Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast

In his Farewell Address on January 17, 1961, delivered from the White House and aired on national television, President Dwight Eisenhower warned of the dangers of the "military-industrial complex." In the context of the Cold War, Eisenhower acknowledged the need for military preparedness at all times. "We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions," stated Eisenhower. "Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications."

Those implications were not limited to a new level of closeness between the US military and private industry, but extended to the question of how to manage this new global military force and the nature of military service itself. Expanding on and revising popular and scholarly understandings of the military-industrial complex, this episode shows how the post-WWII decades gave rise to a significant reorganization of the US military along business lines, illuminating the military's embrace of corporate accounting methods, scientific management, and other business practices, and the consequences that resulted from such actions. In doing so, it highlights a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the Cold War US military. At the same time that the country touted the superiority of free enterprise, the US military applied business thinking and methods to expand state power and bureaucracy. Contending with this history, moreover, forces us to reckon with the paucity of modes of analysis that endeavor to draw a sharp line between the market and the state.

So often, when we hear about computing or computers, we think about disruption—some technological advancement that signals a radical break with all that came before.

But what if that's wrong, or at the very least, incomplete? Today's guest, Devin Kennedy, argues that the twentieth-century history of computing is marked just as much by continuity as change—even between eras, like Fordism and post-Fordism, that we usually separate with a bright line.

I promise you: it's the only book you'll read this year that'll take you all the way from Taylorism up to the 2010 Wall Street flash crash.

Listen on to learn more.

The story of neoliberal capitalism's emergence in the United States typically begins with Ronald Reagan. By contrast, recent scholarship has emphasized the bipartisan nature of the rise of free market politics. Revisiting the history of mid-century liberalism, historians have shown how significant aspects of the New Deal relied on private sector actors and facilitated, as opposed to constrained, market activity. Moving forward in time, they have shown how New Democrats like Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) further repositioned the party in the late 20th century, moving away from its traditional support for social welfare and labor and towards pro-market solutions in response to economic and political stagnation during the 1970s and 1980s. Black Democrats, when they appear, are frequently portrayed as critics of the party's realignment and neoliberalism more broadly. That is a mistake, according to Danielle Wiggins. In this episode, Wiggins reveals Black liberals as some of the original New Democrats and assesses their role as key architects in constructing neoliberal capitalism at local and national scales.

Rolling Stone: just saying the words conjures a whiff patchouli and pot smoke, flashes of of Jim Morison, Janis Joplin, and Lester Bangs, and strains of the Grateful Dead and Sly and the Family Stone.

But our guest this month argues that the magazine was so much more than that. Rolling Stone was in fact pivotal in the remaking of consumer capitalism since the 1960s. In our conversation, we talk about evolving taste cultures, the co-optation of radical politics, and the past and future of criticism. And don't worry—Lester Bangs is in there too. So fire up your hi-fi, flip on your black light, and listen to today's interview.

The year was 1984, "The Year of the Yuppie," according to Newsweek magazine. Yuppies may have been a classic 1980s stereotype, but they were also a very real demographic as revealed in this month's episode featuring our very own Dylan Gottlieb. Gottlieb explains how hundreds of thousands of highly-educated, young, urban professionals flocked to New York and other cities during the 1980s, transforming the US economy in the process. Yuppies, Gottlieb argues, were the footsoldiers of late twentieth-century financialization, writing the legal briefs and crunching the numbers for the corporate takeovers that fueled Wall Street's rise and the growing inequality that accompanied it. They were also some of financialization's primary beneficiaries. As other Americans saw their wages stagnate and opportunities dwindle, yuppies—and the high salaries they earned—stood out as a lone bright spot in the broader downward 1980s economy, attracting attention from retailers, developers, city officials, and national politicians.

The very dregs. Of the very lowest kind. This is how radical abolitionist David Walker described the freedom accorded Black people in the 19th century. In this month's episode, Justin Leroy explores the economic thought of people like Walker, alongside Maria Stewart, William Apess, James McCune Smith, Frederick Douglass, T. Thomas Fortune, and Ida B. Wells. Despite their prominence in the field of African American history, these figures have rarely been taken up as economic thinkers or theorists of racial capitalism. Treating them as such, as Leroy does, offers an alternative narrative of racial capitalism's evolution outside the slave South, the limits of freedom under capitalism and white supremacy, and a possible path forward through the pursuit of abolition democracy.

For those in the Global North, the twentieth century was the Fordist century—an era of mass production and mass consumption. But as Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff argue in their new book, there's another order afoot: Muskism.

Elon Musk, they show, is an avatar for a whole range of phenomena that have shaped our world: from a vision of white supremacy fostered in South Africa; to a symbiosis between Silicon Valley and the warfare state; to a world where founders become technokings; to a dream of a posthuman future where man and machine have merged into a networked whole. Muskism, they reveal, is a new operating system for the twenty-first century.

Listen in to this very special episode—recorded live and in person—to learn more.

Today, we welcome Jessica Levy, co-host of Who Makes Cents, onto the program—not as an interviewer, but as a guest.

She's here to talk about her remarkable new book, Black Power, Inc: Corporate America and the Rise of Multinational Empowerment Politics. This book traces the strange career of black empowerment: from civil rights protests to the boardroom, and from the streets of urban America to the townships of South Africa. Black empowerment, she reveals, was a protean concept, at once radical and conservative, that allowed different constiutencies to sometimes push for change, and at other times, to co-opt more transformative alternatives.

Along the way, we'll grapple with a big question: is it possible to use corporations to combat the inequalities that racial capitalism has created?

To many, banking remains largely invisible—a hidden circulatory system that allocates capital and credit throughout the economy. If it's worth paying any attention to at all, it's only in moments of crisis—when things clot up, and circulation stops entirely.

But in recent years, business and financial historians have reminded us that banks are far more than quiet functionaries. In fact, they are foundational to virtually every aspect of modern life: from public and private investment, to the relationship of the state to its citizens, to the distribution of wealth, to the geographical apportionment of money. In short, understanding banking is essential to seeing how power works under capitalism.

To help us do that, I can think of no one better to have on than Sean Vanatta, a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow, and the author of the two books we'll be discussing today: Private Finance, Public Power: A History of Bank Supervision in America and Plastic Capitalism: Banks, Credit Cards, and the End of Financial Control. Listen for some big-brained takes on the history—and just possibly the future—of banking in the United States.

Popular histories tend to locate capitalism's origins in Europe, only later moving outward to other parts of the globe. Not so says historian Sven Beckert. Capitalism, he argues, was born global, forged through the connections made by merchants and others from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. In this month's episode, Beckert brings listeners on an epic ride, tracing global capitalism's rise during the past millennium and around the world, from merchant businesses in Aden, onto the terrifyingly violent sugar plantations in Barbados, and, finally, to the rising industrial power of contemporary China. Colonialism, coercion, and, notably, state power all featured prominently in capitalism's rise, helping this radical new way of organizing economic life overcome elite and non-elite resistance to become one of the most powerful forces in human history.

This episode is brought to you by Columbia University Press' Series on the History of US Capitalism and listeners like you.