Max Haiven's Blog, page 10

“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

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“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

The post The Order of Unmanageable Risks podcast launch: June 15 appeared first on Max Haiven.

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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“Revenge Fantasy or Avenging Imaginary?” in e-flux

E-Flux has published an edited excerpt from my book Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts.

https://conversations.e-flux.com/t/revenge-capitalism-the-ghosts-of-empire-the-demons-of-capital-and-the-settling-of-unpayable-debts/9990

The following is an excerpt from Max Haiven’s Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts, out this May from Pluto Press .

Revenge Fantasy or Avenging Imaginary?

Revenge capitalism, as I have sought to define it throughout this book, is a dimension of capitalist accumulation at its intersections with other systems of power wherein it appears to take needless, warrantless, and ultimately self-destructive vengeance on humans and other forms of life. I have argued that it names both a general tendency within capitalism throughout its history as well as a valence of the particular period in which we live, since roughly the mid-1970s, coterminous with neoliberalism, financialization, and capitalist globalization. My appending of the adjective “revenge” to capitalism does not seek to offer a categorical or definitional qualifier but, rather, to encourage us to orient our imagination to the vindictive qualities of capitalism. I have sought to demonstrate the fruits of such an orientation in the chapters of this book, which each in their own way seek to chart some of these intersections. These chapters have been written as different windows onto the same multidimensional phenomenon, rather than as stages in a unified argument. As a result, this conclusion can’t be summative but is, rather, geared towards making one final distinction that has been hinted at throughout the foregoing pages, a distinction between revenge fantasy and an avenging imaginary.

In my reading, revenge capitalism is not primarily motivated and perpetuated by anger, bitterness, resentment, or rage, though it may give rise to these sentiments. The vengeful dimension of capital is a reflection of its inherent structural tendencies and contradictions, notably that it is a system not orchestrated by a total monarch, an oligarchy, or a conspiracy but, rather, by the sum of the contradictory actions of innumerable capitalist actors. While sometimes these capitalist actors conspire or work in explicit and intentional concert (in cartels, in secret or not-so-secret societies, in industry blocks, corporatist states, and so on), such collusion can imperil the fundamental dynamic of capitalist accumulation: the necessity of intercapitalist competition. This competition drives each capitalist actor to ever greater excesses in search for profit (and, more abstractly, a share of surplus value) and ultimately drives the reduction of wages, the enclosure of the commons, the desolation of the earth, the proliferation of inter-imperial rivalry and war, and the surplussing of populations. Capitalism can act vengefully even if operated by angels.

This tendency is exacerbated in an age of neoliberal, global capitalist accumulation. This is a moment of capitalist accumulation that has vested itself not only in the hypermobility of capital around the globe, allowing it to play nation-states against one another in the name of attracting or retaining investment and forestalling economic ruin, but also in the progressive transformation of nearly every social actor into a capitalist agent, a kind of universalized complicity and victimhood, though with radically different opportunities and consequences. Ours is a moment when capitalism has developed powerful new ways to avoid, capture, undermine, or reconfigure in its own interests most forms of social and governmental regulation. The imperative to hyper-capitalist dispositions of entrepreneurialism, competition, and private accumulation is offered as the remedy to the world of paranoid precariousness that capitalism is, itself, creating. From the false freedom of the “gig economy” to the sabotaged charity of subprime and microfinance loans, capitalism’s contemporary logic is to, in a profoundly destructive way, make each and every human into not only a source of exploitable labor power but a small-time agent of capitalist accumulation. That most of us will fail is irrelevant: we will be told our failure is our own fault, or sold a fantasy that our failure is the result of others who cheated (migrants, minorities, “special interests”).

Capitalism, of course, has no desires, no sentiments and no dreams, but as the sum of the actions of its parts, actions motivated by its structural demands for competition unto death, it comes to appear as a system of reckless vengeance on those whom it depends. Meanwhile, its pervasive imperative towards competition, and the social, ecological, and political chaos this competition unleashes (see chapter five), tills the psychosocial soil in which the seeds of revenge politics germinate.

