From Racial Democracy to Credit Democracy: Finance and Public Security in Brazil

Abstract

My aim in this article is to provide a first pass at thinking the social effects of this credit expansion which I do via credit as a form of public security. In the first part of this article, I chart the expansion of personal credit as a form of financial corporativism during PT governments in Brazil since 2003. As well, I trace some of the principle cultural mediations of credit and the role of Rio de Janeiro as the site of the production of these mediations, in particular the form of financial mestizagem elaborated in the 2012 novela Cheias de Charme. In the second part, I turn my attention to the kind of subjects that credit expansion has produced. Here I argue that credit expansion has produced a form of the subject as a pass-thru where the state is less concerned with subjects’ interiority and more with facilitating the seizure of assets. This seizure requires a concomitant expansion of militarization and the threat of state violence which further hollows out the subject. I conclude by returning to Rio de Janeiro to apply these insights to the post-UPP political environment. My overall argument is that credit has functioned as a form of public security in two ways: first, state-linked discourse and cultural productions concerning credit-based consumption have produced new figures of national belonging, while, second, the legal environment required for credit expansion produces subjects increasingly exposed to the threat of state violence