Authors:
- 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
Part of the book series: Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice (CPTRP)
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
About this book
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.
Reviews
“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)
Authors and Affiliations
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University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany
Nils C. Kumkar
About the author
Nils C. Kumkar is a postdoctoral research fellow at the SOCIUM, University of Bremen, Germany
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and the Great Recession
Authors: Nils C. Kumkar
Series Title: Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73688-4
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Political Science and International Studies, Political Science and International Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-73687-7Published: 03 April 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-08836-1Published: 26 January 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-73688-4Published: 21 March 2018
Series ISSN: 2731-6580
Series E-ISSN: 2731-6599
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 279
Number of Illustrations: 25 b/w illustrations, 1 illustrations in colour
Topics: Political Theory, US Politics, Political Sociology