Revisiting Oswald de Andrade's 'Technicized Barbarian'

Cardoso 29 REVISITING OSWALD DE ANDRADE’S ‘TECHNICIZED BARBARIAN’ by RODRIGO CARDOSO In his Manifesto Antropófago, published in 1928 in the literary journal Revista de Antropofagia, Oswald de Andrade wrote: “Affiliation. Contact with the Caraíba Brazil. Où Villegaignon print terre. Montaigne. The natural man. Rousseau. From the French Revolution to Romanticism, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Surrealist Revolution and Keyserling's technicized barbarian. We walk.” 1. In the Manifesto, the “clothed civilization” brought to the Americas by the Portuguese, all “catechizations”, and even grammar and logic are construed as the opposite of anthropophagy, which would be instinctive, matriarchal, in contact with the soil, a form of subsistence and knowledge in the relation between the self and the cosmos. In that context, the technicized barbarian is pointed out as a future ideal, the result of the successive revolutions humanity has undergone. He is idealized, therefore, as the new man that these revolutions foreshadow, and characterized by the enjoyment of the benefits of the technology produced by modern civilization, but without the catechism and 1 Revista de Antropofagia, Year One, n. 1, p. 3. All Portuguese quotes translated by me. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Cardoso 30 Christian morals that underlie it. The refusal of Western morality, then, would imply a “return to the natural state” associated, in turn, with the pre-Cabralian Tupinambá. It is interesting to note, however, that the “technicized barbarian” proposed by Oswald is a subversion of the one proposed by the Lithuanian-German philosopher Hermann Keyserling, for whom the term indicated the loss of spirit and the moral decay of modern man, who had allegedly become a mere automaton in his dependence on machines2. After the Manifesto Antropófago, Oswald develops his anthropophagic utopia and the notion of “technicized barbarian” more systematically in an essay written in 1950, “A crise da filosofia messiânica” (or “The crisis of messianic philosophy”). The inclusion of a reflection on Marx and Marxism, related to Andrade’s approximation to the Communist Party during the 1930s, introduce in this essay a critique of work both in capitalist society and in Soviet society. After a philosophical and historical overview of Western civilization, Andrade presents a summary of his theses and a prognosis which can be described as both programmatic and utopian. He foresees the dialectical overcoming of the current Patriarchy, with its messianic philosophy, by a renewed Matriarchy based on an anthropophagic philosophy and expressed in the figure of the technical natural man or the ‘technicized barbarian’. This new matriarchy would be characterized by, "children of maternal right, common ownership of the soil and the State without classes, or the absence of the State"3, unquote, in a clear dialogue with communist utopias. In addition to the extinction of private property by what he calls "Matriarchy" 4, one of the central themes of "A crise da filosofia messiânica" is idleness. In the text, the author offers a See Daniel Faria, “As meditações americanas de Keyserling: um cosmopolitismo nas incertezas do tempo”, Varia Historia 29, no 51 (dezembro de 2013): 905–23, https://doi.org/10.1590/S0104-87752013000300013. 2 3 Oswald de Andrade, A utopia antropofágica, org. Gênese Andrade (São Paulo: Editora Globo, 2011), 204. As to the meaning of "Matriarchy" in Oswald de Andrade, the posthumous essay "The anthropaphagous” makes it clear that it does not refer to a socio-political order in which women have power over men, but rather one in which polygamy and institutions such as avunculate, uxorilocality and matrilinearity predominate – which, in any case, could already be inferred by carefully reading his other texts. For criticism of Andrade’s misleading use of the term matriarchy, see Beth Joan Vinkler, “The Anthropophagic Mother/Other: Appropriated Identities in Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Manifesto Antropófago’”, Luso-Brazilian Review 34, no 1 (1997): 105–11; Ana Paula M Morel, “Entre a antropologia e a literatura: a antropofagia de Oswald de Andrade”, Revista de Ciências Sociais, Fortaleza 44, no 2 (dezembro de 2013): 95–110. 