By JUAN MICHEL MONTEZUMA*

Considerations on the movement for black political autonomy

Since the end of slavery brought about a change in the status of work, making it “free”, black people have faced a long cycle of struggles that can be summarized in the following challenge: the search for political autonomy.

A problem that certainly does not remain in the same terms today in the 21st century, as it was for the first generations of “free” blacks who experienced social immobility, inadequacy to the job market, both due to open racism and the lack of capital necessary to integrate, under the same conditions as poor whites, into the society of wage labor, especially in its most dynamic axes, which would reach levels of incipient industrialization in the first half of the 20th century, even for a peripheral zone of the capitalist interstate system.

Still, even though we are in a relatively different economic context, we have a persistent issue, because even if we consider the imperial caste society as a political construct that has long since disintegrated, replaced in the name of social progress by more democratic forms of organizing political power, the lack of autonomy of black people persists, even in the current political form of national society.

How, then, can we explain this permanence and the apparent contradiction on which it is based? First, as with all historical and sociological problematizations, we need to consider the elements that constitute this framework through diachrony. Thus, subjecting the position of our object, the black people, in the present time to a strangeness. In other words, we need to consider how today, in an era of instant communication and mass participation in public debate, black people can lack autonomy?

Given that our leaders are so rare, our movements are so fragmented, and the bulk of our popular masses are so protected, whether urban or rural, from the Northeast or Southeast, and so on. We need to recognize that these problems are part of a general political movement of our people over time. We need to reframe the problems of the community in terms of historical processes.

Driven by a conflicting cycle of construction and destruction of social mechanisms of political representation, where the architecture of the forms of participation in power never finds in our racial group any creative genius, but rather a supporting subject, soon dominated. Because even without being among the idealizers and reformers of the political regime, the black people are condemned to maintain this order, or form of political supremacy of one class over the others, in order to ensure their minimum vital needs in a dictatorship that does not belong to them.

So, in the dialectic of racism, can we consolidate our position as black citizens, with rights and duties? Yes, why not? As long as we are defenders of a social order, where we have no autonomy, we can paint ourselves and do almost anything we want, except, obviously, challenging the political pact signed by the economic elites and the ruling class.

In the regime of power under which we live, we are free to express our opinions, speak, segregate and make concessions, but we are not free to act without supervision, to lead without supervision or to break away, radicalize and subvert the political form of our social body. This is still, today, an irrevocable right of white people. They are still the masters of our lives in all spheres of social life, responsible for supporting the current organization of political power.

From this perspective, the historical-sociological relations between the political forms of national society and the positions of subordination of our racial group also become clearer. The transformation of one pole does not occur without altering the other. Within this dynamic, if the configuration of the regime changes, whether through a coup as in 1889; 1964 and 2016, a revolution as in 1930, or a “democratic” transition, as occurred in 1985, the political-institutional structure that ensures the stability of the social order is also altered. Obviously, the forms of domination are modified at different rates.

However, there is no doubt that the very conflictual nature of the process embodied in the antagonism of the groups that give the profile of Brazilian social formation, also leads to the modification of the conditions of struggle, thus opening, in the case of the black community, the social space for the development of new types of anti-racist political movements throughout our history.

Even so, if we maintain the consideration that the current state of the black people is one of political fragmentation, we will see, through due historical study of this racial group, that the problem of the lack of political autonomy persists. This can lead us to consolidate the criticism that, although there are transformations in the possibilities of political intervention of the black community, the situation of fragmentation highlights the lack of autonomy in the general framework of the participation of the black community in power.

In this way, the terms of our problem become clearer, as we realize that black political autonomy is possible within the current political regime; it just does not occur in a general manner; it is filtered, monitored and, obviously, restricted to the limits of the bourgeois dictatorship. Therefore, the problem of black political autonomy is the lack of material conditions for the emergence of our people in the political arena as a collective subject conscious of its unity.

Another element that we can better identify when developing this critique, even if incipiently as it is in this brief text, is the discontinuous nature of domination and resistance, as well as the perennial nature of their renewal.

After all, identifying that if domination is historically maintained through conflict, antagonisms that are a set of social tensions between forms of resistance and domination, we can consider that with regard to the problem of black political autonomy, both its defense and attack are in perpetual renewal, but that it can indeed see its founding conditions being exhausted.

In this contradiction between renewal and the finiteness of its capacity for political reproduction, neither racism nor anti-racism are political expressions constructed by anachronistic symbols. No, they simply cannot be, because they are formulas for the struggle for power that are continually renewed in the present, incessantly forming new codes for their dissemination in the here and now, as long as, of course, there are favorable material conditions for the continuity of this process, or in other words, for its probable perpetuation in future scenarios.

Therefore, it is not absurd to say that, when we consider the problem of black political autonomy in movement, the interplay between forms of domination and resistance is not without continuity over time as something given. Obviously, if the conditions of political reproduction are exhausted, one of the poles will win, whether it is the one where the forms of domination or the forms of resistance are produced. In other words, racism may still have a long existence in our history, but the fight against it will not.

So, what are the facts, beyond this real danger, that seek to compel us to reflect throughout this text? It is possible to respond by claiming that perhaps it is the real need of our people to grasp the problem of autonomy, or more precisely the absence of it in community politics, as a general political movement whose articulation we can interpret by understanding history as a process, a form of assimilation of the passing of social time that may have gone out of fashion in academic nominalism, but is still deeply rooted in the relationship of our people with the culture in which they live.

Perhaps also because only by understanding that the state of social reality is a process in motion can those who seek to transform some of its aspects, or the total transformation of society, truly understand where in our past the structural and therefore institutional obstacles in the way of this historic task that is our liberation came from. If our notables do not understand this, we will undoubtedly be defeated in the 21st century, just as we were in the 20th century and in the others that preceded it.

*Juan Michel Montezuma, history teacher in basic and popular education, has a master's degree in social history from UFBA.