor (Leopold Senghor’s nephew and also a member of the commission). For Henri, the commission should have had only black members. According to an interview carried out by Jerry Dávila with Waldir Freitas de Oliveira, another member of the commission, the tension caused a vigorous discussion between Henri Senghor and Raymundo Souza Dantas, former Brazilian ambassador to Ghana and the only black person in the original composition of the Brazilian commission. When exchanging insults, Henri accused Souza Dantas of being a degenerate ‘black man’. In response, Souza Dantas clarified that he was not a ‘black Brazilian’, but a ‘Brazilian black’, clarifying how he organized his overlapping identities (Dávila 2010: 131).

The commission’s makeup was just one of the elements that demonstrated the difference of opinion between the Brazilian government’s proposal for participation in FESMAN and the expectations of its organizers. The root of this divergence was in the conception itself, defended by the commission, of what ‘black Brazilian art’ meant. On at least two occasions, Henri Senghor’s protests led the MRE to express discontent to the Brazilian Embassy in Dakar. At the peak of disagreements, the chancellery hinted at the possibility that Brazil would withdraw from participating in the festival.8

When reporting on Brazilian participation after the festival, Waldir Freitas de Oliveira clearly explained the principle that guided the selection of artists and works that travelled to FESMAN:

Oliveira’s clarification explains the link between the Brazilian commission’s proposals and the notion of regenerative miscegenation, a pillar of the idea of ​​racial democracy in general associated with the work by Gilberto Freyre. In his two most important works, ‘Casa Grande e Senzala’ (1933) and ‘Sobrados e Mocambos’ (1936), the writer from Pernambuco, without denying the trauma and oppression of the relationship between enslavers and enslaved people, sought to describe the formation of a society in which tension between whites and blacks was replaced by benevolent fusion:

In the 1920s, even before Freyre’s contributions, the idea that Brazil’s population was an original racial synthesis had already begun to spread. While it could be mistaken for the valorisation of racial mixing, it also contemplated the elimination of the uncomfortable ‘black element’ through its absorption into a new expression that, as Oliveira elucidated, could allude to the African past but should not be subordinated to it. In 1966, however, the positive assessment of racial relations was far from unanimous in Brazil. Since the 1950s, critical analysis of Freyre’s work had multiplied, drawing attention to the reality of racial discrimination in Brazil.9

The formation of the delegation that would go to FESMAN forced the MRE to participate in the discussion about the role Afro-Brazilians played in national society and the African diaspora. According to the prevailing official vision, integration should only occur with the renunciation of African collective identity. It was about symbolically separating black Brazilians, in a presumed process of redemptive miscegenation, from the African diaspora. That was the meaning of Souza Dantas’ statement when he subordinated the fact of being black to his Brazilianness. That was also what the selection of artists who would represent Brazil expressed: there were white and black people with varying degrees of African influences, from strong to the most tenuous– including bossa nova.10

Those responsible for the configuration of the Brazilian delegation tacitly indicated that if all Brazilian artistic expressions carry African influence in some way, no art produced in Brazil could be specifically considered of African origin. Brazil’s presence at FESMAN sought to refute, under the sign of an imaginary mestizo Brazilianness and even resorting to Afro-Brazilian artists, the relevance of artistic manifestations with African roots for Brazilian society at that time.

Against the delegation’s configuration in those terms, Abdias Nascimento, at that time leader of TEN, stood up in an open letter to the festival participants. Dissatisfied with the methods of selection that excluded, among other groups, the participation of TEN, Nascimento warned that the delegation ‘represents a non-significant sample of the exact situation occupied by blacks in the territory of the arts in Brazil’ (Nascimento 1966: 98). The letter also highlighted that the most active members of the black artistic community were not consulted or invited by the commission. Nascimento pointed out the interest in presenting a whitened people as a way of preventing ‘[B]lack Brazilians from embracing their Blackness’ (Nascimento 1966: 98). Elsewhere, Nascimento attacked Itamaraty, to which he attributed a racist attitude that would transcend the context of dictatorial government (Nascimento 1966: 101). Finally, he emphasized that black Brazilians would only have access to integration and social mobility at the cost of accepting acculturation and assimilation (Nascimento 1966: 103). Years later, when he was prevented from participating in the second World Festival of Black Arts (FESTAC) in 1977, in Lagos, Abdias Nascimento would once again denounce the contradiction between Brazilian reality and the ‘racial image projected internationally’ (Nascimento [1978] 2016: 91).

