Max Haiven's Blog, page 10

“Orcas are not taking nature’s revenge, but we should.” in ROAR

My essay on endangered whales attacking boats in the Strait of Gibraltar has been published by ROAR Magazine here and below.

Here is also an audio version:

Last week wildfires raged mercilessly on America’s Pacific coast and the Gulf of Mexico continued to endure an almost unprecedented frequency of hurricanes and tropical storms. But it was across the ocean, in the Strait of Gibraltar, that we saw one of the most dramatic and tragic examples of capitalism’s climate chaos: a gravely endangered community of orcas attacking boats, as if in a coordinated but reckless fury.

Scientists who have dedicated their lives to studying this hyper-intelligent whale species are baffled and alarmed at this highly unusual behavior. They have risked a cardinal sin of biology: attributing human-like (anthropomorphic) explanations to animal behavior, describing the animals as  “angry,” “pissed off” and even vindictive.

The orcas have every reason to be: their habitat has been interrupted by increasingly busy global shipping lanes. In 2014, the 13 kilometer-wide strait which separates the European and African continents, saw over 110,000 vessels representing half of the world’s maritime trade, a third of its oil and gas and 80 percent of the goods and gas consumed by the EU passing through its waters.

On top of the massive disturbance of gargantuan tankers, the orcas have other problems. Bluefin tuna fishers from Spain and Portugal resent the onerous and costly measures they are forced to take to protect the endangered whales. They often look the other way as fishing lines and nets ensnare or injure the animals, or use various weapons to scare them off their prey.

These and other factors — warming and acidifying oceans, for instance — have affected the orcas for years, diminishing their local population to a mere 50 souls. But it seems to have been the uptick in ocean-going traffic amidst the relaxation of lockdown, notably the return of pleasurecraft and ferries, that has driven the orcas to what appears to many observers to be a kind of suicidal vengeance. They are coordinating ramming attacks on ships much larger than them, even conscripting precious juvenile whales to the cause.

The enduring appeal of the “revenge of nature”

Those of us whose hearts break almost daily to witness the ecocidal destruction that capitalism is wreaking on the planet’s animals and ecosystems might be forgiven for saluting these cetacean avengers. They might appear to us like grimly determined cinematic super heroes, gallantly if tragically fighting one last battle to defend their home and their species from annihilation.

Along with the horrific fires on the Pacific coast, such images encourage us to envision the long-overdue “revenge of nature” itself, the moment when some sort of planetary ecological consciousness finally rises up and gives us humans what is coming to us. In the early days of the ongoing pandemic, this narrative was mobilized by no less than Pope Francis to explain how our sinfully ecologically destructive ways created the conditions for a zoomorphic virus like SARS-Cov2.

There is a tempting neatness to this narrative, and god knows that, by any measure, what we have done to the planet in the name of “progress” and profit deserves revenge. We have also literally seen this countless times before, from sci-fi cult classics to the subgenre of animal horror — including, notably, the 1977 film Orca — to blockbusters like Jurassic Park or Avatar. Stories about nature’s revenge — or revenge on behalf of nature — are familiar and satisfying. Apropos of whales, the fascinating classic Moby-Dick is ultimately about the revenge of nature in the form of the malicious eponymous white whale.

But for those of us who hope to see the mobilization of humanity towards the end to this system of ecological destruction, the revenge of nature story does not do us good service. Ultimately, it reproduces many of the fundamental ideological mistakes and mystifications that power and justify ecocidal capitalism in the first place.

It is capitalism, not humans

First, much like the charismatic term “the anthropocene,” the “revenge of nature” misidentifies the source of the problem as humanity in general. The real culprit is the particular system of global human and environmental exploitation and disposability: capitalism.

The reality is that we humans have, throughout our diverse history, found many ways of living in dynamic balance with natural forces. For many Indigenous civilizations, for instance the Anishinaabe on whose lands I live today, this relationship with non-humans is a central part of an ethical, political, cultural and spiritual system.

Capitalism is by far the most profoundly destructive of several modern economic systems that have despoiled the earth’s ecosystems. And unlike other systems — for all their many faults — capitalism has proven itself to be completely, disastrously ill-equipped to manifest the kind of coordination that would be necessary to halt ecological destruction. In a nutshell, this system drives each nation, industry and firm to compete with one another to avoid meaningful environmental cooperation and regulation in the name of preserving and accelerating accumulation.

By misidentifying “humanity” as the perpetrator of capitalism’s crimes we trade in cheap misanthropy, imagining that it was somehow our tragic destiny to despoil our home. Not only is this profoundly convenient for the systemic and corporate forces of ecological destruction, it traps us in a kind of self-loathing political stasis.

“Nature” does not exist

Second, the “revenge of nature” story continues to perpetuate the unhelpful idea that humanity and nature are fundamentally opposed. As Jason W. Moore notes, this has long been the fundamental myth that has animated the profound and destructive arrogance of colonial, patriarchal and capitalist worldviews. These were rooted in Christian ideologies that framed humanity as elevated above and separate from nature, endowed with a unique, Godly soul and entitled to make use of “nature” as it saw fit.

