“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)

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.
Les mer
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.
Les mer
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 notonly of these social movements, but of the current political conjuncture in the US.
Les mer
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
Les mer
GPSR Compliance The European Union's (EU) General Product Safety Regulation (GPSR) is a set of rules that requires consumer products to be safe and our obligations to ensure this. If you have any concerns about our products you can contact us on ProductSafety@springernature.com. In case Publisher is established outside the EU, the EU authorized representative is: Springer Nature Customer Service Center GmbH Europaplatz 3 69115 Heidelberg, Germany ProductSafety@springernature.com
Les mer

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9783319736877
Publisert
2018-04-03
Utgiver
Vendor
Springer International Publishing AG
Høyde
210 mm
Bredde
148 mm
Aldersnivå
Research, P, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet

Forfatter

Biographical note

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