The Moral Economy of Global Crowds: Egypt 1977, Brazil 2013

Abstract

AbstractPresuming 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.