During FESMAN, Nascimento’s letter was circulated in the Senegalese weekly ‘L’Unité Africaine’, published by Senghor’s party. It was also published in the French periodical ‘Présence Africaine’, an icon of the Negritude movement. In his indignation, Brazil’s ambassador in Dakar speculated that Henri Senghor was involved in translating and disseminating the letter.¹¹ In Brazil, congressman Hamilton Nogueira read Nascimento’s letter in the House of Representatives.12

To understand the importance of this controversy, one must bear in mind that there were available theoretical and political approaches to object to the dilution of Afro-Brazilian identity. The commission, established by the Brazilian government and advised by the MRE, could rely on elements of criticism to revaluate its position, but deliberately chose to promote an image of a country defined by acculturation. Analyses of that decision have highlighted the interest in the international promotion of racial democracy (Dávila 2010: 132; Dietrich 2014: 110; Oliveira 2020: 74). However, little progress has been made in explaining the devotion in promoting this disputable myth. Without mentioning such reasons, the promotion of racial democracy by the MRE presents as an almost natural positioning, the only possible course of action for Brazilian diplomacy.

Structural motivations, it is argued, may allow a more precise understanding of the causes of MRE’s attachment to the thesis of racial democracy and its external promotion. The multiplication of political and academic criticism to racial democracy assumptions allows disregarding the possibility that it was a unanimous position. Support for Portuguese colonialism, in turn, was not necessarily a beneficiary of the stubborn defence. As Senghor realized, the presumed success of racial coexistence in Brazil could be applied to contend for decolonization. Even though it can explain emphases, the dictatorship in power in 1966 does not work either as an explanation, given the repeated use of the Brazilian racial idyll before and after 1964, as well as in different phases of the dictatorship itself (Braga and Milani 2019; Nascimento 2016; Dávila 2010; Saraiva 1996).

As indicated above, the article suggests that the FESMAN episode illustrates the racist strategic selectivity of the State that, through a discursive reference, racial democracy, provided the organization and reproduction of Brazilian capitalism, in which racism takes on distinctive and necessary forms. In developing such a characterization, it is necessary to approach the relationship between racism, capitalism, and the State and how this relationship took place in Brazil in the first half of the 20th century.

Racism, capitalism, and the role of the state

The extensive debate regarding the role of racism in the formation and reproduction of capitalism is rooted in the variety of approaches Marx himself made regarding the issue. The core of the Marxian work, composed of publications edited by himself during his lifetime, dedicates, in proportional terms, little space for evaluations of the phenomenon. The most purely theoretical part of Volume I of Capital mentions slavery and colonialism without going into an in-depth analysis. Chapter 8, on the working day, gives indications that have been used in the discussions about the relationship between the reproduction of capital and racial and gender differences. The final chapters of the first volume, when focusing on primitive accumulation, explore in greater detail the relationship between modern slavery and the historical formation of capitalism. It is the link between racism and capitalism more comprehensively elaborated in Volume I (Fraser 2016).

Still considering the works edited by Marx, the mentions of slavery and pre-capitalist societies in the Communist Manifesto describe the historical process sequentially, enabling the understanding that the course of a history divided into stages would resolve the incompatibility between slavery and the consolidation of capitalism.

The references, often indirect, to racism in that set of contributions are completed by more frequent mentions of the issue in many of Marx’s works published ‘postmortem’ and in the voluminous journalistic production (Anderson 2016). In press articles on the Irish question and on the American Civil War, Marx offered different analyses of the relationship between capitalism and racism. When approaching the Civil War in the USA, his attention turned to the effects of slavery on worker mobilization, as in a letter to François Lafargue when commenting on the victory of the Republican Party in the elections of 1866: ‘The workers in the North have finally understood very well that labour in the white skin can never free itself as long as labour in the black skin is branded’ (Marx/Engels Collected Works (hereafter MECW) 42: 334). Regarding almost directly, he highlighted, at another time, the interdependence between industrial activity and the maintenance of slavery, suggesting their complementarity:

In the evaluations of the Irish question, the analysis of what today would be called the racialization of a group becomes clearer. In the case of Ireland, the construction of hierarchized difference would have enabled the expropriation of Irish peasants, impoverished generation after generation:

