Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast

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?