2015/05/22 by André C. Drainville · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Political Economy and Marxism #Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics #Elite Sociology and Global Capitalism
paper · doi:10.1515/ngs-2014-0026
openalex publication_date 2015/05/22 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Abstract Presuming the hegemony of transnational capital – and thus the perils of action at the global level – critical scholarship has looked with benevolent complacency upon what people actually resisting neoliberal world ordering in our time have been inventing in the course of their struggles. Here, I want to stay a little longer with praxis itself as it takes shape in moments of encounters between global power and its opposite, when world order can still be problematized as if it was at stake. Looking into the gatherings of global crowds, I find a common legitimizing notion. In contrast to the “steady-state” morality of peasants, the moral economy of global crowds is more properly thought of as a morality of situation. It is not about subjectivity but presence. In the second section of the text, I argue for the relative coherence of a “moral and ethical order” of resistance. That we may still be in a time when it appears unnatural for power to be defined outside concrete, historical, situations when presence is possible suggests that domination, not hegemony, should serve as our reference point for thinking about world order and resistance.