Instead of seeing the human animal as one that has always transformed its environment and been transformed by its environment, this dualistic worldview made the abstract notion of “nature” a subordinate but also a threatening force. As Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies observed decades ago, within that ideology, women, non-Europeans, the poor and the disabled were considered closer to nature than the idealized wealthy, educated white man and treated accordingly: objects of pleasure, use and disposal.

If nature can be said to be taking revenge on humanity then, necessarily, nature and humanity are diametrically and fundamentally opposed. As I have argued elsewhere, the powerful always fear the revenge of those whom they oppress. They do so at exactly the same time, and to the same proportion, as they use a kind of needless, warrantless revenge to reproduce and defend their power through policing, repression and punishment. Oppressors project onto the oppressed a capacity and desire for revenge that is the mirror image of the daily, normalized vengeful violence that holds a system of oppression in place.

So it is with the revenge of nature story: we project onto “nature” the kind of ruthless vengeance that is the grim reflection of the vengeance “humanity” has taken on “nature,” and in so doing we reaffirm precisely the myths that enabled this vengeance in the first place.

Human narcissism

This leads to the third problem, revenge of nature narratives narcissistically projects human intentions and behavior onto other animals. This the effect of simplifying what are complex and interwoven ecological phenomena.

Revenge is, as James Baldwin so wisely put it, a “human dream.” It is the name we have given to the particularly human combination of premeditated malice, unanswered injustice and moral outrage. Do other animals take revenge? We do appear to have evidence that some species that we consider intelligent, including other primates and cetaceans, sometimes undertake what appears to us as retributive actions. Many of us have house pets that we would swear take revenge for idle neglect or other petty crimes, throwing up hairballs on the bed or shredding our favorite shoes. But to call this “revenge” is to project onto other animals a complex “human dream” in a way that is inaccurate and often unhelpful.

As in the case of the vindictive Gibraltar orcas, revenge offers us a profoundly simplified explanation for what is, if we are to trust those scientists who have dedicated their lives to the whale’s care and study, much more complicated. We simply do not know why the orcas are acting the way they do, and if we have learned anything about ecosystems and their impacts on animal behavior it is that they are profoundly complex.

As Donna Harawy makes clear, our fate as a species, and the fate of thousands of other species, depends on us humans coming to terms with the complexity of natural systems and their dense, beautiful networks of interreliance, one indicator of which is animal behavior. Simply projecting our own narratives of revenge, cast in the forge of human culture, onto animals as a convenient explanation for how we feel about animals’ behavior is no help at all.

Big nature as conspiracy theory

This leads to the final problem with this revenge of nature story: it creates a kind of supernatural force called “nature” that somehow, in its global totality, with a supernatural intelligence, coordination and intention,“takes revenge.”

Leaving aside some of the more spiritualist takes on the Gaia Hypothesis, there is no credible evidence for such a God-like, all-encompassing entity. Indeed, our attraction to imagining — explicitly or implicitly — that there is such a “big nature” out there, capable of plotting and exacting revenge, is very much like the kinds of anti-scientific conspiracy theories that today haunt the globe. In all cases, some supernatural or all-powerful force is attributed with suprahuman power. Like other conspiracy theories, this notion of nature is profoundly demobilizing.

Why? It would be tempting to imagine that the looming threat of nature’s revenge would scare us humans straight and force us to realize that our ecocidal actions will lead to our doom. But when has this actually worked, outside of fiction and film? This approach makes a fundamental error in its theory of change, assuming that, just as “nature” must have “woken up” and taken up its sword, so too must now humanity come together and change its ways.

But who is this “humanity”? The global supermajority of scientists have been warning “us” for decades about the impacts of our actions and no meaningful action has been taken. Governments, with a handful of exceptions, are so beholden to capitalist forces within their own nations and around the world they have, in spite of some pretty words, squandered those decades.

Humanity as a whole will not “wake up” unless and until it mobilizes and organizes with clarity, intention and intelligence through ungovernable grassroots movements capable of bringing capitalism to its knees.

That goal, however, is ill-served by the “revenge of nature” narrative because it reaffirms one of two demobilizing ideas. First, if nature is to take revenge then why do we humans need to rise up? Will it not take care of the problem for us? Second, perhaps we simply deserve this revenge? Perhaps we are such poisoned and poisonous beasts that we deserve annihilation.

As has been so often said, it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. In a sense we fantasize about some kind of vengeful “nature” as a kind of collective death drive, a lust for obliteration that stems from our unwillingness to overcome some deep contradiction.  We yearn for the annihilation we believe we deserve, precisely to excuse ourselves from the hard work of preventing that fate through collective action.

Now you might rightly point out that very few people actually believe in the strong version of this argument, that “nature” is a superhuman intelligence that is actually intentionally taking revenge. You might argue that advocates use this narrative for dramatic purposes to marshal public sympathy, interest and solidarity.

Perhaps so, but my argument remains that this narrative is profoundly unhelpful: it does not meaningfully cultivate sympathy, interest and solidarity, let alone mobilize action or organization. Rather, it reaffirms many of the ideological stories that have led us to this point: the recasting of capitalism’s crimes as humanity’s fate, creating a false distinction between humanity and nature, and projecting onto nature convenient narratives rather than striving for deep understanding.

The “revenge of nature” narrative contributes to a doomscrolling obsession with our own helplessness in the face of the destructive rampage of a capitalist system we have created.

