Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism by Mike Davis & Daniel Bertrand Monk

Author:Mike Davis & Daniel Bertrand Monk [Davis, Mike & Monk, Daniel Bertrand]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politics, Sociology, Neoliberalism, Utopia, Dystopia, Non-Fiction, Urban, Political Economy
ISBN: 9781595587787
Google: WlSBoDFWbVwC
Amazon: 1595583920
Goodreads: 12556482
Publisher: New Press
Published: 2007-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Legacy of “Late” Slavery

Brazil was the largest-scale example since the Roman Empire of a slave-owning society. The extermination of indigenous peoples, of whom there were 2 million when the Portuguese invaded Brazil, was followed by the importation of millions of African workers, the first generation of the Brazilian working class, the productive base of successive export cycles that the colonizers imposed on Brazil: those of sugar, coffee, and rubber. The Portuguese administered the colony of Brazil as a royal property but acted with a brutal profit-making logic. Portuguese colonization differed in some important respects from the Spanish colonial model: while a university was set up in the Dominican Republic as early as the sixteenth century, Brazil had to wait until the twentieth century. The fundamental mechanisms of plunder and primitive accumulation, however, were similar.

The real divergence in historical trajectories began with the Napoleonic invasions at the beginning of the nineteenth century. While Spain gloriously resisted, and the pictures of Velásquez immortalize this; the Portuguese crown fled Lisbon for Brazil, whose ports it quickly opened up to “friendly countries.” What seemed to be the embrace of liberal idelogy was, in fact, neocolonial dependence upon Great Britain, its main customer and creditor.

The survival of slavery in Brazil, moreover, was directly linked to the arrival of the royal court in Rio de Janeiro. Independence, in the Brazilian case, was a pact among the elite, in which the end of colonization did not mean the establishment of a republic but rather the switch to a monarchy, in which succession to the throne took place through placing the crown on the head of the son of the Portuguese monarch. The farce was even clearer as the son of the king, crowned as Pedro I, proclaimed independence with a shout—“Independence or death!,”—without it being clear exactly what he was fighting against, as he had actually received the crown from the hands of his father. And, to make matters worse, his father addressed him with words that were highly offensive to the Brazilian people: “My son, place the crown on your head, before some adventurer does so.” The “adventurers” were the Brazilian people; and the coronation was the preemption of a real liberation led by a Brazilian Bolívar or San Martin.

The principal victims of this elite pact with monarchy were Afro-Brazilians, and slavery was officially abolished only in 1888, almost seven decades after independence. This “delay” had far-reaching legacies in the concentration of land ownership and the dispossession of former slaves. The crown, worried about rebellions of black workers, attempted to introduce new legislation that would restrict access to land, thereby guaranteeing the availability of labor, as the slaves would remain on the farms, now working as “free” wage earners.

The monarchy passed the crucial Lei de Terras (Land Law) in 1850, which defined the structure of land distribution in Brazil. Only those who had legalized their properties in the notaries’ offices, paying a sum to the crown, could be considered proprietors. The law automatically discriminated against the poor and prevented free slaves from becoming proprietors since they lacked money to pay taxes.

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