Based on extensive fieldwork among a working-class neighbourhood in a medium-size town in France, this paper shows how ethnographic inquiry into economic practices enables us to better understand the complex articulations between political beliefs and behaviours. Considering that practical relationships to social world, as developed in economic transactions, are constitutive of ordinary relationships to politics, I demonstrate that focusing on how political opinions are discursively expressed is not enough to fully capture how people concretely deal with power and authority in their everyday lives. More precisely, the paper will put forward that highly politicized beliefs and critical discourses against the established order can actually occult attitudes of docility and resignation with regard to this order. I investigate the case of a poor, working-class family which, in spite of its critical stances acquired through a deep political socialization within Communist networks, does abide by unjust rules and submit to authority in their daily experiences of economic domination. This mixture of politicized discourses and practical relationships to domination leads us to elaborate a reflexion about ordinary politics which are neither apathy, neither resistance.