Avenging nature?

The orcas are not taking nature’s revenge. But we can, and we should. We should avenge the destruction of our kindred species and our fellow humans at the hands of capitalism. We should do so by abolishing that system before it can continue its own reckless, relentless revenge.

We have heard all too much about climate grief. What of climate vengeance? As the late, great proletarian troubadour Utah Phillips put it “The earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and .” Yet I do not think that isolated acts of revenge against individuals will actually transform things. Capitalism as a system makes every person completely replaceable, even at the top. Yesterday’s CEO and tomorrow’s CEO are the same.

What, however, would it mean to avenge nature? Elsewhere I have suggested that while revenge fantasies — like the “revenge of nature” narrative — are profoundly demobilizing, so too is the almost universal insistence on what I call “reconcilophelia”: our love of just-so stories of forgiveness that substitute the moral transformation of individuals for real systemic change.

An avenging imaginary, by contrast, holds fast to our fury as a grounds for solidarity. A revenge fantasy that dreams we might take the oppressive, coercive and destructive power of capitalism — the masters’ tools — for our own in the name of justice. By contrast, an avenging imaginary recognizes something more profound: we must transform power and develop new forms of life together. We must abolish the systemic sources of ecological violence, not simply its individual agents.

In the case of avenging nature, this can only mean overturning capitalism as a whole, including its profoundly unhelpful ideological infrastructure.

The post “Orcas are not taking nature’s revenge, but we should.” in ROAR appeared first on Max Haiven.

Thirteen Theses Toward a Materialist Theory of Revenge Capitalism

My short essay, “Thirteen Theses Toward a Materialist Theory of Revenge Capitalism,” has appeared in a new edited collection: Challenging the Right, Augmenting the Left
Recasting Leftist Imagination, edited by Robert Latham A.T. Kingsmith Julian von Bargen and Niko Block and published this month by Fernwood, along with many other excellent contributions. This piece is a kind of 12-page tour of key themes in my recently published book Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts now available from Pluto.

You can download the PDF here: https://maxhaiven.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Haiven-revengetheses_augmenting.pdf

The post Thirteen Theses Toward a Materialist Theory of Revenge Capitalism appeared first on Max Haiven.

“Thirteen Theses Toward a Materialist Theory of Revenge Capitalism”

My short essay, “Thirteen Theses Toward a Materialist Theory of Revenge Capitalism,” has appeared in a new edited collection: Challenging the Right, Augmenting the Left

Recasting Leftist Imagination, edited by Robert Latham A.T. Kingsmith Julian von Bargen and Niko Block and published this month by Fernwood, along with many other excellent contributions. This piece is a kind of 12-page tour of key themes in my recently published book Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts now available from Pluto.

You can download the PDF here: https://maxhaiven.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Haiven-revengetheses_augmenting.pdf

The post “Thirteen Theses Toward a Materialist Theory of Revenge Capitalism” appeared first on Max Haiven.

“Art, debt, capitalism and revenge” lecture at Slade

A video of an illustrated lecture I gave (virtually) at The Slade School at UCL in May.  It offers something of an overview of my work to date, encompassing, in a short 50 minutes my books The Radical Imagination, Cultures of Financialization, Art after Money, Money after Art and Revenge Capitalism.

The post “Art, debt, capitalism and revenge” lecture at Slade appeared first on Max Haiven.

Revenge Capitalism conversation with Marc Garrett (video)

I spoke with scholar and Furtherfield co-founder and co-director Marc Garrett as part of RadicalxChange‘s 2020 online conference. We discuss many of the key themes in my book Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts.

The post Revenge Capitalism conversation with Marc Garrett (video) appeared first on Max Haiven.

“Revenge Spending” Won’t Get Us Out of a Crisis of Racial Capitalism

Novara has published a short essay “‘Revenge Spending’ Won’t Get Us Out of a Crisis of Racial Capitalism”

Like the commodification of revenge culture, the instrumentalisation of revenge politics by the far-right preys upon and offers a false solution to the sense of hopelessness, meaninglessness and betrayal that life under neoliberalism generates. It does so by drawing on a deep reservoir of racist and xenophobic vitriol that is our inheritance from centuries of colonialism and imperialism that divides and organises humanity into hierarchies based on the fundamental principle of white supremacy.

Late capitalism not only produces a deep sense of alienation and resentment within each of us, but also offers false and self-defeating antidotes to it. The latest example to make headlines is the rise of so-called revenge spending : a term first popularised on Chinese social media to describe binge-buying by consumers emerging from the boredom of lockdowns.

In the UK, for instance, the Telegraph recently reported the concerns that physical distancing regulations might prevent luxury retailers from adequately accommodating the eager consumers lined up at their doors, with grave implications for the nation’s economic recovery.

If this sounds preposterous or exotic to you it might be because you are among the majority of people (especially the young and racialized) whom the pandemic, and the government response to it, has made poorer, unemployed or more precarious, with little access to the kind of disposable income that would allow such ‘retail therapy’.

This hasn’t prevented neoliberal economists and the capitalist media from musing about revenge spending as a potential ray of light in an otherwise gloomy economic climate. Indeed, it was recently reported that the UK government was considering offering consumers a £500 voucher (£250 for children) to spend in face-to-face retail and hospitality transactions as a means to boost the economy.

