The discourse of propaganda of/about the “new” Social Welfare on digital media: antagonism effects in the relations of capital and labor

Abstract

This dissertation aims to understand the discursive functioning of propaganda of/about the “new” Social Welfare in/on digital media networks, in order to comprehend the tensions of power relations between capital and labor, the (non) sayings and the ideological effects of senses and subjects in this plot, considering the contradictions of the class struggle. We argue that the discourse of government propaganda works under determinations of the neoliberal ideological formation (IF), and this discursive process is affected by the conditions of production and circulation of digital discourse, as well as by historicity. We also postulate digital media as an Ideological Propaganda Apparatus of the neoliberal State (IPAS), which works through language of State to “inculcate” (PÊCHEUX, 2014a) senses of development through the acceptability of changes. The corpus was constituted from an archive of digital materialities of publications collected in 2019 on the page “Previdência e Trabalho” on facebook, on the official website of the federal government, in addition to posts from some journalistic websites, especially from G1 and UOL. As a theoretical-methodological basis, we are anchored in the Discourse Analysis (DA) of Michel Pêcheux, whose analytical gestures are based on the description/interpretation intricacy (PÊCHEUX, 2015). The results indicate that, although the sayings about a “new” social welfare system produce effects of univocal logic, the equivocality is established in the tensions of the confrontations and circulations, producing senses of contestation and resistance to the discourse defended by the government, because in the sayings of a possible “prosperity” are inscribed the non-sayings defense of the interests of businessmen and the loss of rights to the working class.