Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Textbook The Tea Party Occupy Wall Street and The Great Recession Nils C Kumkar Ebook All Chapter PDF
Textbook The Tea Party Occupy Wall Street and The Great Recession Nils C Kumkar Ebook All Chapter PDF
Textbook The Tea Party Occupy Wall Street and The Great Recession Nils C Kumkar Ebook All Chapter PDF
https://textbookfull.com/product/biota-grow-2c-gather-2c-cook-
loucas/
https://textbookfull.com/product/anatomy-of-the-bear-lessons-
from-wall-street-s-four-great-bottoms-napier/
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-tea-party-and-the-remaking-
of-republican-conservatism-theda-skocpol/
https://textbookfull.com/product/from-the-great-wall-to-wall-
street-a-cross-cultural-look-at-leadership-and-management-in-
china-and-the-us-1st-edition-wei-yen-auth/
Engineering the Great Wall of China Yvette Lapierre
https://textbookfull.com/product/engineering-the-great-wall-of-
china-yvette-lapierre/
https://textbookfull.com/product/gender-on-wall-street-laura-
mattia/
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-populist-explosion-how-the-
great-recession-transformed-american-and-european-politics-john-
b-judis/
https://textbookfull.com/product/huge-deal-21-wall-street-lauren-
layne/
https://textbookfull.com/product/billion-dollar-whale-the-man-
who-fooled-wall-street-hollywood-and-the-world-tom-wright/
CRITICAL POLITICAL THEORY AND RADICAL PRACTICE
Series Editor
Stephen Eric Bronner
Department of Political Science
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, NJ, USA
The series introduces new authors, unorthodox themes, critical interpreta-
tions of the classics and salient works by older and more established think-
ers. A new generation of academics is becoming engaged with immanent
critique, interdisciplinary work, actual political problems, and more
broadly the link between theory and practice. Each in this series will, after
his or her fashion, explore the ways in which political theory can enrich
our understanding of the arts and social sciences. Criminal justice, psy-
chology, sociology, theater and a host of other disciplines come into play
for a critical political theory. The series also opens new avenues by engag-
ing alternative traditions, animal rights, Islamic politics, mass movements,
sovereignty, and the institutional problems of power. Critical Political
Theory and Radical Practice thus fills an important niche. Innovatively
blending tradition and experimentation, this intellectual enterprise with a
political intent hopes to help reinvigorate what is fast becoming a petrified
field of study and to perhaps provide a bit of inspiration for future scholars
and activists.
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
to thank Ruth Milkman of the City University in New York and Michael
Shalev of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, whose panel at the ISA in
Yokohama was the first international forum I presented my research in and
who continued to advise me throughout its development. I furthermore
thank Oliver Decker of Leipzig University, whose book on the Secondary
Authoritarianism became the home of my research strand on the German
AfD that had become homeless in my own concept of the thesis; Helena
Flam of Leipzig University, who discussed large parts of this thesis with me
and helped me sharpen my argument; Arlie Hochschild of the University
of California, Berkeley, who, when I was overwhelmed by the familiarity of
some of her findings in her research on the TP she presented at the ESA in
Prague, at this very same evening and in the middle of the opening party,
began to discuss the results of her (and my) research with me.
I am profoundly grateful to my family, and especially my parents,
Brigitte and Matthias Kumkar, my friends, and my office colleagues at
Metrogap for the conversations, the coffee, the moral support, and the
distractions I needed. I especially want to thank those of you that addi-
tionally even read and commented on parts of this book at different stages
of its development: Anna Danilina, Blair Taylor, Christian Banse, Claudia
Baumann, David Bebnowski, Holger Kuhn, Jan-Felix Kumkar, Kai-Moritz
Kumkar, Karoline Dietel, Kim Holtmann, Matthias Claussen, Micha
Fiedlschuster, Nicholas Dietrich, Robert Ogman, and Sina Arnold.
When I wrote that the analysis group were the most continuous fellow
travelers, I was deliberately leaving aside somebody I wanted to save a special
thank-you for: my best friend and partner in crime, Verena Letsch, who has
endured and accompanied me in this project from the first night on which
I pondered comparing crisis-protests, over stressful field-research in pre-
Christmas New York, up until this very moment. I probably could not have
finished this without you and I am pretty sure I would not have finished it, and
I am deeply grateful for this and everything else you’ve done and been for me.
Last, and most importantly, I want to express my gratitude to all the
participants in my group discussions and to all my interviewees that made
space in their often incredibly crammed agendas to sit down for sometimes
quite personal discussions with a stranger that could not offer more than a
cup of coffee and some cookies in exchange. Even though our politics surely
differ quite substantially at times, I hope that those of you that may end up
reading these lines find, not only yourselves regarded with the highest
respect, but also some valuable insights in my reflections throughout this
work that you have so importantly shaped. I, for sure, have learned more
from listening to you than from most books cited in the bibliography.