Like George Bush’s advice to Americans to go shopping in the wake of 9/11, the command to ‘get back to normal’ and start ‘revenge spending’ in the midst of a global pandemic reveals the way our lives and society are so deeply embedded in consumerism that any interruption to it is understood to have catastrophic economic, social and psychological impacts.

But why revenge? Revenge for what and against whom?

Revenge culture.

Feelings of vengefulness are bred in us by neoliberal capitalism, a system that is itself vengeful. Neoliberal society is experienced by most of us as a set of profoundly unfair, inexplicable and disconnected humiliations. It exhorts us to see ourselves as competitive free agents ’empowered’ to skillfully manage debt, risk and opportunity.

But for the majority of workers, debt and risk are unmanageable and the promise of opportunity or fairness feels everywhere foreclosed. We blame ourselves for our failures (leading, among other things, to skyrocketing mental illness), but we also blame others. Capitalism produces a kind of spirit of vengeance, which it then parasitically feeds on in the commodification of what I call revenge culture.

Revenge shopping is an example: the same system that causes our sufferings offers us false fantasies and practices of toothless revenge that, ultimately, simply reproduce that very system.

Perhaps this is easiest to see in Hollywood film and television. Quentin Tarantino’s films, in particular Inglorious Basterds (about a WWII team of Nazi-hunting Jewish commandos) and Django Unchained (about a former slave saving his wife from a sadistic master), offer us voyeuristic and extremely violent individualised revenge fantasies, marketed, as several authors note, towards a generally white imagination. Both films unhelpfully cast racism in the garb of hyperbolic evil with blood dripping from its fangs, and the subsequent revenge taken against it as individualistic violence.

In reality, however, racism kills with bureaucratic and institutional punctuality and is stitched into the fabric of the economic system: a system that I characterise as taking a long, relentless revenge on working and racialised people. Avenging its crimes and cruelties is, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor shows, a matter of the slow and difficult work of building movements for systemic transformation.

Who benefits from Tarantino’s lucrative and seductive revenge fantasies? And why, when we are told peace and justice reign under the global capitalist market, are we so obsessed with them? In part, they give expression to feelings that an alienating and exploitative system itself generates within us, feelings that are a reflection of its own twisted, vengeful logic.

Revenge politics.

Although we should expect little more from an entertainment industry shaped by corporate and financial concerns, revenge culture is also bound up in politics.

Revenge politics takes many forms, but is likely most familiar in the sneering, smug and retributive ethos that has animated the recent ascendency of the far-right, not only in the US and UK, but in Hungary, India, Brazil, the Philippines and more. In all cases, revanchist politicians and allied media have advanced a narrative of persecuted, sidelined, and silenced majorities made ‘aliens in their own land’, rising up against the ‘foreigners’ who made them so.

The vengeful rhetoric of (white) Briton’s ‘taking back their country’ through Brexit, or Trump’s threat to “Make America Great Again,” resonates with revenge culture to produce a revenge politics characterised by the vindictive political sadism of the Windrush scandal or the US policy of child detention for those presumed to have crossed its southern border illegally.

Like the commodification of revenge culture, the instrumentalisation of revenge politics by the far-right preys upon and offers a false solution to the sense of hopelessness, meaninglessness and betrayal that life under neoliberalism generates. It does so by drawing on a deep reservoir of racist and xenophobic vitriol that is our inheritance from centuries of colonialism and imperialism that divides and organises humanity into hierarchies based on the fundamental principle of white supremacy.

Revenge capitalism.

But the heinous, spectacularised forms of political revenge can often overshadow the slower and more insidious vengefulness of neoliberal policies, which abandon whole swathes of the population — usually, those already made vulnerable by racial capitalism—to suffer and die.

The institutionalised murder of the largely poor, migrant and racialised people of Grenfell Tower three years ago, or the way that the mortality rates of the Covid-19 pandemic disproportionately falls on the poor, racialised and marginalised, speak to the way that an economic system itself can be vengeful.

These disasters, which targeted those whose lives were already made vulnerable by racial capitalism, were decades in the making: the anonymous and unintended but predictable and monstrous outcome of a system steeped in warrantless, unearned retribution. Responsibility for the government policies that sustained and created the conditions of this economic revenge are not monopolised by the right. Would-be centrist and liberal politicians, who today are so keen to sanctimoniously denounce the rise of incivility, resentment and populism, are equally the accomplices in a revenge capitalism that breeds revenge politics.

Revenge capitalism is a system driven to extremes by its own crises and contradictions. A world on fire, succumbing to climate collapse, riven with wars large and small, and haunted by unpayable debts, is a kind of revenge that soulless, vampiric capitalism takes on the very human species on which it depends, for no rational or justifiable reason.

Beyond revenge spending.

So revenge spending isn’t just a weird quirk of human behaviour. On one level, It is the kind of activity we might expect of people who have been steeped in a culture of endless consumerism and alienation as lockdowns lift. It is a sad substitute for the kind of connection and social intercourse we miss so dearly in the days of rigid isolation and fear of contagion, but that is also stolen from us by a capitalist life of work, worry and fear. On another level, though, the weird, targetless, self-defeating ‘revenge’ of this spending reflects something much deeper, darker and more dangerous.

