THE “CREATIVE ECONOMY” AND THE PLACE OF CULTURE IN CONTEMPORARY CAPITALISM
Creative economy; Culture; Contemporary capitalism.
This thesis project exposes partial research results with the aim of analyzing how culture presents itself in the contemporary debate on the “creative economy”, in the time span of the last decades of contemporary capitalism (1970-2020). Culture is a broad category and, therefore, we define its three fundamental cores: 1) culture as a parasitic market niche composed of sales campaigns; 2) culture as artistic-cultural goods and services mediated, in their access, by the private sector or the State, but created by a salaried intellectual and artistic workforce; and 3) culture as a certain way of life, encompassing the ways of being and thinking of social classes and, within them, of peoples and countries, which includes ideologies, consciences and hegemonic or counter-hegemonic values. In this research, culture is studied with an emphasis on the objective dimension from its second nucleus - culture as artistic-cultural goods and services created by the salaried intellectual and artistic workforce -, so that the other nuclei are approached in a transversal. In this objective dimension, it is identified that, at the turn of the 21st century, the term “cultural industry” has been replaced by “creative industry”. Culture is treated by national and international organizations as a segment within the so-called “creative economy”. Due to its insertion in the “creative economy”, emerging in contemporary capitalism in a context of capitalist crisis and with literature originating in some imperialist countries, there is an urgent need to investigate the place of culture in this debate, understanding how Brazil, as country of dependent capitalism, is part of this “creative economy”. In relation to specific objectives, the aim is to: understand the origins of the “creative economy” and the theoretical-methodological bases adopted by hegemonic literature; analyze how the culture debate appears in the “creative economy” in national and international institutions; and investigate the impacts of the capitalist crisis on Brazilian national culture based on national documents on “creative economy”. To this end, from a critical-dialectic perspective, documentary research was carried out, of a qualitative nature and explanatory typology, using materials from various national and international institutions regarding what was conventionally called the “creative economy” at the turn of the 21st century. It is also associated with a bibliographical research of the hegemonic literature of the imperialist countries that created the term and also of Brazil on “creative economy” in its relationship with culture.