Contents
vii
viii Contents
Appendices 251
Bibliography 275
Index 277
List of Figures
xi
List of Tables
xiii
CHAPTER 1
The election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the USA came as
a shock to most observers and commentators. As such, it was the (pre-
liminary) culmination point of a decade of surprising events: In 2008,
the bankruptcy of the investment bank Lehman Brothers precipitated the
worst economic recession since the Great Depression. One year later, the
Tea Party, an explosively growing, right-wing conservative protest mobi-
lization, helped to dampen or to stop the reformist programs of the
newly elected Obama administration and injected radical ambition into
the Republican Party which many had already seen as being in inevitable
decline after Obamas election. In 2011, just as the economic indicators
seemed to suggest that the crisis was over, a group of young, left-wing
activists, inspired by the uprisings around the Mediterranean, began a
symbolic encampment in the heart of the financial district of New York
City. After a short incubation period, Occupy Wall Street spread to cities
all over the USA and many other countries, voicing sharp criticism of ris-
ing inequalities. In 2015, observers of the primaries of the two large
US-American parties began to register signs of anomaly: In the
Democratic Party, the social democrat and self-proclaimed socialist
Bernie Sanders managed to win important primary elections against
Hillary Clinton, who had already been considered the de facto crowned
presidential candidate. The leadership of the Republican Party began to
abandon their favorite candidate Jeb Bush and to support the so-called
Tea Party candidates Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio as contenders against
the rise of Donald Trump—as we know, ultimately in vain.
It is striking how similar the political public reacted to these events:
Almost nobody saw them coming. Early signs were ignored and those that
did warn about them were ridiculed or excluded from ‘serious’ debates.
When the dynamic of the event became undeniable, its scope was first
talked down before the mood quickly turned: The events were now seen
as unprecedented, tide turning, and teaching ‘us all’ important lessons.
And after their momentum faded, they were either forgotten or relegated
to the dustbin of the anecdotic.
Freud theorized that the symptom is to be understood as the return of
something repressed, and such a recurring surprise by seemingly random
events nurtures the suspicion that there is something we avoid to confront
and which therefore continues to haunt us. It is the wager of this book
that this is indeed the case. There is something the public debate was
avoiding to confront and which threatened to resurface in these moments
of shock. And however fleeting their appearance and disappearance might
have seemed, the protests of the Tea Party (TP) and Occupy Wall Street
(OWS) offer a window into the social processing of the hard subjective
and objective reality that subterraneously connects the Great Recession
and the election of Donald Trump—and even points beyond it. The eco-
nomic crisis was no “black swan” that interrupted the normal course of
events out of the blue.1 Instead, it represented the escalation of deep eco-
nomic imbalances rooted in the contradictions of the current state of
global capitalism. In the same vein, these protests should not simply be
reduced to a (more or less) consequential but ultimately random event.
Rather, they should be seen as symptoms of the very crisis they reacted to,
thereby revealing social tensions at the heart of contemporary capitalism.
Given that the political economic contradictions that became visible as the
Great Recession are far from resolved, it is all but surprising that the
wishes, tensions, and grievances that drove these protests surfaced again—
and with force.
This book understands and analyzes the protests therefore as symptoms
of an underlying socioeconomic crisis. Its guiding question, which will be
further theoretically and methodologically nuanced and unfolded in the
rest of this introduction, is: How can the lived experience of the Great
Recession by the social classes that drove these mass protests be understood as
shaping and informing their very protest-practice? Or, the other way
around, how can the protests as a social practice be interpreted as a symptom
of the socially specific lived experience of the political economic crisis?
INTRODUCTION: PROTESTS IN THE WAKE OF THE GREAT RECESSION 3
“generation” was hit by the Great Recession “with the force of a bomb”
and that he experienced “wrenching periods of underemployment” before
he joined OWS (Gould-Wartofsky 2015, 4). However, there is no denying
that he and his fellow occupiers were the ones who articulated the most
vocal criticism of rising social inequality and a general discontent about
the way the crisis was politically and economically processed. Connecting
the criticism to its social roots should therefore not be misunderstood as a
veiled attempt at disqualification qua social reduction. Instead, connecting
it to the social conditions of the possibility of its occurrence hopefully
contributes to the overall potential of a critique of the very social condi-
tions that underlie the suffering and the discontent driving the critique.
In the following, I will sketch out my practice-oriented, materialist
approach through which I address this challenge and the corresponding
reconstructive, critical-hermeneutic methodology employed in collecting
and making sense of the empirical data. I hope that what otherwise might
strike some readers as crude reductionism camouflaged in overly arcane
jargon will instead be understood as a very careful, iterative attempt at
identifying a limited number of essential determinants in the chaotic mul-
tiplicity of empirical ‘facts’ through which the inner logic of the protest-
practices and their relation to the Great Recession presented itself.
Following this explanation of the general theoretical and methodological
perspective, the research question is reformulated through the lens of this
approach, concluding with a short summary of the structure of the book.
are very likely subject to specific, shared, or at least similar, objective devel-
opments of their socioeconomic living conditions. On the other hand,
because of their experienced as well as their (consciously and non-
consciously) anticipated biographical trajectory, they also share similar
predispositions to interpret and act upon these dynamics.
