53.1
The Moral Economy Of Global Crowds
In four decades, neo-liberal world ordering has grown into a totalitarian attempt at mining societies like quarries for best practices from which to assemble a global, self-reproducing, social order.
Presuming hegemony, critical theory has not problematized this mutation. 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.
In the first section, I look into three distinct episodes when ‘global crowds’ gathered: the so-called ‘bread riots’ in Egypt (January 1977); the general strike in Barcelona (March 2012), and the ‘V for vinegar’ protests in Brazil (June 2013). From a political point of view, global crowds are never more than mobs. Their myopic rebellions of the belly beg for a new prince to draw them out of themselves. Seen less condescendingly, global crowds reveal common legitimizing notions: a moral (or sociological) economy at work. 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 not about subjectivity placed and embodied, but, more radically, about the possibility of presence in the world.
In the second section of the text, I argue for the relative coherence of resistances as part of a ‘moral and ethical order’, against which capitalist world ordering, for all its hegemonic swagger, remains fragmented and reactive, still excluded from actually-existing social relations.
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.