Middle-class factions, not proletarian strata, powered Tea Party and Occupy

Evidence

Public discourse often vaguely and condescendingly identifies “losers” of globalization or modernization as the social base of populist mobilization. Many commentators no doubt have in mind laid-off or embattled industrial workers like Didier Eribon’s father. But if we look at the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street as paradigmatic examples of rightand left-wing antipolitics respectively, it remains striking that historically proletarian strata did not occupy the front ranks of protest, or at least not visibly. What stands out are the different middle-class factions. The German sociologist Nils C. Kumkar, who devoted 62a comparative study to these movements, concluded that two “intermediate classes,” or groups in “contradictory class positions,” were decisive: on the one hand, the traditional conservative petty bourgeoisie; on the other, a historically younger petite bourgeoisie. Behind the Tea Party, Kumkar argues, stood craftsmen and small-business owners whose “economic base was gradually eroded by the process of capitalist accumulation.” The new petty bourgeoisie, by contrast, consisted of salaried employees who “capitalize their knowledge, have a relatively high degree of autonomy in their work and sometimes the power to organize the production process themselves.” In the wake of the Great Financial Crisis, these younger cohorts faced high student debt and bleak job prospects. The core of Occupy was thus made up of the “proletarianized” and “biographically blocked aspiring new petite bourgeoisie,” protesting the “devaluation of the cultural capital they had accumulated”16—a finding that can probably be applied, cum grano salis, to the demonstrators in Spain and Greece as well: academically credentialed millennials who, after the Euro crisis and its accompanying austerity programs, saw little hope of securing adequate employment and soon left their countries in droves. These twin factions of the middle class now vented their displeasure at progressive neoliberalism, with an older middle class tending to resist the progressive component and the new middle class the neoliberal part. — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 188

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: how the ‘losers of globalization’ trope mislocates antipolitical revolt, since credentialed millennial middle classes, not workers, carried Occupy across OECD states.
• XREF: Contradicts the crude ‘populism = left-behind workers’ gloss in much of the literature the reader will be contrasting. — connects to: The 1990s middle class later became the occupy movement’s squeezed core — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 91