This understanding of socially specific experiences as the key mediating
link between the objective dynamics of the Great Recession and the social
practice of protest shapes the whole perspective of this book. This perspec-
tive is theoretically informed by the theory of practice in the tradition of
Bourdieu. In the research practice of this study, this theoretical approach
implies the use of a reconstructive, critical-hermeneutical methodology.
exposure to the crisis, but that, seen from the perspective of the political
economic crisis, this exposure enforces these differences primarily as class
differences.
This is one reason why, as Bourdieu noticed, the mobilization of social
groups on the basis of other structuring principles than class is most prom-
ising in those cases (such as ‘race’ in the USA) in which the social groups
delineated by these categories at least roughly coincide with the fault lines
of social class (Bourdieu 1985, 13f.) or that scholars in political science
identified the class cleavage as the cleavage most persistently shaping the
political landscape in many European countries (Rokkan 1999, 334ff.). In
capitalist economies, in which the iron laws of commodity exchange and
the ever-extending reevaluation of capital through the exploitation of
labor determine the material reproduction of society, class is not simply
one among several ‘axes of inequality’ but is in its specific logics directly
implicated in the defining basic structure of this society itself. While one
can at least try to imagine a non-racist capitalist society, classless capitalism
is a contradictio in adjecto.
Analytically, the identification of the class-generational units therefore
also functions as the hinge to another level of analysis—that of the struc-
tural crisis of the finance-dominated accumulation regime as the crisis-
protests’ defining horizon. In order to understand and not only replicate
these classes’ experience of crisis and its relation to their protest-practice,
and especially to be able to grasp the critical potential of the protest-
practice, the identification of the classes and their socio-biographic trajec-
tories needs to be analytically reembedded into the changing social
morphology of the direct environment of the practice (which in the case
of more established forms of social practice would be a field) and social
space more generally. This is all the more pertinent, since, other than in
the case of less spontaneous, more differentiated social practices, the pro-
tests in times of crisis cannot be unambiguously identified with a specific
social field. Rather, as discussed in Chap. 6, they unfold at the conjuncture
of synchronized yet relatively autonomous developments in different
social fields. This conjuncture, however, is itself not accidental, but it is the
structural dominance of the economic over all other spheres of social life
that allows for this process of synchronization.
My practice-oriented approach can thus be summed up as the recon-
struction of the overdeterminancy of the protest-practice as arising from
the interaction of the socially specific subjectivations of the development
of the social structure and the objective development itself at different
12 N. C. KUMKAR
points in social space. To fill this rather abstract formula with the concrete
experiences, conflicts, and contradictions that arise at these meeting points
is the task of the book. Before the next subsection turns to the method-
ological implications of this approach, it now seems appropriate to also
write something about the libido sciendi underlying the choice of this per-
spective. In other words, what did I wish to learn and do through this
approach, beyond filling or at least reducing the manifest research gap
identified above?
First, to understand the protest-practice through this lens helps in bet-
ter understanding the genesis and social meaning of some of the often
observed peculiarities, especially of OWS’ protests, such as the occupation
of public space, or its refusal to formulate explicit demands. As discussed
in Chaps. 5 and 7, these elements of the practice can be modelled as result-
ing from different, sometimes even contradicting latent and manifest
interests of the core constituency of the protest, and of those of other
class-generational units that were aligned with—or participating in—the
protests, as well as of opportunities and limitations of the broader social
context in which the protests unfolded. This critical reconstruction allows
for a sober understanding of the social meaning of these practices in the
historical conjuncture they unfolded in and thus to reach beyond the
opposition of making them the signature of the emphatically new—the
“new new social movement” (Langman 2013) that “changes everything”
(Gelder 2011)—and reducing them to yet another instance of “simulative
democracy” (Blühdorn 2013).
Second, and more generally, this practice-oriented reconstructive
approach implicates a stance toward the protests which allows for produc-
tively surmounting the tension between identification with and objectiva-
tion of the protests, between acting as a loudspeaker for (or against) and a
schoolmaster of the protests. Using a term coined by Bourdieu for his own
scientific strategy, I decided to call this project of the “sympathetic inter-
preter”—as Roland Roth praised Herbert Marcuse’s stance toward the
new social movements (Roth 1985, 8)—socio-analysis (Bourdieu and
Wacquant 1996, 95ff.; see also King 2014; Steinmetz 2006). In focusing
on the tension between the different layers of the subjective meaning of
the protest-practice as well as between different social predispositions in
the respective protests and between these predispositions and the objec-
tive social context that these conflicting predispositions unfold in, this
approach contributes to a process of reflexivity and self-understanding
INTRODUCTION: PROTESTS IN THE WAKE OF THE GREAT RECESSION 13
that untangles the social conflicts, discontent, and desires that surfaced in
this short but turbulent phase of critique as protests as a consequence of
the Great Recession.