Abstract
Kumkar argues that the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street have to be understood and analyzed as symptoms of the current crisis of US class society and that this analysis also helps to understand other current events like the election of Donald Trump as the president of the USA. He shows that a Bourdieu-inspired theory of practice approach allows for investigating how the specific protest-practices of these protest mobilizations are rooted in their participants’ lived experience of the crisis. A hermeneutic-reconstructive interpretation of these protest-practices therefore opens a window onto the changing morphology of the USA’s class structure. After an overview over the book’s structure, the chapter closes with a short summary of the first explosive phase of the two protest mobilizations.
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Notes
- 1.
The “black swan event” is a metaphor popularized by the philosopher Taleb to describe an event that is originally not expected, then has major consequences, and often gets superficially rationalized with the benefit of hindsight (Taleb 2007). The extreme popularity of his book on the topic in the years of and after the Great Recession is surely no accident. By emphasizing the ‘shock’ of the improbable against the backdrop of the illusion of a control of risks, it captured the insecurity of many people facing the sudden meltdown of the economy. This emphasis on the unpredictable and unexpected, however, threatens to elide that the crisis did not just result from us being unable to fully understand risk, but instead exposed systemic contradictions. To confront this rootedness in objective contradictions would require to avoid the false dichotomy of both hasty rationalizations and of subsuming it under the existential rather than critical-historical category of the unpredictability of the future.
- 2.
OWS did not raise any explicit demands or goals. Measuring the ‘success’ therefore requires attributing ‘objective’ political goals to OWS. Another possibility would be, as Milkman et al. have done, to try to measure the discursive shift in the general public, in which the issues raised by OWS became more topical in late 2011. Another factor mentioned by Milkman et al. is the politicization of a new generation of activists, even though evidence for this remains at the anecdotal level (cf. Milkman et al. 2013, 38ff.).
- 3.
This might be a good point to illuminate the logics behind my use of quotation marks with regard to the use of everyday language. Of course, where it is quoted, it is quarantined by double quotation marks to avoid importing pre-constructed objects of social life into the analysis. However, these pre-constructed objects themselves structure the practices of everyday life and as such of course should also become objects of analysis, even where nobody directly refers to them. The concepts of ‘firmness’ or ‘simpleness’, for example, even though they denote guiding principles of the everyday practice of many TP activists, are not necessarily directly named by them—neither, however, are they scientific concepts (and their practical relevance would very likely be obscured by translating them into scientific terms, since that would eliminate their quality of bundling a multiplicity of social connotations, the “semantic halo”, as Bourdieu once called it [Bourdieu 1991, 22]). Where these objects and object-properties are referred to in this book, this is indicated by the use of single quotation marks.
- 4.
This also extends to the work of scholars who, for example, Crossley, reconceptualize classical social movement theories through the lens of Bourdieu’s theory of praxis. As fruitful as these are in offering a fresh perspective on certain aspects of social movement praxis, they, too, are exclusively focused on single identity and issue-based movements and therefore do not help to critically challenge the pre-constructed object of ‘social movement’ as it is conceptualized in mainstream social movement studies (cf. Husu 2012; Crossley 2002).
- 5.
Even if one abstracts from the macro-social development of increasing social inequality and instead focuses on the positivist counting of protest events themselves, the withering importance of class conflict is not a simple given. Barker has argued that all periods with increasing ‘new social movement’ protest activity were in fact simultaneously periods of heightened industrial conflict. Hetland and Goodwin furthermore argued that at the heart of many so-called new social movements were also conflicts with a mediated or direct link to class conflict. Finally, Biggs has shown (for the British case) that the relative numerical importance of protest events aside the industrial conflict might be a statistical artifact resulting from the way in which ‘protest’ is conceptualized in many surveys. All in all, we might conclude that the diminishing role of class conflict in social movement studies might be more of an interesting question for a critical reconstruction of academic field dynamics than a reflection of any real trend (cf. Biggs 2015; Hetland and Goodwin 2013; Barker 2010).
- 6.
This is not to say that it is the only methodological challenge. As Lorenzer has cautioned, the analyses of objectivized social structures and of subjectivized social structures, even though these two phenomena are mutually constitutive, and even though the analysis of both has to break with the Diltheyian dichotomy of verstehen and erklären, still have to be understood as following different research logics. Since the logic of the analysis of objectivized social structures, however, seems to provoke less misunderstandings, it might suffice to briefly sketch out its proceeding in the respective chapters (cf. Lorenzer 1977).
- 7.
The same is true for general cultural diagnoses such as ‘neoliberal subjectivity’ or ‘colorblind racism’ which at best produce unfalsifiable, essayistic musings and at worst impose a structure of meaning onto the observed practices and interpretations which hinders to understand their inner logics. For example, Skocpol and Williamson rightly caution that the fact that TP members disproportionately agree with the statement “if blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites” must be interpreted with care. And indeed, even though the politics resulting from such a political stance very likely will hurt (poor) people of color disproportionately, my reconstruction of their habitus implies that the logic producing this statement is the unshakable belief that your standard of living unmistakably reflects your work ethics (and interestingly, as Skocpol and Williamson point out, TPers also rate the work ethic of ‘whites’ far more unfavorable than other Americans do). To label this, in consequence no doubt politically dangerous, basic interpretational structure a mere strategy to “prove” one’s “idyllically” “color-blindness” and thereby to deny one’s racism, as Haltinner has done in her frame analysis, means imposing a structure of thinking derived from one’s own understanding of the world onto a practical way of reasoning that developed in a different environment and therefore deprives itself from the very tools for effectively criticizing the resulting arguments (Haltinner 2015; Skocpol and Williamson 2012, 69).
- 8.
“das Alte stirbt und das Neue (kann) nicht zur Welt kommen” (Gramsci 1991, 354), translation NK.
- 9.
CNBC’s Rick Santelli’s Chicago Tea Party 2009. A transcript of the video can be found at http://freedomeden.blogspot.de/2009/02/rick-santelli-tea-party.html (accessed October 8, 2013).
- 10.
The phrase, with which supporters of the Tea Party describe Santelli’s outburst, is a reference to the line “a shot heard ‘round the world” from the opening stanza of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Concord Hymn” and thereby connects the event rhetorically to the collective memory of the US-American war of independence (cf. Chapman 2012).
- 11.
1776 Tea Party was founded on February 20, the Tea Party Patriots on March 10, and Tea Party Nation on April 3 (Burghart 2012).
- 12.
In a vein similar to (and maybe inspired by?) the TP founding myth of the “rant heard ‘round the world”, the OWS media collective that published one of the first books on the movement referred to this incident as “the scream heard ‘round the world” (Writers for the 99% 2012; cited in: Gould-Wartofsky 2015, 79).
- 13.
Research on LexisNexis shows 16 newspaper articles worldwide for the period from September 17 to 23, 2011, featuring “Occupy Wall Street”, most of them smaller side notes, 76 from September 24 to September 30, 225 from October 01 to 07; and 229 for October 14–20, including front-page coverage and extensive commentary (accessed October 10, 2013).
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Kumkar, N.C. (2018). Introduction: Protests in the Wake of the Great Recession. In: The Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and the Great Recession. Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73688-4_1
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