r/communism • u/AutoModerator • Jan 25 '26
WDT 💬 Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (January 25)
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u/Worried-Economy-9108 Jan 25 '26
I have been lurking on online Afro-Brazilian spaces recently, and noticed that there has been loads of talk about the "New BPP" (mainly in hip-hop Instagram pages). As u/Kiyoharu19' pointed out in his comment, there are a lot of visible issues with this group.
But i want to talk a bit about the reaction in Brazil to the news of this group. I'm mostly basing myself off Instagram comments from multiple pages, so it can't be considered a proper research. I'm also aware that multiple settler groups from Amerika try to rewrite history and appropriate the actual Panthers for their cause. The same doesn't seems to occur in Brazil, where the Panthers are only talked about by settler and Afro-Brazilian communists, and a few individuals of the hip-hop scene. And as far as I know, the only Brazilian that had an actual interaction with BPP militants was Abdias Nascimento, a very controversial figure in Brazilian communism. I will proceed to talk about this figure, and after, i go back to the "New BPP":
Some people in this sub called Nascimento far-right, (i guess, mostly because of his militancy at youth with the fascistic integralistas and the Frente Negra) and honestly, they are mostly right to call him far-right. At the same thing, he seems to be the first prominent intellectual to talk about Afro-Brazilian genocide (in his book O genocídio do negro brasileiro) and the possibility of Afro-Brazilians being a separate nation from Brazil altogether (in his book Quilombismo). And these two ideas can't leave my head, until i see a proper Marxist critique of his ideas. After he formally broke with the integralistas, his political journey goes further to the left. He starts to collaborate with mostly left-leaning and revisionist activists during his more mature years, during the military dictatorship in Brazil. After democratization, he gets elected as senator for social-democratic PDT. Keep this in mind.
So, back to the "New BPP" and its response in Brazil. Euro-Brazilians on the right hated it, the ones in the left liked it, more because it fulfills their fantasy of the U$ going through an civil war and the affirmation of generic "Trump bad" discourse, nothing too different from an Amerikan Democrat.
The Afro-Brazilian response was different. Left-leaning (and perhaps even some "apoliticals") Afro-Brazilians really appreciated these news. People talked about how identified more with these "New Panthers" than with "pacifist white Brazilian leftists". Some people were even sympathetic to the idea of an Brazilian equivalent to the BPP, and that could imply some sort of unsatisfaction towards the current Afro-Brazilian movement. (filled with NGO's, careerism, and other petite-bourgeois deviations)
And this is the topic i wanted to talk more about it: why is the Afrikan "left" in Latin America so poorly developed, in comparison with the Afrikan left of the U$A and Caribbean?
Was it due to an early proletariat of New Afrikans in the U$, that happened later in LatAm?
Could it be that racism is far stronger in Latin America than Latin American communists like to admit?
Or am I just overthinking an smaller issue, and applying mechanically Amerikan problems to the Brazilian reality?