What in the hell …

Practicing a bit of Portuguese. Here’s a translation of a piece by Negri and Giuseppe Cocco. The two wrote a book together recently, called GlobAL: Biopoder y luchas en una América latina globalizada. I’ve not read it yet cuz Prometeolibros are wicked slow in shipping. Original is here. I’d love it if someone w/ better portuguese than me would review it. I may be able to get someone offline to do so, if that happens I’ll post the revision.

*

The Constitution of Freedom

The elite opposes the Statute of Racial Equality and the Cotas Law with a cynical arugment: the quotas will produce racism.

History demonstrates that the Aurea Law only formally recognized an abolition that had already happened in fact. In the same way, voting for the Cotas Law and the the Statute of Racial Equality, senators and deputies will recognize an affirmative action that has already happened in almost 30 Brazilian public universities. The elite mobilizes a single cynical argument: the quotas will produce racism.

In the midst of this conservative trash, there is a question that merits being addressed: the future of the project of the nation. Between 1888 and 1930, the Brazilian elite had to confront two big challenges: the exhaustion of force labor (slavery) and, following that, the indefiniteness of the idea of the “people” adequate to the national project.

The slaves won freedom by different forms of negotiation and conflict. Among them, interbreeding and flight constituted powerful lines of biopolitical resistance: the power of life. This consituent dimension of freedom became resistance to the new form of subordination: waged labor. The Paulist ranchers managed to capture the flows of international migration. The first immigrants came to the coffee plantations to work as slaves, well before slavery was formally abolished. “Free men in the slave order,” as vulgar marxism and darwinism considers the marginal mass available for the labor market, were, to the contrary, men that were proletarianized. This power traversed, like a sword, “Os Sertões”, from Euclides to Cunha, until it made us see “rigid [caboclos], the nucleus of force for our future constitution, the living rock of our race.”

At the turn of the century, the positivist forceps did not manage to force the birth of a unitary figure of the “people.” The Republic was born crooked! The break-head is transposed to the 1930s. The varguist “nationalism” closed off the country to international immigrants and racism was reorganized: interbreeding was fixed in the homogeneous figure of the “mixed people,” produced by “inter-racial cordiality.” Eugenic theories were abandoned, racism was restructuring into an infinite chromatic modulation: “not domination because one is white, but rather domination is white.” The patriarchal oligarchy mixed with a corporatist technocracy, forming a block of biopower that rearticulated the power of the flows of life in a project of national development.

Despite two critical efforts by the black movement, this paradigm would be sustained until the end of the 1980s. It began to collapse in the 1990s, when neoliberalism recognized the need for a “real democratization” of the relations between “races, social groups and class” (Fernando Henrique Cardoso). Today, the ultraconservative opposition that the PSDB makes to the Cotas Law shows how superficial were the “liberatory” efforts of a Brazilian liberalism incestuously corrupted by state privileges.

Over all, [a essa altura,] the black movement was able to give a new weight to the anti-racist struggle. The myth of racial democracy would be unmasked and broken up by the militants of the cultural movements in the favelas, by the [pré-vestibulares] for blacks and the poor, by the occupations of the homeless, by the movements of informal workers. These struggles are constituent: they become productive independently of their homology in the wage (employment) relation and express themselves politically without passing through their national obliteration. Now, nothing would be more inadequate than to underestimate this innovation. The rainbow of singularities is irreducible to any identitarian and multicultural comprehension. The breakdown of freyrian hybridity reaffirms the mestizaje as multiplicty, opening up identities.

The immediately productive dimensions of the new struggles against racism are the singularities that cooperate and maintain themselves as such: they affirm relational affinities and not substantive identities (Viveiros de Castro). It is no longer the “being mestizo,” but more the becoming mestizo, black, white, [aimara]. As Deleuze said, “being is becoming.” The constitution of freedom will be founded today in the labor of a multitude of singularities. This is the living form of development. This is why we say that “Lula is many.” Lula is not a charismatic leader with whom we identify, but a multiplicity that will not be “represented”, one which opens up the limits of representation, which expresses a large portion of the Brazilians of the slave quarter.