ABSTRACT
Seen from the vantage point of ‘modes of relations to the world economy’, contemporary global politics seems a Manichaean struggle between (1) transnational historical subjects moved by the exigencies of their many campaigns, who hop and skip across the terrain of the world economy, carrying bundles of contextualized issues and, along with these, what Ralph Miliband would have called ‘the actual structures of work and life’, preparing the ground for a successful, self-supportive and self-governing global neighbourhood à la Jane Jacobs, and (2) abstract subjects gathered by globalizing élites in civic coalitions and global goo-goo (good government) clubs, who look to the world economy as a levelled space and labour to create a settled and perfectly efficient place to be administered on purely business principles.2
