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This book analyzes the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street as symptoms of the structural crisis of US capitalism and its class structure. It shows that the protests have to be understood as rooted in the petty bourgeoisie's lived experience of crisis, which also plays a crucial role in current political developments like the successful presidential campaign of Donald Trump. The book explains the Great Recession as an acute phase of the structural crisis of the finance-dominated accumulation regime, identifies the social classes from which the core-participants of the respective protests recruited themselves and the socioeconomic developments to which they were exposed in the years leading up to the protests, and interprets interviews and group discussions conducted with activists to reconstruct the habitus that structured both their experience of the crisis and their resonance with the respective protest practices. It thereby provides an encompassing understanding of the social logicsnot only of these social movements, but of the current political conjuncture in the US.
List of contents
1. Introduction: Protests in the Wake of the Great Recession.- 2. The Structural Crisis and the Emerging Patterns of Class Conflict.- 3. The Demographics of the Mobilized: the Core Constituency of the Protests.- 4. Theoretical and Methodological Considerations: Habitus and Habitus Reconstruction.- 5. Experiencing the Crisis: Results of the Habitus Reconstruction.- 6. Fields and Conjunctures: The Thick Opportunity Structure of the Mobilizations.- 7. The Acid Test: Reconstructing the Occupation of Urban Public Space as a Socially Determined Practice.- 8. Conclusion and Outlook.
About the author
Nils C. Kumkar is a postdoctoral research fellow at the SOCIUM, University of Bremen, Germany
Summary
This book analyzes the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street as symptoms of the structural crisis of US capitalism and its class structure. It shows that the protests have to be understood as rooted in the petty bourgeoisie’s lived experience of crisis, which also plays a crucial role in current political developments like the successful presidential campaign of Donald Trump. The book explains the Great Recession as an acute phase of the structural crisis of the finance-dominated accumulation regime, identifies the social classes from which the core-participants of the respective protests recruited themselves and the socioeconomic developments to which they were exposed in the years leading up to the protests, and interprets interviews and group discussions conducted with activists to reconstruct the habitus that structured both their experience of the crisis and their resonance with the respective protest practices. It thereby provides an encompassing understanding of the social logicsnot only of these social movements, but of the current political conjuncture in the US.
Additional text
“The Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and the Great Recession, is an ambitious and thought-provoking addition to this literature. … Kumkar’s conceptually synthetic and analytically meticulous work makes for a stimulating contribution to nonreductionist class analysis of contemporary movements. It helps us understand OWS and the Tea Party by reconstructing how ordinary citizens made sense of the nameless disruption of capitalist crisis with the instruments of class-specific moral categories, their myopias included.” (Linus Westheuser, Mobilization, Vol. 24 (4), November, 2019)
Report
"The Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and the Great Recession, is an ambitious and thought-provoking addition to this literature. ... Kumkar's conceptually synthetic and analytically meticulous work makes for a stimulating contribution to nonreductionist class analysis of contemporary movements. It helps us understand OWS and the Tea Party by reconstructing how ordinary citizens made sense of the nameless disruption of capitalist crisis with the instruments of class-specific moral categories, their myopias included." (Linus Westheuser, Mobilization, Vol. 24 (4), November, 2019)