In bringing the notion of revenge in proximity with the system of capitalism, then, I have sought to do three things:

I wish to account for the seemingly irrational and vindictive patterns of capitalist accumulation today, which are destroying the life-support systems of the planet, immiserating and indebting most of us, surplussing an ever increasing number of humans, and unleashing the spectres of political revenge: war, fascism, fundamentalism, and economic sadism.
I have argued that revenge is not only, as we have been led to believe, a timeless human frailty but also (and more importantly) something that is defined differently, and for particular ideological purposes, in each historical and social context. If this is so, then there is something important at stake in how we define revenge, an important struggle over its meaning. My effort in these pages has been, in the face of the overwhelming sentimentality and opprobrium attached to liberal capitalism’s myths of revenge, to suggest that revenge can be used to describe the operation of interlocking systems of oppression and exploitation, specifically capitalism. Against the idea that revenge is a timeless monster of human nature that has been banished by the knights of reason to the political hinterland (to rogue states, ganglands, prisons, or slums), I have sought to argue that revenge is at work in the very heart of the allegedly hyper-rational system.
In accounting for capitalism as a system of revenge I hope to have contributed to efforts to bring into focus how this system’s vitality and longevity is in no small part due to the way it operates not only at the level of brutal economic reason but also fantasy, affect, and sociality. In the chapters of this book I hope to have offered a demonstration of these contradictory and nonlinear relationships.
Throughout this book I have also attempted to map the ways that capitalism has always been fundamentally and inexorably entangled with racism, (hetero-)sexism, patriarchy, colonialisms, imperialism, and ableism, that these systems interlock and reinforce one another, and that part of this interlocking and reinforcement operates through a vengeful logic.

Revenge fantasy, as distinct from the act of revenge, is often a means of maintaining oneself within an intolerable or contradictory situation. It is not only the sweetness of the fantasy itself which becomes sustaining. In the nursing of the grudge, in the calculation and recalculation of the debt, we come to understand ourselves within otherwise intolerable and inscrutable contradictions and forestall a painful transformation. But in contradiction to the Nietzschean approach, which might encourage us to imagine that the oppressed and powerless dream of revenge as a resentful compensatory fantasy to help justify their cowardly inaction, I would suggest that sometimes, oftentimes, it is all one has. If one is denied the opportunity to exercise the radical imagination, which is to say to come together with others, across differences, and discover the shared source of oppression, if one is forbidden from devising, based on the transversal experience of that pain, a vision for a world without it, then revenge fantasy may ironically be the only way to maintain one’s humanity in a situation of relentless dehumanization. To dream of revenge is, in part, to hold fast to the knowledge that what you love has value in a world where it is made worthless. To condemn fantasies of revenge without asking how their bearers are structurally or explicitly prohibited (or made cynical towards) more capacious dreams of collective liberation, is the height of arrogance. For so many, a dream of revenge is all they have, though often that revenge is framed in ways that, if achieved, will reproduce the dominant order and economy, with perhaps slightly different winners and losers. Indeed, to fall prey to the moral blackmail that forbids us to think with revenge is to fail to recognize how widespread its fantasies are, a theme to which we will return in a moment.

Throughout this book I have dropped hints as to a distinction I am trying to draw between, on the one hand, the kind of revenge fantasy outlined above, which hedges towards the reactionary, and, on the other, a more radical and transformative avenging imaginary. On the face of it, the distinction between revenge and avenging is subtle but undeniable: the Avengers, after all, are a team of superheroes; the Revengers would be supervillains. No less an authority on the English language than Dr. Samuel Johnson, author of one of the most authoritative early dictionaries, instructs that “revenge is an act of passion; vengeance of justice. Injuries are revenged; crimes are avenged.”