Engels, in turn, clearly pointed out the super-exploitation of the Irish proletariat and its role in containing the wages of the English proletariat (Engels [1845] 2008: 110 and 126). It was up to Marx, already in 1869, to observe, in ‘Confidential Communication’ of the General Council of the International, that the division between English and Irish workers was consciously manipulated: ‘The common English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers wages (…) This antagonism among the proletarians of England is artificially nourished and kept up by the bourgeoisie’ (MECW 21: 119). The finding caused him to change his position on the Irish question, moving from advocating action joint effort of English and Irish workers to defending the separation of the two countries as inevitable and desirable for the unfolding emancipation of the British proletariat as a whole (Anderson 2016: 126).

The differences in perspective offered by Marx when he deals with the matter led Anderson to detect a transformation in the German philosopher’s vision over the years (Anderson 2016: 243-44). On the other hand, Go argues that the difference does not result from a change in the understanding of the subject but rather from the approach at different levels of abstraction. While the theory of capital would hold little space for consideration of the role of racism, the theory of capitalism would be more abundant in its description (Go 2021: 42-43). Less than exclusive, the positions seem complementary. It is noticeable that when Marx raises the levels of abstraction, considerations about the role of construction and exploration of racial differences rarefy. At the same time, Anderson’s observation that between the Manifest, from 1848, and the French edition of Capital, from 1872, the last supervised by the author, there is a notable incorporation of reflections on the mutual influences between ‘class, ethnicity, race and nationalism’ is well-grounded (Anderson 2016: 244).

The most relevant discussion here concerns the role racism plays in the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production (CMP). The question to be faced is whether such a role is necessary or merely contingent. One of the moments in which reflection gained tangible contours was in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. In that context, understanding whether there was a possibility of overcoming ‘apartheid’ without changing the capitalist structure was decisive in choosing the steps to take in the fight against the Afrikaner regime. Those circumstances brought to light the concept of ‘racial capitalism’ that would later be adopted and popularized by Cedric Robinson (Al-Bulushi 2022).

For Robinson, nationalism and racism not only preceded the emergence of capitalism in Western Europe but were exacerbated by it (Robinson [1983] 2000: 59). The spread of racism among European societies would thus precede the ‘incorporation of Africans, Asians, and New World peoples in the world system that emerged from late feudalism and merchant capitalism’ (Robinson [1983] 2000: 67). In its new guise, the old racism would have enabled the ‘construct of Negro, [that] unlike the terms ‘African,’ ‘Moor’ or ‘Ethiope’ suggested no situatedness in time, that is history, or space [...]’ (Robinson [1983] 2000: 81). When describing the historical and essential relationship between racism and capitalism, Robinson highlights that such an original connection precluded the European epistemology from understanding the racist nature of capitalism. Acknowledging the relationship between the two would only have been made possible by the dialogue between Marxist orthodoxy and the victims of double oppression, racial and classist (Kelley 2000), an issue that Robinson places at the heart of the emergence of black Marxism based on the contributions of names such as Du Bois, C.L.R. James, and Richard Wright. For Robinson, another contribution of black Marxism would be to counter the perception emanating from the first works of Marx and Engels, particularly the Communist Manifesto, that the affirmation of bourgeois society would condense the diversity of social contradictions into class contradictions. In the opposite direction, black Marxism would advocate that at the heart of the historical origin of CMP would be the multiplication of differences rather than homogenization. From that point on, the expansion of capitalism would have continued to promote differentiation instead of promoting the grouping of interests (Bhattacharyya 2018: 11).

The creation of difference by the CMP is the object of Lisa Lowe’s attention when studying the political culture of Asian immigrants in the USA (Lowe 1996). In dialogue with the concept of abstract work and addressing American history, Lowe argues that capital obtains gains not through the creation of abstract labour but, in the opposite direction, through the ‘social production of difference’ (Lowe 1996: 26-28) regarding race, gender, or nationality. The socially produced difference offers the capital the possibility of exploring the fragmentation of the working class. For Lebowitz, the division acts to prevent wage gains from following productivity gains (Lebowitz 2006: 39). Called by the author ‘factor x’, the degree of antagonism that develops from differences would be ‘an essential aspect of the logic of capital’ (Lebowitz 2006: 39). Lebowitz goes further and states that more than productivity alone, the relationship between productivity and divisions among workers is vital for the expansion of capital.

