A-Infos (en) Brazil, OSL: Black Consciousness is a living struggle against racism, capital, and the State. Palmares Lives! The Black People Resist! (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

November 20th is a day of affirmation of Black resistance and the 
combative memory that has accompanied the Brazilian people since the 
times of the European invasion. It is not an empty commemorative date, 
as the mainstream media seeks to disseminate, but a political landmark 
that reaffirms that racism continues to structure the capitalist-statist 
order and class domination in Brazil. This reality continues to express 
itself violently and explicitly in the country.

Racial Violence and Social Crisis

The recent massacres in the peripheries of Baixada Santista, Rio de 
Janeiro, Salvador, and other cities in the country have once again shown 
how the State uses police violence to control and terrorize territories 
with a Black majority. In addition to this, mass incarceration continues 
to expand, with overcrowded prisons and pretrial detentions 
overwhelmingly affecting the Black population-75% of those imprisoned 
without trial are Black. At the same time, the housing crisis worsened, 
with violent evictions in large cities such as São Paulo, Recife, and 
Belo Horizonte, primarily removing Black families from their homes and 
reinforcing the logic of urban expulsion that favors large landowners 
and the interests of the real estate market.

All of this is associated with the increased cost of living, food 
inflation, and precarious work, which disproportionately affects the 
Black population, which comprises the most exploited base of the working 
class. In this context, Black women remain the most precarious and 
poorly paid group, accumulating long and unstable working hours in 
domestic service, for example, and in occupations with low social and 
labor protection. According to Dieese, about half of Black women earn up 
to one minimum wage, and their average income is 53% lower than that of 
white men. These numbers starkly reveal the racial and gender apartheid 
in the country.

International Scenario: Racialized Peoples as Targets

This internal scenario connects with the international context, marked 
by the advancement of the climate crisis, which especially affects 
racialized territories in the Global South; by the militarization of 
borders in Europe and the United States, where African, Caribbean, and 
Latin American migrants become targets of violence and incarceration; 
and by wars that fall more heavily on historically colonized 
populations. Brazil is part of this process, where Black and Indigenous 
peoples are the most vulnerable, both in relation to environmental 
destruction and economic exploitation, as well as the very dynamics of 
legalized extermination.

Racism as a Pillar of Brazilian Capitalism

The recent events mentioned make it even clearer that racism is not a 
moral deviation or a historical residue, but a structuring form of 
domination deeply embedded in the very constitution of 
capitalism-statism. Like colonialism/imperialism and patriarchy, racism 
is a fundamental part of the formation of social classes and the 
maintenance of exploitation: it guides state violence, defines who 
occupies the most precarious jobs, legitimizes super-exploitation, 
naturalizes inequalities, and sustains the social division of labor that 
reserves the most powerful positions for white men. The poverty of the 
Black population is not an accident-it is a functional pillar for the 
reproduction of dependent and subordinate Brazilian capitalism. 
Therefore, the anti-racist struggle can only be effective when 
understood as an inseparable part of the class struggle and the 
confrontation with capitalism and the State that organizes it. Combating 
racism is confronting the order that depends on it. The memory of Zumbi, 
Dandara, Tereza de Benguela, and the quilombos precisely expresses this 
perspective: Palmares did not seek integration with colonial power, but 
built an insurgent project of collective autonomy, solidarity, and 
popular self-organization capable of breaking with all forms of 
articulated domination.

Palmares points the way: rebellion, autonomy, and self-management.

In Brazil in 2025, this spirit manifests itself in mobilizations against 
massacres, in housing occupations spreading throughout the capitals, as 
seen in the Favela do Moinho in São Paulo, in the strikes and resistance 
of outsourced and precarious workers, in the struggle of Black youth 
against state brutality, in the resistance of the peripheries to the 
advance of real estate capital, and in the defense of quilombola and 
indigenous territories against environmental destruction. These 
struggles form a single historical thread: the active refusal to accept 
social and economic inequality as destiny.

On this November 20th, we reaffirm the enormous importance of the Black 
struggle in the reorganization of oppressed classes, the need to 
strengthen all movements confronting police violence and ongoing 
genocide, and the urgency of popular self-organization in urban and 
rural territories, workplaces, schools, and universities. We reject the 
attempt to transform the date into a cultural spectacle or a piece of 
institutional marketing, emptying the anti-racist struggle of its 
political and revolutionary content. We defend the construction of a 
radical project of social transformation that understands that the 
ethnic-racial struggle is inseparable from the class struggle and that 
only with this understanding can we move towards a common horizon of 
emancipation and rupture with capitalism.

November 20th does not belong to the State, to corporations, or to 
conciliatory discourses. It is a day that belongs to the Black people 
and to the popular struggles that continue to confront the structure of 
oppression denounced by Zumbi, Dandara, and the Quilombo of Palmares. 
May this November 20th, 2025, contribute to keeping us organized, 
united, and determined to confront racism and the statist capitalism 
that sustains it. Zumbi lives, the Black people fight, and the 
construction of self-managed popular power remains the only answer 
capable of honoring this memory and advancing towards a future of 
freedom and social equality.

PALMARES LIVES!

LONG LIVE THE BLACK PEOPLE IN STRUGGLE!

AGAINST RACISM. AGAINST CAPITAL. FOR SELF-MANAGED POPULAR POWER AND 
SOCIAL REVOLUTION!

Libertarian Socialist Organization

November 20th, 2025

https://socialismolibertario.net/2025/11/20/consciencia-negra-e-luta-viva/
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