Capitalism’s revenge: critique, response and the third wave of capitalism

ABSTRACT In this paper I will sketch a theory of how normative demands for freedom emerging from the lifeworld both serve to provide new bases of legitimation for capitalism by drawing on underlying normative orders in the lifeworld while simultaneously giving rise to precarity on the part of new classes of workers. I argue that such a theory can provide a means of theorizing recent protests against capitalism (including, for instance, the events of the Occupy Wall Street movement and protests against the so-called sharing or gig economy). My thesis is that the phenomenon Standing identifies as the precariat emerges out of the reaction of the capitalist system to the events of the 1960s, and to available normative potentials contained therein.