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Chapter one draws on histories of suicide and historical studies of industrial labour in order to examine whether work suicide constitutes a new phenomenon reflecting the historically specific conditions of neoliberalism. Despite the poor material conditions of labour under industrial capitalism, there are few recorded cases of work-related suicide. In 19^th century France, suicide was characterised as a marginal phenomenon that affected the most impoverished social groups: the jobless, the destitute or the infirm. The chapter examines the structural transformations that have precipitated a rise of suicides in the workplace and in particular, the shift to a finance-driven economic order. From a source of productivity and therefore profit under industrial capitalism, labour has become, in the contemporary context, an obstacle to rational and extraneous financial goals that needs to be removed. Suicides are the product of differential neoliberal management regimes. On the one hand, suicides affected workers who were pushed to their very limits by management in a bid to increase their individual productivity, economic worth and therefore maximise profits. On the other, suicides affected workers who were pushed out of the workplace as a form of surplus cost.

This chapter pans westward to investigate a single novel, Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902), regarded as the beginning of the Western, an origin story for that national mythology. The Virginian and the Western would seem to have nothing to do with slavery, but as this chapter reveals, slavery supplies the scaffolding for that most American of heroes, the cowboy. This chapter explores the centrality of anti-Blackness in the origins of the Western, engaging with genre theory and Sigmund Freud’s work on jokes. It explains the Western’s appearance against a backdrop of incorporation, finance capitalism, and emerging economic theories of marginalism. Tracing the connections between the frontier economies of the South and the West, and between the slave overseer and the cowboy, it reveals the Western as originating from a fantasy of Black genocide and white supremacy.

This chapter briefly outlines the history of racial discrimination in the rural South and the ways social justice activists continued the struggle for equality in the decades following the civil rights movement. Civil rights legislation failed to adequately address the economic legacies of past discrimintation, which were compounded by the mass displacement of agricultural workers from the land in the mid-twentieth century. Activists’ calls for government intervention to provide employment, income, education, housing, and health care for displaced workers generated strong resistance from regional elites whose preferred solution to the crisis was for displaced workers to leave. The ideological and political struggles that ensued had consequences for all Americans, not just African Americans, and helped shape national responses to labor displacement during the transition from industrial capitalism to finance capitalism in the late twentieth century.