Occupy protests and the Bourgeoisie

Glenn Reynolds writes:

Professor Kenneth Anderson of American University has suggested that the Occupy movement is best understood as a struggle between the upper and lower tiers of the elite. In recent years, the upper tier, composed of bankers, financiers, etc., has become decoupled from the lower-tier sub-elite of "Virtue Industry" workers in fields like education, nonprofit activism, social work and the like—with the latter feeling betrayed and abandoned.

Mr. Anderson writes: "It was, after all, the upper tier New Class, the private-public finance consortium, that created the student loan business and inflated the bubble in which these lower tier would-be professionals borrowed the money. It's a securitization machine, not so very different from the subprime mortgage machine. The asset bubble pops, but the upper tier New Class, having insulated itself and, as with subprime, having taken its cut upfront and passed the risk along, is still doing pretty well. It's not populism versus the bankers so much as internecine warfare between two tiers of elites. The downward mobility is real, however."

Yesterday I wrote that there are two groups of Bourgeoisie which I called the rich Bourgeoisie and the not-rich Bourgeoisie. There were no members of either group of Bourgeoisie at the Occupy protests because as the beneficiaries of the status quo, the Bourgeoisie have nothing to complain about. (Although many left-leaning members of the not-rich Bourgeoisie had warm fuzzy feelings towards the Occupy movement.) True members of the not-rich Bourgeoisie are quite secure in their class position, and although not filthy rich they are financially well off.

However, a good portion of the Occupy protesters were people who wished they could be members of the not-rich Bourgeoisie, and they blamed the rich Bourgeoisie for their inability to achieve that class goal. But this is why their protest movement was doomed. They didn’t truly think of themselves as members of the proletariat and therefore lacked the class consciousness to succeed in their goals.

Comments

[Fiddlesticks]

Nice to see some rapprochement between paleos and Instapundit.

He seems to have evolved (in a good way) out of his Steve Sailer-baiting days when he affected an enlightened pose just to show off his S-I-L.

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/36467/

Great clueless patronizing line: "we...watched a Nigerian movie...on DVD"

http://pjmedia.com//instapundit-archive/archives/006164.php

[not too late]

The proletariat are productive workers. They are the workers from whom value is transferred. Hippies, hipsters and gov't pseudo workers are not productive, therefore they are not proletariat. They want value transfer jobs in which they are well compensated but don't have to really work doing anything that actually needs to be done.

[dana]

Upper tier= hank Reardon, OWS=his brother

relevant scene starts at 2:24

http://youtu.be/5PK5Sq3bIHY

[Black Death]

Reynolds also commented on the anti-Semitism of some of the Occupy protests, which was condemned by the Anti-Defamation League (http://www.adl.org/PresRele/ASUS_12/6138_12.htm). Did you miss that one?

[Staunton]

Graduate students are the perfect example of the wannabe not-rich (but comfortable and smug) Bourgeoisie who are finding themselves left out in the cold.

Higher education has expanded massively, but the number of professors hasn't, so all those growing graduate programs have been churning out PhDs like crazy, but now there's no place to put them all.

Those grad students thought that a few years of poverty and humiliation would be worth it in the end, but it's just leading to more poverty and humiliation.

Hence, all the wailing and gnashing of teeth over at 100 Reasons: http://100rsns.blogspot.com/