4 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Cardoso 31 fictitious etymology for the words ‘sacerdócio’ (priesthood), defining the priest as one who sacralizes and claims for himself the right to a sacred idleness (‘ócio’), and ‘negócio’ (business), is described as the negation of idleness and the central principle of capitalist society. Andrade then defines idleness as the main value denied by messianic philosophy and, simultaneously, as a central value to his utopian project. He writes: All social techniques, legislation as well as politics, utility [ofemilidade] as well as unfortunistics [infortunística], reduce work, organize it, and compensate on sanitary and palinodic bases. It is the sharing of idleness to which every man born of a woman is entitled. And the common ideal becomes retirement, which is the metaphysics of idleness. In the supertechnical world that is announced, when the final barriers of the Patriarchy fall, man can feed his innate laziness, the mother of fantasy, invention, and love. And restore himself, after the end of his long state of negativity, in the synthesis at last, of the technique that is civilization and of the natural life that is culture, his playful instinct. Over Faber, Viator and Sapiens, Homo Ludens will prevail. Serenely waiting for the devouring of the planet by the imperative of its cosmic destiny.5 After the serendipitously optimistic program of waiting for the world's end while relying on the work of robots, in his final theses, Andrade argues that "the current phase of human progress foreshadows what Aristotle sought to express by saying that when the spindles worked alone, the slave would disappear" 6. Implicit in Andrade’s defense of idleness is the criticism of productivist dogmatism and the centrality of work as a social principle and essence of man. Similarly to Paul Lafargue, in The right to be lazy, Andrade defines idleness as a fundamental human right that should be seen as a driving force for the political and revolutionary imagination. As a utopian demand, 5 Andrade, A utopia antropofágica, 145. 6 Andrade, 204. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Cardoso 32 the defense of idleness makes up a critique of the ideological ethics of work in both capitalism and Soviet socialism and allows us to glimpse new fields of concrete political claim and struggle against the capitalist State’s mechanisms of control.7 However, Oswald de Andrade rejects class struggle as a fundamental category of politics and projects his utopian claim into a metahistorical plan naturally accomplished in a dialectical teleology of progress based on the faith in technological development. Anthropophagy is often and productively read as a kind of anti-metaphysical philosophy or meta-critical category of Brazilian literary and artistic history. However, if we consider the original context of the Revista de Antropofagia in the late 1920s, it becomes evident that it plays an important role in the building of discourses about national identity that were being developed by many intellectuals then. In her book, Cannibal Democracy, Professor Zita Nunes has pointed out how the assimilation of the indigenous as a symbol by a white intellectual elite connects anthropophagy with the ideology of Racial Democracy. In the text of anthropophagy, while black people are repressed and erased, the indigenous is always depicted as a pre-Cabralian ideal and thus confined to the past. Indigenous traits valued in relation to anthropophagy are then claimed by those white, Portuguese-speaking intellectuals in the economic capital of Brazilian developmentalism. While Gilberto Freyre’s, narrative of Racial Democracy mythically enacts the projection of male European desire over native and black female bodies in the formation of the “Brasil Moreno”, as Denise Ferreira da Silva describes,8 in anthropophagy the white Paulista artist becomes the indigenous themselves who has devoured and continues to devour European subjectivity in a synchronous and everpresent process of absorption of transparency 9. 7 See Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). See Chapter 10 – Tropical Democracy in Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 8 This argument is more thoroughly developed in my dissertation. See Rodrigo Octávio Cardoso, “Políticas do primitivismo na América Latina: raça, nação e utopia na Revista de Antropofagia e em Amauta” (Campinas, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 2021), http://www.repositorio.unicamp.br/acervo/detalhe/1231115. 9 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Cardoso 33 So, how can we understand the effectivity of the image of the “technical natural man” or the “technicized barbarian” in the context of highly racialized discourses during the period of hegemonization of the myth of racial democracy in Brazil? Or, as Abdias Nascimento calls it, the ideology of Brazilian racism10? The first issue one can raise is the recurring association of laziness and indigenous peoples in anthropophagy: “lazy people in the world map of Brazil”, reads the Manifesto 11. Of course, as we can read in Oswald de Andrade’s 1950 essay, idleness and laziness are seen as positive and desired values in his anthropophagic utopia, when machines will do all the work and people can dedicate themselves to “fantasy, invention and love”. In Stone Age Economics, Marshal Sahlins criticizes the classical notion that non-capitalist societies live in scarcity economies. Through the analysis of many ethnographies of hunter/gatherer peoples, Sahlins argues these are, in fact, affluent societies with very few hours dedicated to work and the procurement of delicacies rather than simple