AGES OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM

Capital, writes economic historian Levy, is “the process through which a legal asset is invested with pecuniary value, in light of its capacity to yield a future pecuniary profit.” The word invested is an important component, since investment, the trust that the future will reward present outlay, is critical. In early U.S. history, the wherewithal for investment was limited to White men, who enjoyed the benefit of an economy fueled by slaves. Racial domination was central, effected in part by “an assortment of odd tasks that masters and overseers ingeniously invented to keep their slaves busy” when they were not harvesting cotton. The current doctrine—fomented primarily by evangelists and so-called conservatives—that poverty is the poor person’s fault goes back a surprisingly long time. Levy links it to the social Darwinism of the 1870s and ’80s. “What the social classes owed to each other was, essentially, nothing,” he writes of that doctrine. Union membership helped improve the lot of many workers in the decades following, but even so, a certain social Darwinism prevailed, through which one can detect the origins of pay disparity between White and minority workers and, especially, male and female workers. As Levy notes in this detailed, discursive narrative, union political power was grudgingly granted after the owners of capital battled workers endlessly: “Between 1880 and 1930, according to one estimate, U.S. courts would issue no less than 4,300 injunctions against labor union activity.” In time, though, union power would erode as Richard Nixon and other right-wing politicians exploited “white blue-collar dissatisfaction,” a divide-and-conquer motif that continues into the present. It helps to have some knowledge of economics to read this book, though it’s not essential. Levy is an uncommonly lucid interpreter of numbers and theories and a nimble explainer.

A rewarding exercise in understanding where we are and how we got there.