Dívida pública, de uma solução à um problema: a política da técnica

Abstract

How does public debt become a problem? This thesis offers a sociological answer to this question. As the sociology of public problems, the sociology of translation and Foucault's genealogical problematization teach us, problems do not arise spontaneously, nor do they have a problematic nature. Something becomes a problem to the extent that an active effort of problematization is made by the interested parties. The emergence of a problem requires the creation of its own nomenclature, the definition of causes, solutions, culprits and victims. It involves disputes for the power to dictate these definitions to a collectivity, as well as power asymmetries between the disputants. It comprises a network of socio-technical relationships, which associates engaged actors and devices in an audience. Problems are therefore produced from social and essentially political processes. Analyzing the Brazilian case, this work reconstructs the problematization of public debt in the context of its financialization. Starting from 1964, the year in which the domestic public debt market was created in Brazil, I follow the emergence of debt as a problem in the narratives of the relevant actors and in the media exposure of this economic device. The public debt was born as a solution to the problem of non-inflationary financing of the public deficit, in the context of the establishment of the military dictatorship. To the extent that the first signs of crisis of this positive view of state indebtedness appear, the efforts to define the debt problem in a technical way express the effort to remove the political and public character from both the management of the problem and its definition. The analysis ends in 2002, when it is already possible to identify the predominance of the definition according to which the proportion of debt in relation to GDP is considered problematic.