Hegemonia e transnacionalização : uma análise exploratória da rede de relações do sistema financeiro brasileiro.

Abstract

In the last decades the financialization of the Brazilian economy has advanced. The predominance of financial capital has been accompanied by a scenario of reduction in investments in fixed capital, exorbitant interest rates, securities with yields above the world average, and increasing profits of the main financial institutions operating in the country. This process is congruent with international dynamics that intensified after the neoliberal turn of the late 1970s and unleashed social and political processes that began to act on various scales and with varying intensities around the world. Given this scenario, it is important to understand and analytically describe the recent network of relations of the financial fraction of Brazilian capitalists, in view of the contact of part of this fraction with transnational processes. To this end, the present study mobilized Social Network Analysis in an exploratory way to understand the networks of relations - national and transnational - among the directors and among the institutions that operated in the Brazilian financial system between the years 2010 and 2019. This analysis is combined with a theoretical discussion that refers both to classical and contemporary theories about Brazilian capitalism, and to theories from the Gramscian tradition about the processes of transnationalization and the formation of a transnational capitalist class. After the analyses it was possible to identify a cohesive network of relations that is organized mainly around class associations - such as FEBRABAN and CNF - central directors who could be understood as in a sense close to what Gramsci identified as organic intellectuals. In this network the internationalized directors are still peripheral, pointing to a financial class fraction more focused on national social processes. Although it is not possible to affirm a hegemony of the financial fraction in Brazil, it could be understood as an essential element in the national historical bloc, mainly because its network of relations extends throughout the Brazilian extended State, putting in close relation public, private and civil society sectors.