A crise da grande política

HIS CRISIS, which questions politics itself, is not new. What is new is its transformation into a media spectacle; its visibility and the reasons for its evolution, which demand a more analytical view of the problem. Thus, it must be asked: what is the crisis of the Parliament? What is meant by crisis? What is at the foundation of this crisis, which is far from being a word that reveals the seriousness of the problem, and which has become commonplace, waiting for just one more fact to confi rm the thesis of the unimportance of political activity or of its association with amoral and private values? The fi rst realization is that the unimportance of politics as the decision making sphere of public destinies - which is confused as being only the occasional act of voting – is a current phenomenon. This “unimportance” is increasingly amplifi ed by the enormous economic weight of the corporations, which make valueless the controls citizens have over public life. In the government sphere, the decisions of the Central Bank to set interest rates are much more important than most of the decisions of the Parliament. And the Central Bank, unlike the other branches of power of the Republic, is not directed by anyone elected by popular vote. As sociologist Francisco de Oliveira says, there is a broad trend towards “the colonization of the political by the economic. ” The second fi nding is that the advance of globalization and the acceleration of the processes of capitalist accumulation make the symbiosis between State and private corporations much faster than the forms of regulation of politics. In the realm of Parliament and the production of laws, this symbiosis results in a government where everything is done in exception to the rule, in which the Executive governs based on decrees of provisional measures that always force the deputies to respond with urgency. The third fi nding is that politics itself is increasingly reduced to a spectacle. In mass societies, with mechanisms for popular control and participation nearly nonexistent, the weight of the media is preponderant in the defi nition of that which is or is not important from the perspective of the public debate. Today, the media has the power to set the agenda of action for the National Congress. Thus, the form in which politics reaches the common citizen is mediated by a process that places the interpretation of the fact in front of the fact itself. That is, politics, to appear, is naturally framed in the scheme of small politics, or as a scandal that is easily approached through the focus on corruption. There is a preponderance, to use Grasmscian terminology, of small politics over large politics

Political science · Cultural, Media, and Literary Studies · Social and Political Issues · Urban Development and Societal Issues