Racism would allow both operations. The ‘magic formula’ would be made possible by the supposed historical basis claimed by racism, combined with the ‘extreme flexibility’ (Balibar and Wallerstein [1988] 1991: 33) of the outlines of the groups that are victims of discrimination. In the authors’ words, ‘[T]he constant redrawing of these boundaries (...) takes the form of the creation and constant recreation of racial and/or ethnic-national-religious groups or communities.” (Balibar and Wallerstein [1988] 1991: 34) This variable extension gives rise, in concrete conditions, to the increase or decrease of the contingent that receives the smallest remuneration and performs the least coveted functions and of the group that is socialized to carry out those works. Inclusion in the variable-length subordinate group offers, still, justification for inequalities that cannot be assimilated by meritocratic predication (Balibar and Wallerstein [1988] 1991: 34). Wallerstein observes that ‘[T]he combination of universalism-meritocracy as the basis [that] legitimate the system and racism-sexism serving to structure the majority of the workforce works very well’ (Balibar and Wallerstein [1988] 1991: 35). The evident contradiction between ‘ideological structures’, universalism, and racism-sexism, is at the basis of a delicate balance, which is at risk every time one of the structures tries to gain space from the other.

Wallerstein’s analysis sheds light on the fact that the CMP is justified by universalism, but it is strengthened by the operation of difference. The movements of contraction and expansion of capitalism demand, however, the demarcation of difference to be mobile, which requires the rationale behind inequality to be subject to continuous review and recreation.

To explore the intrinsic relationship between racism and the reproduction of capital, Fraser suggests the inclusion of expropriation among forms of accumulation (Fraser 2016). Fraser remembers that Marx sought to reveal the dimension of labour exploitation that is hidden beneath the appearance of free labour hiring (Fraser 2016: 166). The author proposes the inclusion of yet another level of examination in order to encompass expropriation, which works ‘[C]onfiscating capacities and resources and conscripting them into capital’s circuits of self-expansion’ (Fraser 2016: 167). In addition to the historical relationship between capitalism and expropriation, Fraser underscores a more structural connection when she states that ‘[E]xpropriation cheapens the cost of reproducing labour power and thus of wages. In effect, it increases the rate of exploitation and counters the tendency of the rate of profit to fall’ (Fraser 2016: 168). The reduction in the cost of reproduction of labour would be achieved, among other methods, by not remunerating the activities necessary for that reproduction, by expropriation, enslavement, and by preventing access to formally universalized rights. Fraser differentiates the expropriation in the CMP of mere ‘plunder’, recurrent in history, since expropriation presupposes that the resources taken from the expropriated are incorporated into the circuit of capital accumulation (Fraser 2016: 167).13

Regarding the inclusion of expropriation among forms of exploitation, Fraser refers to relations different from those carried out in primitive accumulation (Fraser 2016: 168). The understanding that the expropriation would allow the ignition of the CMP, which, then, would expand through forms of exploitation regulated by contract and based on wages, is refused by the author, for whom expropriation is a permanent process.

Similarly, Fontes advances the concept of ‘disposals or secondary expropriations’ (Fontes 2010: 54), which would go beyond the appropriation of the means of production, exacerbating the forms of extracting surplus value. Expropriation, therefore, ‘[F]ar from stabilizing, deepens and becomes generalized with capitalist expansion’ (Fontes 2010: 45) and develops different configurations. When comparing the authors’ conclusions, it should be noted that for Fraser, the main object is the definition of the subjects of permanent expropriation, while for Fontes, the central issue are the modes of ‘secondary expropriation.’

Racialization would be one of the forms, and, alongside the social construction of gender¹⁴, the most dominant, to define which subjects would be susceptible to expropriation. Drawing the racial line would validate the separation between those subject to exploitation but entitled to some degree of protection and those on whom lies the strongest possibility of straightforward usurpation, even of labour power, whether through enslavement or other forms of brutal appropriation. Fraser emphasizes that the two categories, ‘exploitable’ and ‘expropriable,’ are mutually constituted and adds that the State has a primary role in establishing the limits between groups. She draws attention, however, to the different combinations of exploitation and expropriation in concrete reality, in which they can overlap in an almost indiscernible way, as in the case of the current advanced industrial societies.