Simply put, capitalism will endlessly produce false solutions to its own crises. These solutions will only beget further, deeper and more dangerous crises. Revenge spending is one particularly transparent false solution. It offers the narcotic of consumerism as a cure for a systemic and structural capitalist disease of which consumerism, itself, is part. Beyond the fact that not all of us can afford this therapy, there is a deeper problem: capitalism ravages our bodies and minds, offering us fantasies of individual fulfilment or retribution as compensation.

The task before us is to dream otherwise, and avenge what capitalism has done, and is doing, to people and the planet by making those dreams real.

Max Haiven is Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice at Lakehead University. His most recent book is Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts.

The post “Revenge Spending” Won’t Get Us Out of a Crisis of Racial Capitalism appeared first on Max Haiven.

‘Revenge Spending’ Won’t Get Us Out of a Crisis of Racial Capitalism at Novara

Novara has published a short essay “‘Revenge Spending’ Won’t Get Us Out of a Crisis of Racial Capitalism”

Like the commodification of revenge culture, the instrumentalisation of revenge politics by the far-right preys upon and offers a false solution to the sense of hopelessness, meaninglessness and betrayal that life under neoliberalism generates. It does so by drawing on a deep reservoir of racist and xenophobic vitriol that is our inheritance from centuries of colonialism and imperialism that divides and organises humanity into hierarchies based on the fundamental principle of white supremacy.

Late capitalism not only produces a deep sense of alienation and resentment within each of us, but also offers false and self-defeating antidotes to it. The latest example to make headlines is the rise of so-called revenge spending : a term first popularised on Chinese social media to describe binge-buying by consumers emerging from the boredom of lockdowns.

In the UK, for instance, the Telegraph recently reported the concerns that physical distancing regulations might prevent luxury retailers from adequately accommodating the eager consumers lined up at their doors, with grave implications for the nation’s economic recovery.

If this sounds preposterous or exotic to you it might be because you are among the majority of people (especially the young and racialized) whom the pandemic, and the government response to it, has made poorer, unemployed or more precarious, with little access to the kind of disposable income that would allow such ‘retail therapy’.

This hasn’t prevented neoliberal economists and the capitalist media from musing about revenge spending as a potential ray of light in an otherwise gloomy economic climate. Indeed, it was recently reported that the UK government was considering offering consumers a £500 voucher (£250 for children) to spend in face-to-face retail and hospitality transactions as a means to boost the economy.

Like George Bush’s advice to Americans to go shopping in the wake of 9/11, the command to ‘get back to normal’ and start ‘revenge spending’ in the midst of a global pandemic reveals the way our lives and society are so deeply embedded in consumerism that any interruption to it is understood to have catastrophic economic, social and psychological impacts.

But why revenge? Revenge for what and against whom?

Revenge culture.

Feelings of vengefulness are bred in us by neoliberal capitalism, a system that is itself vengeful. Neoliberal society is experienced by most of us as a set of profoundly unfair, inexplicable and disconnected humiliations. It exhorts us to see ourselves as competitive free agents ’empowered’ to skillfully manage debt, risk and opportunity.

But for the majority of workers, debt and risk are unmanageable and the promise of opportunity or fairness feels everywhere foreclosed. We blame ourselves for our failures (leading, among other things, to skyrocketing mental illness), but we also blame others. Capitalism produces a kind of spirit of vengeance, which it then parasitically feeds on in the commodification of what I call revenge culture.

Revenge shopping is an example: the same system that causes our sufferings offers us false fantasies and practices of toothless revenge that, ultimately, simply reproduce that very system.

Perhaps this is easiest to see in Hollywood film and television. Quentin Tarantino’s films, in particular Inglorious Basterds (about a WWII team of Nazi-hunting Jewish commandos) and Django Unchained (about a former slave saving his wife from a sadistic master), offer us voyeuristic and extremely violent individualised revenge fantasies, marketed, as several authors note, towards a generally white imagination. Both films unhelpfully cast racism in the garb of hyperbolic evil with blood dripping from its fangs, and the subsequent revenge taken against it as individualistic violence.

In reality, however, racism kills with bureaucratic and institutional punctuality and is stitched into the fabric of the economic system: a system that I characterise as taking a long, relentless revenge on working and racialised people. Avenging its crimes and cruelties is, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor shows, a matter of the slow and difficult work of building movements for systemic transformation.

Who benefits from Tarantino’s lucrative and seductive revenge fantasies? And why, when we are told peace and justice reign under the global capitalist market, are we so obsessed with them? In part, they give expression to feelings that an alienating and exploitative system itself generates within us, feelings that are a reflection of its own twisted, vengeful logic.

Revenge politics.

Although we should expect little more from an entertainment industry shaped by corporate and financial concerns, revenge culture is also bound up in politics.

Revenge politics takes many forms, but is likely most familiar in the sneering, smug and retributive ethos that has animated the recent ascendency of the far-right, not only in the US and UK, but in Hungary, India, Brazil, the Philippines and more. In all cases, revanchist politicians and allied media have advanced a narrative of persecuted, sidelined, and silenced majorities made ‘aliens in their own land’, rising up against the ‘foreigners’ who made them so.

