Capitalism Hits Home covers Marxist sex work, U.S. drug crisis, class identity and more in Season 5

Capitalism Hits Home is your guide to the ways capitalism affects personal lives: our thinking, our relationships and our identities. 

Listen to or watch Season 5 of this program for all new conversations with Dr. Harriet Fraad, a mental health counselor who writes and speaks on the intersection of politics, economics and personal life. New episodes cover identity politics, the drug industry, abortion, sex work and finding a class consciousness to resist capitalism.

Dr. Fraad started this season with a discussion of identity politics, intersectionality and unity. Continued in an episode on the fracturing of the Women’s Movement, the shows explore the history of identity-based movements for women’s rights, LGBT rights and the history of racism in America. Why did the feminist movement “wanting equality for all morph into an equality for women within a system of ever greater inequality?” Dr. Fraad wants us to understand how identities have been used to divide the working class, and how we find a common identity as workers in the future, while respecting each other’s struggles.

"It was a united revolt of whites and blacks against a class system of ownership and dispossession, so the dispossessed rose up together."

Two episodes already have been dedicated to more deeply understanding two issues close to the feminist movement: abortion and sex work. Bringing a Marxist understanding to sex work, Dr. Fraad argues that “sex is one of those many areas where women are condemned and where exploitation is not condemned,” and we need to change that. The same is true for abortion, where moralizing is a thin excuse for taking away lower class pregnant people’s control over their bodies.

“The right wing is trying to assert male supremacy and white male supremacy and to divide the mass of workers from each other, so that we don't all together demand a more just and economically possible future together. Abortion is an element of class control through controlling women's bodies, and it has always been so.”

One episode details the coping mechanisms of the working class under the falling living standards of the past half-century: depression, dissociation and denial. This desperation is seen in the capitalism-induced opioid crisis: a systematic collusion of big pharma, doctors, hospitals and insurance companies. As a practicing health professional, Dr. Fraad rejects the model of mental health “disease” diagnosis that isn’t founded in evidence and reduces human misery to a pill-pushing, profit scheme.

What we learn on this show is that doing better than capitalism also means doing better in our relationships. Democracy at Work is determined to see an inspired working class heal and change the world for the better. Stream or listen to Capitalism Hits Home on our YouTube channel, website or on your favorite podcast player. 

“What heals people is the determination that we can recapture this nation. We can join other people. We can make it happen.”

We can host conversations like this with honest truths about capitalism’s personal impacts thanks to our audience donations. Consider donating to Democracy at Work with a monthly or one-time gift. Our monthly supporters are invaluable to us, in that they allow us to plan for the future, and commit to bringing you more media from an anti-capitalist and pro-workplace democracy perspective. Thank you.