The group of discussions presented converges on two points. Firstly, the understanding that the construction of difference, whether in terms of race or gender, opens spaces for the operationalization of overexploitation, the division of the working class, and the submission to expropriation, movements necessary for the magnification of surplus value and for the reproduction and expansion of the CMP. Secondly, hierarchical differentiations, such as racism, are located at the junction between economic reproduction, political domination, and the ideological framework, and their partial framing in only one of those dimensions is insufficient. Due to this multidimensional characteristic, the State is the privileged arena for conserving and reorganizing structures of differentiation and hierarchization.

To address the relationship between the State and racism, it is imperative to delineate an explanatory frame for the role of the State in the organization of the CMP. Among Marxist theorists, Nicos Poulantzas became one of the most influential proponents of formulations on the constitution and action of the State in capitalist societies. For him, the State, understood as more extensive than its legal definition and than the State apparatus, is the materialization of social relations founded in the relations of production (Poulantzas [1978] 2014) and, dialectically, ‘[P]lays a decisive role in the relations of production and the class struggle, entering into their constitution and, hence, their reproduction.’ (Poulantzas [1978] 2014: 35). To challenge the conception of the State as an empty receptacle of the guidelines assigned by the ruling class or as an all-powerful instance that hovers over class-based society, Poulantzas insists on the essential relationship between the economic, political, and ideological regions of the CMP. Based on that relationship, it is impossible to imagine the political and ideological as exterior, or consecutive in time, to the economic dimension (Poulantzas [1978] 2014: 16). More than that, the different modes of production are the sources of the boundaries between such regions, an assumption that rules out specific essences of the different regions. For not being only a social relationship but the materialization of social relationships, the State also has its own ‘opacity and resistance,’ meaning that, despite reflecting the power relations between classes, it does not do so automatically (Poulantzas [1978] 2014: 130).

Precisely the constitutive identification between production relations and political power leads the State, based on clashes and positionings guided by the strategic selectivity of actors and making use of its relative autonomy, to act as organizer of class fractions so as to guarantee the long-term interest of the power block, even against immediate and specific interests. In parallel, the State acts to disorganize the dominated classes (Hall [1980] 2014: ix; Jessop 1999: 48).

The notion of the State as a materialization of social relations based on capitalist relations of production, in which the construction of hierarchical difference plays a necessary role, allows the apprehension of how racism and the State can co-constitute, with racism integrating the foundational elements of the State and being reproduced and reconstituted by it. It is always present, in such a way, in the organization of social relations promoted by the State (Almeida 2019: 111). Racism is part of the structures that inscribe strategic selectivities in the State ‘[T]hat differentially rewards actions that are compatible with the recursive reproduction of the structure(s) in question’ (Jessop 1999: 54). The strategic selectivity inscribed in the state fabric privileges certain actions, which in turn are structuring, that is, responsible for the conservation or alteration of structures, as a reflection of ‘[C]hanging balance of forces operating within, and at a distance from, the state and, perhaps, also trying to transform it (…)’ (Jessop 1999: 54).

Racism, capitalism and racial democracy

The formal suppression of slavery in Brazil intensified the controversy over the role that would be played by formerly enslaved people and by Afro-Brazilians, in general, in the country. The intensification of conflicts between enslaved people, enslavers, and security forces, which led to the formal abolition of slavery, reinforced, among the Brazilian elite, a marked concern with different possibilities of subversion of order (De Azevedo 1987). The extension of social unrest during the post-abolition period fuelled the fear that formal freedom would not satisfy expectations of political integration of the Afro-descendant population. Concerns about effective land ownership persisted based on the fear that significant fractions of the territory began to be controlled by freed communities (Miki 2018). The fear remained that formerly enslaved people would refuse to enter the labour market on the terms imposed by the enslavers converted into employers. It is no coincidence that enforcing wage labour discipline was one of the first tasks of the Republic, established in 1889 (Chaloub 1986).