The vengeful rhetoric of (white) Briton’s ‘taking back their country’ through Brexit, or Trump’s threat to “Make America Great Again,” resonates with revenge culture to produce a revenge politics characterised by the vindictive political sadism of the Windrush scandal or the US policy of child detention for those presumed to have crossed its southern border illegally.

Like the commodification of revenge culture, the instrumentalisation of revenge politics by the far-right preys upon and offers a false solution to the sense of hopelessness, meaninglessness and betrayal that life under neoliberalism generates. It does so by drawing on a deep reservoir of racist and xenophobic vitriol that is our inheritance from centuries of colonialism and imperialism that divides and organises humanity into hierarchies based on the fundamental principle of white supremacy.

Revenge capitalism.

But the heinous, spectacularised forms of political revenge can often overshadow the slower and more insidious vengefulness of neoliberal policies, which abandon whole swathes of the population — usually, those already made vulnerable by racial capitalism—to suffer and die.

The institutionalised murder of the largely poor, migrant and racialised people of Grenfell Tower three years ago, or the way that the mortality rates of the Covid-19 pandemic disproportionately falls on the poor, racialised and marginalised, speak to the way that an economic system itself can be vengeful.

These disasters, which targeted those whose lives were already made vulnerable by racial capitalism, were decades in the making: the anonymous and unintended but predictable and monstrous outcome of a system steeped in warrantless, unearned retribution. Responsibility for the government policies that sustained and created the conditions of this economic revenge are not monopolised by the right. Would-be centrist and liberal politicians, who today are so keen to sanctimoniously denounce the rise of incivility, resentment and populism, are equally the accomplices in a revenge capitalism that breeds revenge politics.

Revenge capitalism is a system driven to extremes by its own crises and contradictions. A world on fire, succumbing to climate collapse, riven with wars large and small, and haunted by unpayable debts, is a kind of revenge that soulless, vampiric capitalism takes on the very human species on which it depends, for no rational or justifiable reason.

Beyond revenge spending.

So revenge spending isn’t just a weird quirk of human behaviour. On one level, It is the kind of activity we might expect of people who have been steeped in a culture of endless consumerism and alienation as lockdowns lift. It is a sad substitute for the kind of connection and social intercourse we miss so dearly in the days of rigid isolation and fear of contagion, but that is also stolen from us by a capitalist life of work, worry and fear. On another level, though, the weird, targetless, self-defeating ‘revenge’ of this spending reflects something much deeper, darker and more dangerous.

Simply put, capitalism will endlessly produce false solutions to its own crises. These solutions will only beget further, deeper and more dangerous crises. Revenge spending is one particularly transparent false solution. It offers the narcotic of consumerism as a cure for a systemic and structural capitalist disease of which consumerism, itself, is part. Beyond the fact that not all of us can afford this therapy, there is a deeper problem: capitalism ravages our bodies and minds, offering us fantasies of individual fulfilment or retribution as compensation.

The task before us is to dream otherwise, and avenge what capitalism has done, and is doing, to people and the planet by making those dreams real.

Max Haiven is Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice at Lakehead University. His most recent book is Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts.

The post ‘Revenge Spending’ Won’t Get Us Out of a Crisis of Racial Capitalism at Novara appeared first on Max Haiven.

The Order of Unmanageable Risks podcast launch: June 15

We are pleased to launch The Order of Unmanageable Risks: A Podcast about Capitalism and Anxiety on June 15 at 9am EST, 2pm BST.

Join hosts Max Haiven and Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou over on YouTube for a brief discussion of the podcast’s objectives and main themes, as well as a rundown of the episodes so far:

* James Bridle (on technology and uncertainty)

* Esther Leslie (on emojis and capitalism)

* Alana Lentin (on racist anxieties)

* Hari Sewell (on racism and mental health)

* Arjun Appadurai (coming soon – on finance and risk)

More episodes are scheduled! All are free to listen online, download or subscribe at http://anxious.community

The Order of Unmanageable Risks is produced by the Common Anxieties Research Project and supported by RiVAL: the ReImagining Value Action Lab and the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies.

Links to the YouTube stream and archived video will be posted at http://anxious.community

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Rising up against white revenge in ROAR

ROAR Magazine has published a short essay I wrote “Rising up against white revenge.”

The current uprisings reveal that America is haunted by the reality of white revenge and manufactured fears of Black revenge. But the tide is turning

Read the original here: https://roarmag.org/essays/rising-up-against-white-revenge/

Since its inception, the Unites States has been wreaking a deadly and unprovoked revenge on Black people.

It is made all the more horrific because it both disguises and excuses that revenge by casting Black people as pathologically vengeful. The precious horror by which the mainstream media and white pundits have greeted the riots triggered by the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis is a quintessential example. His murder was an expression of the kind of needless, warrantless, extrajudicial vengeance that has always been the secret code of the US economy and society, a revenge that never refers to itself as such but is as predictable as a clockwork.

The riots that followed, which are quickly building into a full-scale rebellion, are framed by the institutions of racial capitalism as nihilistic vengeance so as to retroactively justify the structural, systemic and institutional conditions of relentless racist terror that led to them in the first place.