nourishment. The rest of their time is dedicated to leisure, gossip, and social and religious activities. In that sense, anthropophagic utopian idleness could be read as a critique of the capitalist ideology of work ethics and a claim for less work hours in a more humane lifestyle. The “Anthropophagous Manifesto” reads: “we had communism. [...] We had the relation and distribution of physical goods, moral goods, dignified goods.”12 At the same time, while celebrating indigenous “laziness”, anthropophagy also claims all the technological advances of industrial modernity. The manifesto reads: “American cinema will inform. [...] towards the technicized barbarian of Keyserling. We walk. [...] The fixation of progress through catalogs and television sets. Machinery only. And blood transfusers”13. In the 2nd dentition, Jurandyr Manfredini writes: “we should not confuse the return to the natural state (what we 10 Abdias Nascimento, O genocídio do negro brasileiro: processo de um racismo mascarado (São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva S.A, 2016). 11 Revista de Antropofagia, Year One, n. 1, p. 3. 12 Revista de Antropofagia, Year One, n. 1, p. 3. 13 Revista de Antropofagia, Year One, n. 1, p. 3. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Cardoso 34 want) with the return to the primitive state (which we don't care about)” 14 . In general, Anthropophagy rejects the indigenous way of life as a social model, and values only a vague notion of simplicity materialized, eventually, in the idea of idleness as the unlimited possibility of pleasure and creativity. Moreover, the association of laziness to indigenous peoples is one of the main tropes of the racist discourse of colonialism worldwide and has justified the enslavement, genocide and assimilation of indigenous peoples throughout history, as this alleged laziness is seen as an essential characteristic of indigenous peoples and incompatible with the modern project and its disciplinary axioms. Since the beginning of colonization and the first Portuguese invasion, Brazil has been constituted and structured through racialized slavery. In Negros da terra, John Manuel Monteiro reconstitutes the history of enslavement of the indigenous peoples that characterized the first Portuguese settlements in Brazil and the bandeirantismo of the first centuries of colonization. While there are reports, in the first encounters, of a few attempts at collaboration and cooperation between the Portuguese and indigenous peoples, soon the mercantile appetites of the Europeans exceeded their saturation point. "To the displeasure of the colonizers [....] the Indians provided provisions only sporadically and in a limited way, while the Portuguese began to depend increasingly on indigenous production and labor for their own livelihood" 15. In the period that followed, the Portuguese began to resort more and more to force and violence to coerce indigenous people to work for their benefit. Faced with the impossibility of simply conquering a much larger population, war between indigenous peoples began to be used and fomented to subject groups that resisted, and to enslave them. Faced with the Church's debates about the existence of a soul in indigenous peoples and the need to catechize them, Portuguese legislation in the Philippine Ordinations began to limit indigenous slavery, 14 Revista de Antropofagia, Year Two (2ª dentição), n. 4 15 John M. Monteiro, Negros da terra: índios e bandeirantes nas origens de São Paulo (São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia das Letras, 1994), 32. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Cardoso 35 admitting it only in cases of "Just Wars" or in the capture of already enslaved people. Despite this, the number of "entradas e bandeiras", expeditions with the main purpose of capturing indigenous labor, increased, manipulating the terms for lawful enslavement without any kind of regulation. According to Darcy Ribeiro, "strictly speaking, despite the copious legislation guaranteeing the freedom of the Indians, it can be affirmed that the only indispensable requirement for the Indian to be enslaved was to still be a free Indian" 16. Meanwhile, Jesuit reductions aimed at indigenous evangelization used their workforce to maintain and enrich the Church's Estate, leasing their work when it was convenient, making indigenous labor an essential element in the building of colonial Brazil. While the lucrative Atlantic trade of enslaved Africans soon replaced indigenous labor as the main source of profit for the colonizers, indigenous labor continued to be used until the 18th century for the subsistence economy, necessary but devalued within the mercantile export system17. This change was accompanied by discourses that attributed to indigenous people predicates of savagery, inconstancy, and refusal to work and made the African labor more attractive, according also to the interests of the lucrative slave trade 18. In his study of the "myth of the lazy native", Syad Hussein