In a context marked by such concerns, the discussion on ‘what to do with the black,’ which began in the middle of the 18th century (Eisenberg 1987), persisted. The most accepted answer by the beginning of the XX century was that the increase in the entry of European immigrants and the virtual elimination of the slave trade since 1850 would lead to the whitening of the population. This position gained public policy status. In July 1911, in the First International Race Congress, held in London, the director of the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro, João Batista de Lacerda, addressed the public with a speech entitled ‘Sur le Métis au Brésil’ in which he estimated as a hundred years the period necessary for the complete disappearance of blacks, Indians and mestizos of the Brazilian population (Lacerda 1911: 30).¹⁵ The deadline was contested as optimistic, but the principle survived.

The confidence in the progressive whitening of the population was related to the myth that slavery did not result in racial prejudice in Brazil, based on the belief in the relative benevolence of slavery in the Iberian empires and their tendency towards miscegenation (Caldeira and Feros 2019; Hanchard 1998: 44). Since the abolition debates, the argument was current (Skidmore 1974: 23). Later, the notion of racial democracy would recycle the myth of the non-existence of prejudice, this time not as a path to whitening, but as a basis for miscegenation. The forecast miscegenation could even receive a positive sign, provided that it would result in the apparent dissolution of differences in a hegemonically white and Western cultural model. Both Abdias Nascimento and Kabengele Munanga identify the exaltation of miscegenation as a continuation of the attempt at whitening and equally ‘genocidal’ and ‘ethnocidal’ (Nascimento [1978] 2016: 96; Munanga [1999] 2019: 111).

It should be highlighted that the obvious link between racism and slavery and its prolongation beyond abolition does not mean that it should be interpreted as a mere persistence of the period that ended in 1888. Over the post-abolition years, racism acquired new contours and became adapted to emerging relations of production while simultaneously helping to shape them. For example, at the beginning of the 20th century, a time of numerous worker organization initiatives, racism acted as a wedge between workers in different social movements (Maram 1977: 258; 1979: 220), making clear its demobilizing features.

The emergence of the expression racial democracy is the subject of discussions that go beyond the scope of this article. It is true that it is not part of Gilberto Freyre’s principal works and will only be used by the author from Pernambuco after 1950. What matters, however, is that a certain positive character to miscegenation was consolidated in the transition of the 1920s to the 1930s (Skidmore 1985: 13). At that moment, it was usual the segmentation of the concept of democracy through adjectivation, in line with the weakening of the original meaning of political participation (Guimarães 2002). Terms like ‘economic democracy’ and ‘social democracy’ also formed part of the lexicon of the period. Regardless of the expressions used, Freyre’s significant contribution was to consolidate and disseminate the conception that, given characteristics of the colonization process and the Portuguese colonizer, Brazil had a unique system of race relations in which prejudice was not systematic. Furthermore, there would be no racial limits to social mobility, and cultural and biological miscegenation would be intense and continuous.

The versatility of the idea of ​​racial democracy helps to explain its full integration into the strategic field of the State and its prolonged reorganization and repetition through the combination of selective structures and strategically oriented actions (Jessop 2016: 55). Although the nostalgic aspect of Freyre’s work is often highlighted, his memorialist ethnography produced a systematization of Brazilian racial fantasy that connected symbiotically with the development of dependent capitalism. The praise of miscegenation, relegating the claim to racism to the private sphere, allowed formal equality to receive an ideological basis suitable for covering up the material inequality indispensable for capitalist reproduction. Even though racism continued to be one of the organizers of Brazilian society, the equality stated in the letter of the law found in the notion of racial democracy its ideological complement, distorting reality, and bringing it closer to the legal abstraction. While it emulated the commodification of labour, it enabled the maintenance of overexploitation.

The insistence on miscegenation also established an ideological curb on identifying Afro-descendants as a specific population group, reducing their demand for power. After direct repression during the ‘Estado Novo’ (1937-1945), the black movement faced in the democratic period, between 1946 and 1964, routine accusations of ‘reverse racism’ and anti-patriotism for insisting on exposing a conflict that would not exist officially. Through testimonies from activists of the period, Elisa Larkin Nascimento describes the difficulties of mobilizing due to accusations of racism (Nascimento 2007: 152).16