There is a long history of preemptive revenge, one that, as theorists including Sadiya Hartman and Ibram X. Kendi have shown, has been exacted in different forms throughout US history: on slave ships, on plantations, on debt-prisoners and leased after abolition, through lynchings, and every day, for centuries, on the streets of American cities. Sometimes this revenge has been enacted by the police, as in Minneapolis, sometimes by their: the gangs of whites marshaled to hunt people who liberated themselves from slavery, or who sewed terror in Black communities in revenge for the abolition of slavery.

Sometimes this revenge is simply the everyday, grinding humiliation and degradation of poverty that, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor among others has detailed, disproportionately gnaws at Black life, the pervasive shadow of the prison-industrial complex which Angela Davis and Ruth Gilmore Wilson show sabotages so many Black families, and the constant fear that irrational, vindictive violence, perhaps by police, could descend at any moment. The revenge can be blatant, grinning with impunity or, more often, seems, as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva illustrates, to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once, not confined to the ill intent or purposeful action of any single individual.

The systemic vengefulness of racial capitalism has revealed itself in all its blatancy and complexity in the current pandemic where in some jurisdictions Black people die of COVID-19 at rates at least three times that of non-Black people due to a combination of factors that, while not conclusively catalogued, are clear enough: intergenerational exposure to completely unnecessary poverty, poor food, poor housing and environmental racism; lifelong lack of access to preventative medical care; the ghettoization of workers in front-line low-paid service and retail work, often requiring long commutes on underfunded public transit and thus greater exposure to contagion; high incarceration rates that place Black people in institutions where the virus is allowed to run rampant; the list goes on and on.

In America, insult and injury are two sides of a coin of revanchist white supremacy: all the terrors listed above and more are justified in part by the fear cultivated in white people of what they are told, from a million tiny sources, is the impending, inevitable, irrational revenge of Black people, a theme explored by James Baldwin and others since. As Sylvia Wynter has argued, the global racial order was configured around the subhumanization and beastialization of non-white people who were framed as defficient models of full humanity and particularly predisposed to an excess of all-too human tendencies like revenge.

The narrative by which multiple, diverse, once-antagonistic groups of people are conscripted into the absurd and deadly fiction of a singular “white race” (deadly even for white people) is underscored by a tutored fear of racialized revenge. That story, as CLR James wrote of the Haitian Revolution, is constructed precisely to disguise and normalize the endemic revenge a white supremacist system constantly takes on racialized and especially Black people. Justified expressions of rage like the riots in Minneapolis and beyond — though they ultimately and historically hurt relatively few people (unless you consider corporations people) — are presented as evidence, as Khalil Gibran Muhammad has shown, of the monstrous, retributive sub-humanity of Black people, retroactive justification for the policies and policing of endemic and perpetual vengefulness that led to the riots in the first place.

This trope dovetails with the hypocritical and ill-informed fetishization of forgiveness, non-violence and “progress” that, as Cornel West observes, so many white people today project backwards on figures like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who their (often literal) fathers once cast as a dangerous “outside agitator” mobilizing a secret Black army of revenge.

But a debt must be paid not only for centuries of subjugation and ruination but for gaslighting and defamation: reparations for slavery, for red-lining, for mass incarceration, for the routine murder of Black people by police. These debts, as William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen make clear, are all long past due. The courts and laws, which we have been told exist to forestall and prevent society from descending into the hell of revenge, have in so many ways revealed themselves to be institutions to defend, perpetuate and mystify the systemic, structural and institutional forms of racial capitalist vengeance that make so many racialized people, especially Black people, disposable and, indeed, make a gruesome spectacle of that disposability.

It is the sideways awareness of these moral and material arrears, lodged at the heart of white America, that then gives rise, as Carol Anderson shows, to its own revenge politics of the absolute worst. Salivating, the avatar and warlord of white revenge, Donald Trump, quickly responded to the uprising with threats to deploy the American military against its domestic population, revealing that Black people have always been seen by his ilk as disposable interlopers, a foreign threat. He was waiting for this moment, and it comes in an election year.

Trump is a master of echoing a powerful story without ever necessarily speaking it directly. His entire political career has been building to this moment. The narrative is as predictable and asinine as it is vicious, taken straight from the pages of white supremacist propaganda: liberal white people have been too tolerant, too accommodating, too shame-faced towards Black and “minority” demands, have opened the doors of the nation to Black vengeance. “Political correctness,” wokeness and “cancel culture” was, according to this narrative, the psy-ops of a secret race war, intended to weaken white resolve.

Now, Trump insists, only he can save white people from the enemies not only at the gates but within them. If he faces opposition, he will use the military. If not the military, then the white militias, whom he has already cultivated and encouraged. “You have to do retribution,” he instructed a selected group of the nation’s governors on June 1.

Yes, Trump wants a civil war. Or, more accurately, he wishes to resume open hostilities in a civil war that in some ways, as critics since W.E.B. DuBois have noted, never ended, simply continued by other covert means in normalized, institutionalized, banalized, distributed anti-Black revenge.

The riots, then, should come as no surprise. If they are labeled by so many as spasmodic and inchoate forms of political revenge then it is a revenge steeped within and striking back against the normalized, systemic revenge of racial capitalism centuries in the making.