Alatas demonstrates the recurrence of accusations against southeast Asian natives, particularly Malays, as one of colonial capitalism’s main domination strategies in the nineteenth century. Analyzing texts from colonial administrators, travelers and academics linked to the colonial enterprise, Alatas observes the explicit recognition of the diligence and work ability of the natives for jobs that served their livelihood within local economic practices. However, this work was not valued and was despised by the writers of modernity in the region. Thus, the native's image fashioned 16 Darcy Ribeiro, O povo brasileiro: a formação e o sentido do Brasil, Estudos de antropologia da civilização (São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia das Letras, 1995), 99. 17 Ribeiro, O povo brasileiro. See Giuseppe Marcocci, “Escravos ameríndios e negros africanos: uma história conectada. Teorias e modelos de discriminação no império português (ca. 1450-1650)”, Tempo 16, no 30 (2011): 41–70; Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “O mármore e a murta: sobre a inconstância da alma selvagem”, Revista de antropologia, 1992, 21–74. 18 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Cardoso 36 by these writers had an important role in the exploitation of these peoples by colonial capitalism. As Alatas argues, The image of the native had a function in the exploitation complex of colonial times. This was the time when the capitalist conception of labour gained supremacy. Any type of labour which did not conform to this conception was rejected as a deviation. A community which did not enthusiastically and willingly adopt this conception of labour was regarded as indolent. 19 Only work focused on colonial production, and which became direct profit for the colonizers – export monoculture in the plantations – was valued and considered worthy. Because of this, imported forced labor employed in this production, although also characterized with many racist predicates, were considered fit and capable workers. On the other hand, native workers, resistant to exploitation in plantations on their own lands, which presented no rewards for local communities, have for centuries become the targets of accusations of indolence and laziness. These discourses eventually constituted an ideology so enduring that they became a common trope used even by Malay native intellectuals during the processes of independence in the second half of the twentieth century. Alatas also discusses the role of some intellectuals who are generally critical of imperialism and the exploitation of work, but who also reproduce the colonial ideology's depiction of the native, as in the cases of the Filipino nationalist writer José Rizal, English historian John Hobson and even Marx and Engels 20 . While denouncing the exploitative and violent character of imperialism as immoral, these authors reproduced stereotypes and prejudiced 19 Syed Hussein Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th Century and Its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism (Londres: Frank Cass and Company Limited, 1977), 70. “Marx and Engels. Their condescending attitude, their carelessness about facts, their misinterpretation of Asian institutions, and their ethnic pride, were clearly revealed in their writings. Marx called Chinese isolation barbarous, ignoring the fact that in such isolation China had built a grand civilization. In the apprehension of great changes Orientals used to hoard. His view of the Indian peasant and village life excelled that of the British Colonial administrator in its distortion and insulting tone. The destruction of the village community, which he considered to be semi-civilized, was hailed by him as the 'only social revolution ever heard of in Asia'”. Alatas, 232. 20 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Cardoso 37 images about colonized peoples and contributed to the propagation of ideas and arguments that ultimately served to justify the colonization and the dominance of native populations by the white-European yoke. Similarly, the characterization of the Brazilian indigenous as lazy works as part of a colonial ideology within the slave economy that favored the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans and their commercialization as commodities. The fact stands that the myth of the lazy Indian has become a commonplace of Brazilian culture, repeated to this day as part of the racist discourse against indigenous people in the country 21 . This must be taken into account when we attempt to evaluate the effect of anthropophagy’s statements idealizing indigenous peoples in a utopian image of idleness and refusal to work. The trope of “indigenous laziness” remains one of the main arguments that demarcate the incompatibility of indigenous communities with the productivist and developmental paradigm that guides the nation-state within global capitalist modernity, excluding indigenous people from the nation's communal imagination and making them