Beyond altermondialisme: anti-capitalist dialectic of presence

That ‘Another World is Possible’ has become the ensign of the left's common sense. For lack of having been thought through, and for want to take it all in, the new reasonableness has given itself a hollow name with a ring to it: altermondialisme. Notwithstanding fashionable certainties, everything about it needs to be problematized, both because, in carrying on the century-old internationalist drive for programmatic coherence, altermondialisme rather stands at the rearguard of the movement than at its forefront, and because in its relationship to it, it reproduces rather than challenges attempts by the World Bank et al. to contain contemporary anti-capitalism and empty it of political possibilities. The text is divided into three parts. In the first, I identify what I take to be an essential political dynamic of contemporary world order: the attempt by regulatory agencies of global capitalism to invent a functional, civil and perfectly apolitical global subject that could serve as an ideal social companion to global-neo-liberalism. In the second part of the text, I work from concepts that originated with the Internationale Situationniste to begin making political sense of contemporary anti-capitalist praxis. In the third part of the article, I extract from the first two principles of articulation that may allow us to understand contemporary anti-capitalism for what it is, without containing or reifying it.