The Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and the Great Recession (Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice)

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 logics not only of these social movements, but of the current political conjuncture in the US.-- Provided by publisher Front Matter ....Pages i-xiii Introduction: Protests in the Wake of the Great Recession (Nils C. Kumkar)....Pages 1-29 The Structural Crisis and the Emerging Patterns of Class Conflict (Nils C. Kumkar)....Pages 31-59 The Demographics of the Mobilized: The Core Constituency of the Protests (Nils C. Kumkar)....Pages 61-92 Theoretical and Methodological Considerations: Habitus and Habitus Reconstruction (Nils C. Kumkar)....Pages 93-108 Experiencing the Crisis: Results of the Habitus Reconstruction (Nils C. Kumkar)....Pages 109-183 Fields and Conjunctures: The Thick Opportunity Structure of the Mobilizations (Nils C. Kumkar)....Pages 185-207 The Acid Test: Reconstructing the Occupation of Urban Public Space as a Socially Determined Practice (Nils C. Kumkar)....Pages 209-229 Conclusion and Outlook (Nils C. Kumkar)....Pages 231-250 Back Matter ....Pages 251-279 Annotation This text analyses 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