“The white utopia” that Europeans founded in the Americas “was a black inferno,” writes Sylvia Wynter. And so it in so many ways remains. When you live in someone else’s utopia, all you have is revenge. This is not simply because the only tool left to you is violence, though that may be true enough. No matter what you do, no matter how benign or peaceful your protest, the shocked and appalled utopians will fathom it only as revenge.

America, of course, is far from utopia, including for the vast majority of white people who suffer poverty, precarity, alienation and also police abuse, though not nearly at the rate and with the severity as these forms of revenge are exacted on Black people. Yet the thwarted promise of utopia has, since America’s inception, been the lure by which white elites have conscripted poor and working white people. White revenge against racialized, especially Black people, for ruining their promised utopia is the tragic, predictable and sickening norm.

The same racist narrative that frames Black people as pathologically, inherently vengeful contributes something also to the now-widespread sanctimonious belief among liberals that the next step is for Black protesters to calm themselves and develop constructive strategies for change. In reality, what must happen next for any movement forward is mass white ungovernability: rebellion against whiteness, negation of the institutions of white supremacy, treason to white utopianism.

As William C. Anderson argues, we are already seeing this in the streets, where a different future is being rekindled and reinvented in insurgent patterns of solidarity, mutual aid and common life.

Beyond the accusation of revenge, these uprisings resonate with the spirit of a righteous avenging: not merely the retributive turning of the tables, but the overturning of them. They aim towards the horizon where the kind of systemic and structural revenge that has been exacted on Black people becomes impossible by and for anyone.

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The Order of Unmanageable Risks podcast

The Order of Unmanageable Risks is an eclectic podcast about the crisis of anxiety in our society today and its links to the system of capitalism.

In a series of interviews with important thinkers across a range of disciplines, hosts Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou (UCL Sociology) and Max Haiven (Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice, Lakehead University and visiting research fellow at UCL’s Institute for Advanced Studies) explore these intersections. The podcast is produced by their Common Anxieties Research Project and is supported by the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL) and UCL’s Institute for Advanced Studies.

The first two episodes are posted, and more are being produced and released in the near future

Episode 1: “The gifts of darkness?” with media theorist and artist James Bridle
Episode 2: “Why is there no emoji for…?” with Birkbeck professor Esther Leslie
(coming soon) Episode 3: “The weaponized anxieties of the racially illiterate” with University of Western Sydney professor Alana Lentin
(coming soon) Episode 4: “Racism and mental health” with consultant, writer and speaker Hári Sewell
(coming soon) Episode 5: “Finance, uncertainty and anxiety” with New York University professor Arjun Appadurai

These episodes can be listened to and downloaded on Soundcloud or subscribed via podcasting apps at this link. More information about the series can be found here.

Background

We have recently found ourselves, as academics interested in the workings of financialized capitalism, circling more and more often around the question of anxiety. Well over a decade since the 2008 financial crisis and the sweeping waves of neoliberal austerity that succeeded it, it looks as though today a generalised sense of anxiety has settled in, becoming deeply embedded in capitalist structures. It’s not just that we become more anxious about the uncertainties now engulfing all aspects of everyday life (from economic volatility and labour precarity, to regressive political instability and the chaos of the contemporary digital world). Our ways of engaging with such radical uncertainties shift too: we no longer seem to believe in the promises of a ‘better future’ (promises that were until recently the hallmark of neoliberal capitalism). If that’s the case then, how are we to understand the politics of today’s collective anxiety?

In our past work, we have explored capitalism’s insidious capacity to shape dominant imaginations of the future. We have studied the system’s own speculative use of uncertainty as a lucrative resource for expanding its horizons of profit on the behest of markets. But our research journeys have always returned to the role of imagination in this process: the success or failure of the capitalist project ultimately depends on controlling and wielding the power to imagine. This then, is where our interest in the current ‘anxiety epidemic’ is motivated from: what kind of collectivity is imagined in today’s anxious engagements with the chaos of everyday life? What are the possibilities for a more radical imagination that would lean on our shared experiences of anxiety to ‘counter-speculate’?

The podcast

Our podcast series tries to make sense of it all. Through interviews with important thinkers, we explore how today’s economic forces shape our mental health, but also the possibilities that are opening for solidarity, care, and a different world. We want to go beyond the medicalised approach to anxiety as an isolated disorder or chemical imbalance and ask bigger questions about how a system of constant uncertainty and risk management leads to an anxious society. In each episode, we talk with people whose research or writing has inspired us to think differently about capitalism and society. We discuss how their work can cast a different light on anxiety as a psychological, social, technological, or political challenge.

The hosts

Dr Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou is a political sociologist at University College London where he leads the Sociology & Social Theory Research Group, and a Senior Editor at Public Seminar with Chiara Bottici and Judith Butler. He recently edited a Special Issue on finance’s imagination in the Journal of Cultural Economy, and his first book, ‘Speculative Communities’, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

Dr. Max Haiven is Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice at Lakehead University and co-director of the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL). He writes articles for both academic and general audiences and is the author of the books Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power: Capitalism, Creativity and the Commons (2014), The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity (with Alex Khasnabish, 2014) and Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life (2014). Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization, was published by Pluto in Fall 2018 and his latest book Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts was published in May 2020.

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