How Capitalism Works: Experiential
Lived experience as a source of knowledge. What has the room been through? What do participants already know from the inside?
See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.
Anchor questions
Sample prompts to open experiential work in this theme. Adapt to your room. See the facilitator guide for general guidance on experiential prompts.
- Walk us through your workday. What do you actually do all day, and how do you feel about it?
- Who owns the place where you work? Who gives the orders, and who takes them?
- Have you ever been paid less than you knew your work was worth? How did you know?
- What do you and the people you live with do to make ends meet that does not show up as a paycheck?
- When money has been tight, what got cut first? What did that cost you?
- Have you ever been part of a workplace or a building or a neighborhood where people organized to change something? What happened?
- What did the adults around you when you were young believe about money, work, and getting ahead? Do you still believe it?
Materials that may help
Experiential work begins from the room. These outside materials extend or challenge what the room can offer. All are free unless marked otherwise. Use them to prompt recognition (“that is my life too”) or contrast (“that is not my experience at all”).
Oral histories and testimonio
- The WFMT Studs Terkel Radio Archive (interviews 1952 to 1997, digitized from 2018). More than two thousand streamable programs, including Terkel’s own reflections on the interviews behind Working (1974), his book of ordinary people describing what they do all day and how they feel about it. The cornerstone experiential archive for this theme. Free: studsterkel.wfmt.com
- The Working Tapes of Studs Terkel, restored by Radio Diaries. Eleven stories from Terkel’s original Working tapes, the switchboard operator, the beat cop, the piano tuner, in their own recorded voices. A polished, roughly one-hour listen that is ready for a session. Free: soundcloud.com/radio-diaries
- StoryCorps (2003 to present). Recorded oral histories from people of all backgrounds, searchable by theme, with collections on work, poverty, and economic hardship and a Callings work-life series. Short enough to play one and discuss. Free: storycorps.org/stories
- Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1938 (WPA, Library of Congress). More than 2,300 first-person accounts by formerly enslaved people, the largest body of testimony on the lived economy of slavery, and the model of the New Deal oral-history method that StoryCorps later echoed. Public domain and free: loc.gov
Worker testimony grounded in a single event
- Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives (Cornell ILR School). More than 350 labor oral-history interviews, plus the widely used Triangle Shirtwaist Fire collection of survivor accounts, photographs, and cartoons. Strong when a session anchors itself in one struggle and lets the room encounter the people who lived it. Free: digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/kheel
First-person testimony as readings
- Voices of a People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove (2004, ongoing project). First-hand testimony, speeches, letters, and songs, from workers, women, and marginalized people usually left out of the record. The book is for sale, but many of the primary texts and dramatic readings are free through the Zinn Education Project. Ready-made testimonios for reading aloud. Free teaching materials: zinnedproject.org
A note on method
Experiential work is not a warm-up. Give it real time. The point is to establish that the people in the room are already knowers of how capitalism organizes their lives, before any theory enters. Outside material should be used sparingly and only to deepen what the room surfaces, never to override it.
Status
This lens has a developed first pass for this theme. Resources continue to be added as the project grows. Contributions welcome, especially Global South testimonio, which the current set is thin on.