targets of genocidal practices and policies. In that sense, the racist stereotyping disseminated by this discourse submits indigenous people to racist offenses, attacks on their territorial rights, ethnocide through practices of evangelization, assimilation and even the kidnapping of babies by the State under the argument that families are not able to provide for their children 22, in addition to physical aggression and massacres. With that in mind, one must consider the association between the Indian and idleness found in anthropophagy as part of the colonial and racist ideological-discursive complex. The fact In 2018, the then vice-presidential candidate, Hamilton Mourão, stated that “Brazil inherited the indolence of the Indians”: https://congressoemfoco.uol.com.br/area/pais/mourao-diz-que-pais-herdou-indolencia-doindio-e-malandragem-do-negro/. Accessed in May 2022. In 2019, Pará State Attorney Ricardo Albuquerque da Silva stated that “The problem of slavery in Brazil happened because the Indian does not like to work, until today. The Indian would rather die than dig a mine or to work the land for the Portuguese”: https://congressoemfoco.uol.com.br/direitos-humanos/negro-foi-escravizado-porque-indio-e-preguicoso-dizprocurador-deputados-repudiam/ Accessed in May 2022. For a more complete assessment of racism against indigenous people in Brazil see Felipe Milanez et al., “Existência e diferença: o racismo contra os povos indígenas / Existence and difference: racism against indigenous peoples”, Revista Direito e Práxis 10, no 3 (Sep. 2019): 2161–81. 21 22 See https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/in-brazil-indigenous-people-fighting-to-keepchildren. Accessed in May 2022. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Cardoso 38 becomes more evident when considering its locus of enunciation: a white urban bourgeoisie with no engagement with the situation of the indigenous peoples of Brazil except for occasional praise for the assimilationist project of the SPI (Indian Protection Service).23 Even so, to understand the effectiveness of anthropophagy's and Oswald de Andrade's politics, it is necessary to consider how this discourse is mobilized within a utopian project of criticism of the organization of capitalist labor and modern productivism. In this sense, the anthropophagic praise of laziness and idleness also corresponds to a perception that indigenous people live a rich and abundant way of life that, which, at the same time, rejects the logic of capitalist accumulation and overproduction. However, while the utopic representation of anthropophagy points to alternative values in its critique of capitalism, it reinforces racist discourses in its abstraction of concrete indigenous bodies. But, perhaps, the most difficult and delicate issue here, rather than utopian idleness, is the means used to reach that goal in a “supertechnicized world that announces itself” 24. The ideal of the “technicized barbarian” is based on the notion of the liberation of work by technology, which allows us to conceive of a world in which human beings enjoy the freedom conquered by the overcoming of the capitalist State and "wage slavery" having all their fundamental needs, and even the whims of modern life, met by the automatic work of machines. In this scenario, the machines would perform the necessary work in all stages of production: the extraction of minerals and vegetables from the soil, the control and slaughter of animals, the assembly and synthesis of products, quality control, and even the work required for developing and reproducing new machines. If this description may already suggest some nightmarish dystopian images, we don’t have to go so far in order to find some delicate issues in a utopian formulation based on technological development and the liberation from work through machines. The Oswaldian imagination conceives the liberation of work for idleness as a virtuality contained in the present ("the current phase of human progress foreshadows what Aristotle sought to express by saying that, when if spindles worked alone, the slave 23 Oswald de Andrade, Estética e política, org. Maria Eugenia Boaventura (São Paulo: Editora Globo, 2011), 197. See also Rodrigo Cardoso, “Colonialidade, transculturação e identidade nacional na antropofagia modernista”, Entre caníbales, Lima 2, no 9 (2018). 24 Andrade, A utopia antropofágica, 145. