Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast

Mike Glass on the Surprisingly Precarious Postwar Suburbs

Few historical tableaus are more iconic than the midcentury suburbs of Long Island. I can see it now: rows of identical houses, subsidized by federal spending, inhabited by white middle-class heteronormative families 2.3 children, attending well-funded schools. If there's a stereotypical image of the "American Dream," this is it. But after reading Mike Glass' new book, Cracked Foundations: Debt and Inequality in Suburban America, I can promise you'll never think about the suburbs quite the same way. Glass reveals that the way we paid for those homes and those schools—through debt financing on the capital markets—left midcentury suburbs unstable, unequal, and racially segregated. Even in the so-called "golden age of capitalism," suburban life was more precarious than I'd ever imagined. If you're ready to demolish all of the things you thought you knew about postwar suburbia, listen to today's episode with Mike Glass.

Rudi Batzell on Racialized Working-Class Politics in the U.S. and British Empires

This month's episode offers a fresh perspective on an old debate. Jettisoning outdated modes of analysis that emphasize race vs. class, guest Rudi Batzell illuminates the materialist underpinnings of racialized working-class politics in the U.S. and British empires. Employing a transnational approach, Batzell shows, for example, how land reform in Ireland helped set the British labor movement on a trajectory towards more inclusive unionism, while, in the U.S., northern industrialists' ability to recruit landless African Americans from the U.S. south undermined working-class solidarity in the U.S. and lay the foundation for the more narrow craft unionism of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Later, we discuss the anti-immigrant and whites-only policies of labor unions in the U.S., Australia, and South Africa, wrestling with the white working-class movement to restrict immigration. The history presented here contains some hard truths about the difficulties of organizing across fractured working-classes, while also making the case for reckoning with this history as a necessary precondition for building a more equitable and just world.

Leigh Claire La Berge on Why Capitalism Might Be A Joke

If you work at a so-called laptop job, there are moments every day when your work feels silly, pointless, absurd, even fake. What if you wrote an entire book that tried to inhabit and analyze that very feeling? Leigh Claire LaBerge's new book—which is part memoir, part history, with a heavy dash of dark comedy and a sprinkling of Marx—attempts to do exactly that. Drawing on her time working inside of a corporate conglomerate, LaBerge alternatively revels in and eviscerates the inanity of day-to-day white collar life. Late capitalism, she shows, might just be one long joke. The question is: who's the joke on? Workers? Consumers? The planet? Listen to this month's episode to find out.

Bench Ansfield on Arson-for-Profit, Insurance Brownlining, and the Bronx

Arson - which frequently involves the destruction of property - and business are not typically thought to be compatible. Indeed, there is a whole industry - the insurance industry - whose stated business is the mitigation of risk, including the risk of fire. Over the course of the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, fire insurance and fire prevention became untethered. This, combined with other developments, created the circumstances for arson to become profitable for some landlords. In this month's episode, guest Bench Ansfield details the local, national, and international circumstances that helped fuel the rise of arson-for-profit in U.S. cities. In doing so, they show how the Bronx and other urban areas like it served as crucial sites of late twentieth-century financialization via a ground-up history of finance told from the perspective of Bronx residents and community activists. Along the way, we discuss insurance brownlining, community-developed arson-fighting algorithms, and disco.

Kendra Boyd on Black Business and Racial Capitalism during the Great Migration

Take a moment and picture the average person who came North during the Great Migration. Chances are good that you conjured someone who was African-American and working-class, bound for a city in search of a job, say, in a factory or in domestic service. But as Kendra Boyd's new book, Freedom Enterprise, reveals, the Great Migration also saw entrepreneurs moving to the urban North in search of opportunity. Once they arrived in places like Detroit, these businesspeople had to navigate a fraught landscape that was profoundly structured by race and racism. Today's episode tackles everything from female entrepreneurs, to illegal hustling, racial uplift, and urban renewal. The boxer Joe Louis even makes an appearance. And we'll grapple with a big and vexed question: Can you overcome racial capitalism by being a Black capitalist?