Petty-bourgeois factions drove Tea Party and Occupy protests

Evidence

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. — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 188

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘biographically blocked aspiring petite bourgeoisie’ protests cultural capital devaluation connects to theories of credentialism and precarity discourse. — connects to: The Tea Party was a product of engineered state-legitimacy crisis, not grassroots spontaneity — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 950; The Tea Party fused astroturfing with grassroots entrepreneurship into a self-propagating franchise — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 908; Occupy mirrored the Tea Party’s anti-government populism while ignoring its commercialization of protest — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 909 (+4 more)