The emphasis on Brazilian exceptionality also limited the scope of dialogue with transnational movements, such as Negritude and different Pan-Africanisms. Following the obstacles to the discussion about Afro-Brazilian identity, discussions about the insertion of the Afro-Brazilian population into the African diaspora were also obstructed. As described, what can be noticed in the organization of the Brazilian delegation to FESMAN is the intention of refuting the connections between Afro-Brazilians and the African diaspora. In 1966, the denial of identity was likely consciously applied to restrict, as much as possible, tighter bonds between Afro-Brazilian militancy, African anti-colonial movements, and Afro-American mobilization, which was still on the rise. From another perspective, Larkin Nascimento indicates that the successful international diffusion of Brazilian exceptionalism diminished among international actors the interest in including Afro-Brazilian groups among participants in the debate about shared identities: ‘The presumption is that blacks in Brazil are in a unique situation determined solely by the circumstances of their society and have little or nothing in common with black populations in other parts of the world’ (Nascimento 2007: 6). It should be highlighted that, despite representing a heavy obstacle, the dissemination of exceptionality has never been able to eliminate efforts to build transnational ties, through initiatives of black movements in Brazil or abroad. In the 1930s, the Chicago Herald, the most prominent newspaper of the US black press, closely followed, for example, the activities of the Brazilian Black Front (FNB) due to the attention the organization attracted in the Afro-Atlantic space (Domingues 2013: 209). Petrônio Domingues narrates, in the same vein, the commitment of Associação Cultural do Negro (ACN), between 1955 and 1964, to participate in the international production of Pan-Africanism in the Americas, Africa, and Europe and to take a stance on issues of transnational scope, such as the struggle for civil rights in the USA and resistance to South African ‘apartheid’ (Domingues 2018).

The international presumption that relations between whites and blacks in Brazil could offer solutions to countries where the conflict was more visible, such as the USA and South Africa, led UNESCO to fund, from 1950 onwards, a study on the racial issue in Brazil. Initially planned to be restricted to Bahia, the research was extended to Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Recife (Mêtreaux 1952: 6; Maio 1999: 144-45). Contrary to expectations, the results of the academic investigation highlighted a reality of multifaceted and deep-rooted prejudice in the areas researched (Nascimento 2007: 49). The UNESCO project brought to light works by Florestan Fernandes and Oracy Nogueira on the subject, with innovations from the point of methodology and conclusions. In the case of Fernandes, his research would culminate in his chair thesis, ‘A Integração do Negro na Sociedade de Classes’, which would profoundly influence the research conducted by the so-called ‘São Paulo School of Sociology’ on the racial issue in Brazil. Fernandes’ initial approach, which recognized racism as an archaism that the development of capitalist relations would tend to resolve (Fernandes [1955] 2021), was later the target of critics who observed the intrinsic relationship between the history of Brazilian capitalism and racism, that constituted and updated mutually (Hasenbalg 1979). Even so, the research by Fernandes and the ‘São Paulo School’ allowed the creation of an academic repertoire critical of the notion of racial democracy. The influence of the UNESCO project would reach the study of Southern Brazil, with the publication in 1960 of ‘Cor e Mobilidade Social em Florianópolis’ by Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Octavio Ianni, the result of a research financed by INEP/CAPES (Maio 1999: 152).

The examples mentioned show how, from the 1920s onwards, the set of ideas grouped under the label of racial democracy functioned as an organizing factor for the power bloc by integrating the ideological, political, and economic regions of the CMP and a disorganizing factor for the dominated classes. Racial democracy represented a discursive reference (Heigl 2011: 183 et passim) that mediated the formulation and enforcement of racist policies and decisions privileged by the strategic selectivity inscribed in the State (Jessop 2007: 36). The longevity of the myth was due to its multiple functions and its conceptual malleability, which allowed different intellectual currents and historical contexts to rearrange its vague contents repeatedly. The presumed exceptionality and exemplarity of Brazilian miscegenation served to both Gilberto Freyre, in defending Portuguese colonialism under the title of Luso-Tropicalism, and Darcy Ribeiro to forecast the formation of a ‘New Rome’ (Ribeiro [1995] 2015). The reference to racial democracy not only masked racism but encouraged it, whether through the weakening of mobilization around the causes of the Afro-descendant population or due to denial of the need for actions to mitigate the consequences of discrimination.

