Identidade cultural e consciência de classe no capitalismo tardio

Abstract

The study of the relationship between class and cultural identities produced a significant literature. This thesis looks at this relationship in one aspect rarely addressed. From the Marxist tradition, especially one that brings the Marxian thought an ontological approach, the determinants of the general relationship between class and cultural identities in the contemporary world (the late capitalism) are identified. Thus, the Marxist concept of class is revisited in the need to identify how the class under capitalism relates to the whole culture - which is here defined as the sum of mediations produced by humans. After establishing the general relations, we proceed to the particular forms of cultural identification in late capitalism. Here, the discussion of alienation and reification from Marx and late Lukacs is remembered. In late capitalism, the way everyday experience of cultural identifications seems perennial with cotidianização life. This shared experience becomes the basis for the naturalization of a reified form of cultural identification, on which a manipulative process (an anti-praxis, as said Sartre) overlaps the dynamics of the praxis. Finally, it is shown how this shared experience of manipulating identity is the basis for important theories of identity in social theory such as structuralism and poststructuralism.