ABSTRACT
This chapter explains that the participants draw upon a discourse that displays a tension between attributing their professional success to their own agencies, hard efforts, and individual motivations, and citing capitalism as the main or even sole factor enabling their success. Gramsci argued that within shared common-sense beliefs, there exists a nucleus of good sense – which observes and acknowledges contradictions that threaten to render the common-sense belief to become senseless and eventually discarded. A dominant discourse attempts to restrict our notions of agency so that it can only be enacted and recognized accordingly within its system. The chapter reviews that participants interviewed in Times Square, New York and Cedar Rapids, argues that the long-term economic success of their country – the US – has been proof that capitalism works. Capitalism continually seeks to escape limits on its growth.