Racial democracy, as a notion, was not only defined, but also strengthened in parallel with the incipient process of industrialization and the formation of a diversified capitalist economy in Brazil. If, in its initial phases, Brazilian industrialization could be supplied only by the contingents of immigrants, periods of more accelerated expansion required the mobilization of workers hitherto linked to the less dynamic sectors of production (Kowarick 1987: 107). At that moment, and in the constant fluctuations of the industrialization movement, whether during import substitution industrialization or, later, during the process of association with transnational monopoly capital, racial democracy presented itself as an instrument for the necessary manipulation of the limits of overexploitation and expropriation, in the format described in the section ‘Racism, Capitalism and the Role of the State.’ The incorporation of racial democracy into the repertoire of discursive references that mediate strategic selectivities of the State corresponded, in this way, to the development of new relations of production and allowed the reorganization of racism in terms compatible with the new emerging relations.

Brazil’s participation in FESMAN was, therefore, an episode of the cyclical process in which a structure, in this case, racism, originated from the relations of production, creates a strategic selectivity that, mediated (Jessop 2016: 10) by a discursive reference, tends to steer policies and orientate decisions of actors positioned in the State, who, with their actions, to some extent affect the structures of the relations of production, reconstituting and reconfiguring them. The decision regarding the terms of participation in FESMAN, instead of being merely an option on the Brazilian image projected internationally, was integrated into the social production of difference, in which racism plays a central role and is inseparable from the reproduction of capital.

Conclusion

Construction, hierarchization, and exploration of differences within the working class intensifies the reproduction of capital. Differentiation and discrimination in terms of race and gender work efficiently to intensify the extraction of surplus value within the scope of exploitation and to draw the lines that separate exploitation from expropriation. The process acquires specific characteristics in different historical contexts.

In Brazil and other colonies of Iberian countries, the purported exceptionality of the relationship between enslavers and enslaved people was a recurring topic throughout the colonization and Empire. Between the 1920s and 1930s, the racist selectivity of the State began to adopt racial democracy as a discursive reference to the benign system of race relations, in which there would be no systematic prejudice and miscegenation, and social mobility would be current.

Individual or collective actors within the State apparatus have, throughout history, resorted to the topic of the exceptionality of racial relations and, from the 1920s onwards, more specifically, to racial democracy, to develop and put into practice strategies linked to the strengthening, and reorganization of racism in the relations of production. It is possible to say that the studies promoted by UNESCO from 1951 onwards and the development of the São Paulo School throughout 1950-1960 offered new discursive references to the actors located in the State apparatus, references that may or may not have been integrated into their strategically oriented actions.

However, Senghor’s visit in 1964 showed that racial democracy continued to be privileged as a means to formulate and justify the mobilization of the State apparatus and the State as a whole. The situation did not change until 1966. Brazilian participation at FESMAN was a conscious and combative defence of Brazilian exceptionalism against internal and external mobilizations that demanded a change in the MRE’s position. The MRE’s performance in the FESMAN episode went beyond the interest in promoting a particular image abroad. Instead, it obeyed the racist strategic selectivity inscribed in the State. The predominance of that strategic selectivity was thus incorporated into the continuous cycle of reconstitution of racism required for the reproduction of Brazilian capitalism.

Prospectively, what is suggested is, firstly, that, given the characteristics of the Brazilian social formation, strategic selectivities of the State based on racism should be incorporated as potentially determining elements of foreign policy formulation. Secondly, the degree of racism in MRE’s actions should be evaluated based on the actors’ positioning in the strategic field shaped by selectivities and on the discursive references that form foreign policy orientation.

This article proposes the analysis of an episode that reveals the racist strategic selectivity of the State apparatus and, more specifically, of the MRE. As a result of a structural arrangement, such selectivity presumably manifests itself in other contexts. It would be helpful in the discussion about the connection, in Brazil, between capitalism, racism, and foreign policy in the research periods in which the country internationally adopted a critical position on colonialism and, allegedly, on racism, such as the ‘Política Externa Independente,’ the ‘Pragmatismo Responsável’ and during the diplomatic action following re-democratization. Attention to racism as a structure defining strategic selectivities may similarly allow for a more accurate understanding of the motivations and results of Brazilian foreign policy towards the African continent, usually targeted by fierce internal scrutiny.

Acknowledgements

The opinions expressed here are personal and do not necessarily reflect those of the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The author would also like to express his gratitude for the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

Notes

Acknowledgements

The opinions expressed here are personal and do not necessarily reflect those of the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The author would also like to express his gratitude for the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

References

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