Abstract

As Gramsci put it, enforcing domination in capitalism requires not only means of coercion but also an ability to obtain social “consent”. Metastructural analysis pushes the idea even further. The object of social domination in capitalism is profit as abstract wealth, while the field on which “ruling” (vs. “dominating”) is exerted is the concrete space of use value. Thus the dominant class requires the articulation between, on the one hand, capital-power and, on the other, competency-power, whose relationship to the people as a whole is distinct. This pattern, formed within the context of the nationstate, is only very slowly emerging at the global scale. The key feature of the neoliberal moment, in which a world-state begins to penetrate the world-system, is domination without ruling.