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Cardoso 39 would disappear”25). This imagination is projected from an increasingly technological world, which is, however, still fundamentally structured by globality and the racial division of labor. The thesis that the technological development of machinery could mean the end of capitalist exploitation is put forward by Marx himself in his economic manuscripts and has been taken up by countless Marxist theorists ever since. Nevertheless, while indicating this possibility, Marx demonstrates how capitalism converts any labor freed up by the purchase of machinery into further exploitation destined for capitalist accumulation. In the famous fragment about machinery in the Grundrisse 26 , Marx points out the eventual tendency of technological development to free up the labor time of the worker, potentially reducing exploitation and allowing him to devote the earned time to developing his own capabilities. Here, machinery is considered a means of production or a form of fixed capital. However, the tendency of capital is to create superfluous needs in order to continue exploiting the worker's time in the production of exchange and surplus value for capital accumulation, by producing, for example, more machinery to be appropriated as fixed capital. Capitalism lives on its own incessant expansion. The acquisition of machinery favors overproduction, which must be disposed of through increased consumption. Here lies the connection between technological development in capitalism with imperialist expansion, made explicit by Paul Lafargue. 27 For the capitalist, it is necessary to continue to produce more and more, and so the worker is redirected to another function so as to remain trapped within the cycle of production and consumption. This ever-expanding cycle leads to an unceasing escalation of production, as Deleuze & Guattari note, bringing the capitalist economy closer to full output within the given limits, and by widening these limits in turn-especially within an order of military expenditures that are in no way competitive with private enterprise, quite the contrary […] The State, its police, and its army form a gigantic enterprise of 25 Andrade, 204. My emphasis. 26 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, 2005. 690-712 27 Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy, 2022. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Cardoso 40 antiproduction, but at the heart of production itself, and conditioning this production.28 And thus, technological development is incapable of bringing benefits to the worker by itself unless the worker forcibly appropriates the freed-up time. While the surplus value is reinvested in the acquisition of more machinery, the worker finds himself increasingly alienated from the result of his work and reduced to a surplus piece of machinery, as the machinery reduced the number of workers necessary for production. The liberation of work and the end of capitalist exploitation cannot be a natural consequence of technological progress. The very concept of progress based on the technical-scientific development of the means of production constitutes a mode of bourgeois ideology that minimizes the central and necessary role of the worker in the production process, who increasingly resembles the machine himself, as one more mechanism in the production process. It is also interesting to note the parallels between Marx's description of the role played by machinery in industrial capitalism and the racial division of labor characteristic of colonial capitalism. The modern text, contemporary with primitive accumulation and the colonial exploitation of the Americas and slave labor, established racial difference as an expression of the duality of body and mind, or, similarly, of the primitive and the modern 29 . This separation was also implicit in modern disciplinary technologies developed as submission of body to mind. The modern text identifies Africans and indigenous peoples, in their alleged primitivism, with animality and, similarly, according to Cartesian dualism, as automatons or machines. Thus, modern racial division of labor links them to an eternal and insurmountable primitive accumulation, subjecting them, through total violence, forced evictions and 28 Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trad. Helen R Lane, Robert Hurley, e Mark Seem (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 235. See Aníbal Quijano, “Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina” (clacso Buenos Aires, 2000); Silvia Frederici, Calibã e a bruxa: mulheres, corpo e acumulação primitiva, trad. coletivo Sycorax (São Paulo: Elefante, 2017). 29 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Cardoso 41 physical coercion, to reiterated extractions of total value, while “only” surplus value is extracted from white workers, as Ferreira da Silva argues 30. As several historians and colonial chroniclers record 31, in Brazilian slave society, every form of heavy or productive labor was carried out by enslaved people: planting and harvesting on plantations, extracting precious ores from the soil, production of food for the subsistence of the colonial population, the transport of heavy loads, the reproduction of domestic life. Work was seen as an unworthy occupation for whites and especially for the elite, who lived a life of idleness, dedicated to social, intellectual and administrative activities. Enslaved indigenous and African people were treated, from a legal and social point of view, as objects or goods. Their bodies were the private property of the white masters. In seeking to understand the economic transformations that led to the end of slavery and the adoption of wage labor by capitalists, Marxist thinkers historically characterized the slave as a form of fixed capital that did not meet the expanding consumption needs of industrial capital 32 . Reflecting on the relationship between the institution of slavery and liberal ideology, Roberto Schwarz, for example, writes: “Being property, a slave can be sold, but not fired. The free worker, at this point, gives his employer more freedom, in addition to immobilizing less capital.” 