By TARSUS GENUS*
The hegemonic dispute has migrated to digital control and the financialization of the State, with global actors and local elites eroding democracy in favor of private interests
1.
The protagonists of the dispute for political and cultural hegemony in the capitalist society of the 1980s, then conceptualized (Adam Schaff) as the “information society” – today already labeled as “infodigital” – did not have in their hands such diverse and varied technological instruments, with such a broad capacity to circulate data, opinions, resources, with the speed and precision so close to the spontaneous rules of the market, as at the end of this quarter of a century.
In contemporary industrial society, starting with radio and then television, the influences of new technological media and instruments were already predominant – albeit in a lesser form – both in terms of seduction for political concerts and agreements, and in terms of verification and dissemination of political conflicts, although all of this took place at a slower pace. The techniques most suited to the propagation of products to the market (such as advertising) predominated in this first stage, although they were already disseminating information to sow new meanings for politics in a society with its traditional classes in dissolution.
Information of public interest or simply important (in different formats) was selected by local and national communication business groups and disputed, within its framework, with political parties, unions, “interest” groups – pressure groups of different origins – which made up, at the time, systems of relationships with visible sources of power to try, with their rebellious or conservative movements, to change the order, improve it or preserve it, according to their immediate interests.
It can be said that the dispute, at this time, was mainly – even before the ongoing technological revolutions – determined by the verticality of concentrated power and that today it is mainly determined by the horizontality of shared power. In the current cycle of the relationship between information technologies and politics and culture, however, there is a new concentration of power: external to the nation, the nation-state, the municipality and the territory.
This concentration of power is also verticalized, but driven by network flows, with messages at the speed of light. Its transfer of messages and data is also more precise, in its spatial diffusion, not only in terms of the part of the class structure that it wants to reach, but also in terms of the places in the sovereign territory that the messages want to influence.
On the other hand, this transfer of information planned by these new centers of power can only be controlled by them until it is dispersed through social networks, where the power to transfer and communicate is socialized. There, action groups are organized that dominate technologies that are easier to command, although much more complex to produce.
2.
Today the dispute for hegemony in the world integrated by the circulation of “legal or illegal” financial capital", It therefore goes through other paths and occurs internally within the State, such as public-private partnerships and privatization pacts for its essential services, which increasingly integrate large global private conglomerates into the direct commands of State power.
These institutions, which begin to provide essential public services with an easily profitable monopoly aimed at captive clienteles, then establish their imperial power in the institutions. And externally to the State, the dispute for hegemony also involves electoral processes and civil society mobilizations, through political alliances to attack or defend the welfare State and democracy.
The reformist and democratic political relationship with the State, with dispersed social networks and with a planned and centralized intersection of digital political actions, are the new spaces of dispute that social-democratic and democratic-republican parties and governments must prioritize in the fight for hegemony. It is necessary to consider that this work, for the dominant classes and neoliberal factions, is done by the traditional and commercial press, in a “voluntary” (or paid) manner, more (or less) spontaneously, in favor of their savage privatizing interests.
Business groups and the States of the dominant countries, linked to the new world-system of globalization, also in a crisis of hegemony, view this process with clear objectives, simply considering them as a renewal of the opening of a new frontier of capital accumulation and also of accumulation of political power.
The first, to prepare for inevitable wars, the second, to support democratic regimes only within the limits of their accumulation interests.
Their political pacts for forming alliances and their advertising finance contracts openly reflect the systemic agglutination and power of the “upper class” party leaders – with or without a party – who make each moment of privatization of public services a more advanced step in the dominance of political power. Such conduct dissolves – slowly but surely – the boundaries between public and private, suffocating electoral democracy with the use of force by these “de facto” powers.
This interaction allows not only the conversion of the welfare state into a private structure with a monopolistic character to provide essential services at high cost, but also a process of permanent intervention in electoral processes, with the proliferation of wild privatizations, uncritical leniency towards corrupt governments and with the care of the natural environment, as well as in the prevention of catastrophes, generating cash – with privatizations – that serve as financial oxygen for their alliances against the consecrated forms of the welfare state of law.
*Tarsus in law he was governor of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, mayor of Porto Alegre, Minister of Justice, Minister of Education and Minister of Institutional Relations in Brazil. Author, among other books, of possible utopia (arts & crafts). [https://amzn.to/3DfPdhF]
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