Slavery and Modes of Production in Brazil

Abstract

No other problem so obsesses Brazilian Marxists working in the social sciences nowadays as the characterization and analysis of modes of production. The problem is doubly important. On the one hand, it represents the Brazilian equivalent of what Marx studied in Capital, the evolution of a mode of production, the central historical process, to which all other historical phenomena relate in a more or less dependent way. On the other hand, one's perspective on the problem can have direct consequences for political action: if capitalism arrived only belatedly in Brazil if precapitalist or noncapitalist work relations still predominate in many rural areas then alliances with progressive sectors of the national bourgeoisie should be taken more seriously, and alliances with semifeudal peasants should recognize that the peasants' basic interests may differ from those of the urban proletariat. The books by Gorender and Souza Martins represent two serious efforts to understand modes of production in Brazil. Gorender, a member of the Brazilian Communist Party or Partido Comunista Brasileiro (PCB) since the 1950s, helped found the Partido Comunista Brasileiro Revolucionario (PCBR) in the mid-1960s; this latter party supported urban guerrilla actions, and Gorender spent over a year in jail. He has since written a long book based on hundreds of published sources in which he defends the idea that throughout the period and up until final abolition in 1888, Brazil's dominant mode of production was neither feudalism nor capitalism, but colonial slavery. Gorender devotes a large part of his book to an explanation of five laws of the slavery mode of production those characteristics which differentiate it from other modes of production, and hence justify his thesis. First, the law of monetary income: all the slave's labor, beyond that needed to keep him alive (if not for very long), was converted into monetary income. This distinguished slavery from ancient slavery and also from feudalism, where only a very small portion of the surplus product was commercialized. Because the slave himself earned no money, the slave society had a very