The Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and the Great Recession

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.

Based on the interpretation of (qualitative) interviews, focus-group discussions and participant observations conducted with activists from the two movements in the years 2012-2014 Refers to available surveys and statistics on the protest movements Of interest to scholars and students working on contemporary capitalism, dynamics of class-societies, and social movements on the right and left of the political spectrum

Autorentext

Nils C. Kumkar is a postdoctoral research fellow at the SOCIUM, University of Bremen, Germany

Inhalt

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.