Estratégias discursivas na fabricação do consenso político: a propaganda sobre a reforma trabalhista do governo Michel Temer.

Abstract

In this master’s dissertation, it is investigated the discursive production of consensus on the need of the Labour Reform implementation that was approved in Michel Termer’s government (2016-2019), by analysing the government propaganda produced about this reform at that political and historical moment. This research’s main concern is to observe the play of subject positions mobilised, assumed and related in the intradiscourse of the official propaganda. The mentioned play aimed to produce an idea of consensus on the reform in order to gain the support of workers and public opinion. Considering this hypothesis, it is the objective to understand the discursive strategies of the construction of a consensus on the urgency and necessity of implementing this reform in the discursive play of subject positions government, employer and worker, textualised in the Temer government’s Labour Reform propaganda. This research is based on the framework of Pecheutian Discourse Analysis and its ramifications in Brazil, mainly the theoretical formulations about the strategies of discourse (PÊCHEUX, [1969] 2014; ORLANDI, 1998; 1983). The move of analysis will be made from a hit between description and interpretation of discourse sequence fragments related to 11 official video-propaganda about the Labour Reform which represent the discursive process under study. The analysis results showed that, in the propaganda, the subject enunciator, speaking from the social place of the government, produce a discursive unfolding of his position, assuming the places of subject employer and of subject worker, representing and simulating his positions in order to produce an effect of consensus on the common benefits of the Labour Reform. The government subject position is characterized by activating a place of spokesperson and of leader of the whole society. Considering the employer position, it was noticed that it is activated as government’s spokesperson legitimising its position and, at the same time, being legitimised by it. The worker position, however, is mobilised in order to endorse the two other positions. In this case, although being placed in the discourse as appearing to be the workers' spokesperson, the worker subject position enunciates and legitimises the political-ideological positions of both the government and the employer. In this way, it can be affirmed that the mobilisation of government, employer and worker positions, divergent and antagonistic from the point of view of their social and ideological places in the social structure, are presented in the discourse of the propaganda as convergent and non-conflictual. Therefore, through the discursive strategies of anticipation and contradictory alternation of social places and subject positions, it is possible to understand, in the discourse, the production of effects of consensus that attenuate or erase the existence of conflicts and social struggles, in order to impose the dominant interests of the political and business classes on the workers as a whole.