Florestan Fernandes and the criticism of Brazil’s colonial formation

labor, racism and dependent capitalism

Abstract

The work of Florestan Fernandes, specifically focused on the study of race relations between blacks and whites in Brazil, presents strong links with his interpretation of the process of emergence, formation, and consolidation of dependent capitalism. Various criticisms, many of them based on hasty readings that disregard the exact meaning of his theoretical, methodological, and political positions, were erroneously directed at him, leading to mistaken views that Fernandes would have stated the absence of class consciousness in slaves or that capitalist development would automatically lead to the elimination of racism. In this article, the essay A sociedade escravista no Brasil, published as the first chapter of Circuito fechado (1976), will be analyzed, since this work is fundamental to understanding how the slave-owning mode of production fed the nascent Brazilian capitalism. Although posterior to the author’s best-known books on the subject, such as A integração do negro na sociedade de classes (1964), this text reconstitutes more clearly the connections of meaning between slave labour, racial stratification, and the original accumulation that engendered the emergence of capitalist formation in Brazil. This exposition will allow us to deconstruct the misconceptions of the critiques above and recover Florestan Fernandes’ ideas about the dialectical interactions between race and class in dependent capitalism. His theses ultimately lead us to think of the anti-capitalist struggle in Brazil from the confluence of race and class as political poles of the construction of a socialist consciousness by the ensemble of working classes and dispossessed masses.