Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast

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 Jettisoning outdated modes of analysis that emphasize race vs. class, guest Rudi Batzell illuminates the materialist underpinnings of racialized working-class politics in the U.S.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?

Trish Kahle on Energy Citizenship and Coal-Fired Democracy in the 20th Century U.S.

What do energy consumers owe energy producers? What does it mean to be a citizen in a coal-fired democracy? In this month's episode, guest Trish Kahle reckons with the costs and benefits of coal from the perspective of American coal miners in Appalachia. Starting at the turn of the 20th century, Kahle outlines miners efforts to articulate and, later, revise a coal-fired social contract, one capable of delivering them the benefits of citizenship. Thus, Kahle shows how miners, throughout the 20th century, endeavored to leverage their position as energy producers to make claims on the U.S. government and American citizens, more broadly, related to a range of citizenship rights. These included the right to occupational safety, health, and housing, all of which were, at various points, threatened by coal companies and the U.S. government's failure to protect miners and their families from the devastation wrought by coal.