33 Thus, the enslaved body, as fixed capital, occupies, for colonial capitalism, a structural place similar to that of machinery in industrial capitalism, in the terms of political economy. In the scheme of racial division of labor that characterizes modernity/coloniality and conceives of non-white bodies as work machines, the slave-owning patriarchal society appears as the black and white mirror of a utopia where “[the white] man can feed his innate 30 Denise Ferreira da Silva, A dívida Impagável, trad. Pedro Daher e Amilcar Packer (São Paulo: Oficina de Imaginação Política e Living Commons, 2019). 31 See Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Nem preto, nem branco, muito pelo contrário: cor e raça na sociabilidade brasileira, Coleção Agenda brasileira (São Paulo, SP: Claro Enigma, 2012). See Ricardo Rezende Figueira, “Por que o trabalho escravo?”, Estudos Avançados 14 (abril de 2000): 31– 50, https://doi.org/10.1590/S0103-40142000000100003. 32 33 Roberto Schwarz, Cultura e política (São Paulo, SP: Paz e Terra, 2009), 63. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Cardoso 42 laziness, mother of fantasy, invention and love. And restore himself at last, after the end of his long state of negativity, in the synthesis of technique that is civilization and of the natural life that is culture, his playful instinct” 34. At this point, it's not untimely to remember that Oswald de Andrade's family, when migrating from Pará and Minas Gerais to São Paulo at the end of the 19th century, made their fortune by leasing fixed capital: renting slaves 35. In this world on the other side of the mirror, while the white man can feed his innate laziness, black people work as machinery, the means of production that has liberated workers to enjoy their natural right to laziness. In any case, Oswald de Andrade's utopian proposition evidently does not prescribe the racial division of labor and the conversion of black and indigenous bodies into machines so that “the spindles work by themselves”. The author most certainly had such an absolute technological development in mind that really all men would be freed from manual labor. But, even if we followed this logic, the question would still remain for the anthropophagic imagination to answer: who will build the machinery that will finally free mankind from all work? Who must extract metal from the ground to build it? Who operates said machinery until it is able to do it by itself? What has allowed Oswald de Andrade to imagine the advent of the “technicized barbarian” in 1928 and 1950? Does the erasure of black people and contemporary indigenous peoples in the text of anthropophagy symbolically equate their inscription as fixed capital? Given the contemporary reality of spatial segregation and total extraction of value from racialized bodies, it is necessary to question, once again, in what ways the ideology of progress and the fetishization of technical and scientific development corroborate the reintegration of decoded flows of capital into the structures of coloniality that organize global capitalism. While it is incorporated into the worker-machine system of the technological industrial complex, the incessant escalation of overproduction is drained through the necropolitical militarization of spaces of colonial occupation demarcated by raciality. In this 34 Andrade, A utopia antropofágica, 145. 35 See Oswald de Andrade, Um homem sem profissão: sob as ordens de mamãe (Editora Globo, 1990). The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Cardoso 43 scenario, the praise of the machine without the question of whom does it work for, and under what conditions, leaves the question whether the technicized barbarian concretized as a political entity could be a Palestinian militant with his sling or bazooka, a Maoist guerrilla fighting for national liberation with an AK-47, or, rather, an Uribista Robocop repressing demonstrations in Colombia, a CORE police officer with all his equipment invading the favela in the last Chacina do Jacarezinho or even the venture capitalist who diversifies his investments by buying shares in the arms industry on his cell phone while sunbathing on the deck of a yacht sailing on international waters. WORKS CITED Alatas, Syed Hussein. The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th Century and Its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism. 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