Alcances e limites da crítica no contexto da cultura política do consumo

Abstract

Consumer culture, whose roots lay in the final decades of the nineteenth century, has been restructuring itself as a political culture of consumption. In this new phase, corporations are taking the place of politics, while the idea of publicness is concomitantly weakened by consumer culture itself. In this context, this article questions the scope and limits of criticism, focusing on protests that erupted in Brazil, especially in June 2013. It is suggested that these protests can be analyzed from the perspective of a double movement of the political culture of consumption, i.e., both in the way in which they were expressed and how they were, and still are, interpreted by the various media, advertisers and academics. At the end, the idea of democratization by consumption is discussed, at the center of which can be found a crisis of democracy itself.