Industrialização cultural e capitalismo monopolista: uma introdução às origens

Abstract

This dissertation aimed to analyze the economic determinations that made possible the origins of cultural industrialization from bibliographies that deal with the main tendencies of monopoly capitalism. Although cultural industrialization is present in the current reality of the 21st century, involving economy, politics and culture, its origin and, therefore, its study, do not appear today. His investigation began in the 20th century by the German philosophers of the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, with the publication of Dialectics of Enlightenment, in 1947. In this work, it appears with its own meaning under the term "cultural industry", presenting itself, in a central way, as an expression of the advancement of instrumental reason present in the Fordist technique of serial production of cultural products aimed at their exchange value. The concern of the Frankfurtians, however, was not directed towards the material origins of cultural industrialization, its constitution and its development. But, fundamentally, they turned to the social effects on individuals, as a means of controlling, manipulating and integrating them into capitalist society, as it standardizes ideas, predilections and consumption habits. Following this thought, his analytical approach overestimated the power of control of the “cultural industry”, showing himself to be pessimistic in relation to the possibilities of popular resistance capable of achieving an emancipatory critical reason and suppressing the domination of man by man. In this sense, it was noticed that, emphasizing the social effects of the "cultural industry", the German philosophers were absent from analyzes that consider the structural foundation and the historical process of cultural industrialization, based on the particularities and contradictions of monopoly capitalism, although they have not denied the existence of material determinations. Therefore, this investigation starts from the following question: from an analysis of economic determinations, what are the origins of cultural industrialization? As for the specific objectives, the research focused on: i) capture the fundamentals of the economic surplus and the crisis in the transition from the competitive to the monopolistic phase; ii) analyze the fordism as a work process and production of relative surplus value in the constitution of cultural industrialization; and iii) investigate what is the functionality of cultural industrialization for capital reproduction, focusing on sales campaigns. Therefore, in the light of dialectical historical materialism, an explanatory theoretical research of a bibliographical type and qualitative nature was undertaken, using bibliographies that deal with the main tendencies of monopoly capitalism. As an instrument for data collection and production, a reading script organized in axes was used, with application during the reflective reading of the selected works. It was concluded that cultural industrialization was constituted in the period of classical imperialism and was developed in late capitalism. Its original conditions were created in the USA and spread to Europe, especially in Germany, in the 1930s. The main trends of your constitution and development are: i) an attempt to realize the surplus value contained in the merchandise, within the scope circulation, through a sales effort; and ii) need for capital to control new markets. It was also identified that cultural industrialization has a duality inherent to the contradiction between capital and labor. Therefore, it expresses a dialectic between the parasitism of capital, via sales campaigns, and the need for cultural consumption by workers for humanistic artistic services. Such cultural need is not created by capital, but rather by the productive fource of work.