In my formulation, whereas revenge fantasy envisions the revisiting of a harm or a debt on its author in the same or a similar form in which it was issued, avenging strives to abolish the order or economy of power that licensed, authorized, or enabled that violence in the first place. An avenging imaginary is not satisfied to turn the tables but seeks to overturn them. An avenging imaginary does not simply dream of redistributing the winners and losers, the debtors and the creditors, the oppressors and the oppressed, but yearns to abolish the very foundations of the moral, political, and economic order on which those injustices are erected. In the most basic terms, an avenging imaginary dreams of revenge against a system, not (only) its agents and beneficiaries. Whereas revenge fantasies are often fixated on Others who come to stand in for systems, an avenging imaginary is informed by a complex understanding of the way individuals are made to (or choose to) become replaceable operatives within such systems. Whereas revenge fantasy speaks to an isolated fixation, an avenging imaginary emerges from and helps to reproduce collective action.

I seek to identify at least six features that distinguish an avenging imaginary from a revenge fantasy, while also acknowledging that the line between them is never starkly defined.

The avenging imaginary is not simply a privately nursed grudge or an individual flight of fancy; it is an abolitionist vision cultivated in the collective experience of refusal of a revenge system.
Though the finding of common cause and the sharing of pain and rage is a vital aspect of allowing revenge fantasy to cohere into an avenging imaginary, such an imaginary is a matter of not only fellow feeling but common practice. This practice can take the form of acts of refusal, rebellion, and destruction. But it can also take the form of new forms of cooperation, care, and creation. These practices are undertaken literally in spite of a system that is seeking to avenge itself upon us.
An avenging imaginary is rooted in the reckless determination and relentless insistence that what you love in the world has value within a system that renders it worthless, disposable, and surplus. Maybe it’s your life, your kin, your ancestors, or the earth. Insisting on the value of what or whom you love is an ongoing act of revolutionary refusal and creation.
An avenging imaginary holds individuals to account for the part they play in revenge systems of oppression, exploitation, and agony, but recognizes that these systems themselves must be abolished. It refuses to reconcile itself with these systems. It may forgive individuals, recognizing that these systems force all of us into some degree of complicity, but it does not forgive these systems.
An avenging imaginary surpasses the revenge fantasy of a short-sharp revolutionary break with the past and, while not giving up on the importance of the destruction of revenge systems, insists on experimenting with and building new institutions, forms of cooperation, and modes of care in the present, forms which actively deprive revenge systems of resources and allow people to survive outside their blackmail while at the same time setting the stage for the society to come.

An avenging imaginary takes Benjamin’s caution (parsed in chapter one) to heart. In his reading, the anti-capitalist struggle is one that dreams of concluding an intergenerational struggle. For this reason, he argues that, in Marx’s work, “the proletariat appears as the last enslaved class, as the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden.” Thus it is not enough (indeed, it is dangerous) to focus triumphantly on struggle as the “redeemer of future generations.” In this way we might cut “the sinews of [our] greatest strength” by making us “forget both [our] hatred and… spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.” There is, we must remember, “a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply.”

The post “Revenge Fantasy or Avenging Imaginary?” in e-flux appeared first on Max Haiven.

Revenge Capitalism is out now!

I’m thrilled to announce that, at long last, my book Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts has been published by Pluto Books and is available for sale online now and in stores… whenever they reopen! You can find out more at:

maxhaiven.com/revengecapitalism
https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745340562/revenge-capitalism/

*** Special: 30% off ***

Enter ‘REVENGE30’ at the checkout over at Pluto Books’ website under “add coupon”

https://maxhaiven.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/RevengeCapitalismTrailer.mp4
A personal request to help spread the word.

The first two weeks of a new book’s life are crucial, and the fact that we’re all stuck indoors makes this especially difficult. While ‘m personally disappointed not to be able to do in-person public events to promote the book (for online ones, see below), the impact of the pandemic on radical publishers like Pluto is dire.  Please consider buying extra copies of my book to give to friends (or, better, enemies – they’re guaranteed to hate it) and also contributing to Pluto’s Patreon.

Meanwhile, I hope you might consider doing any of the following to help get the word out about the book:

Please take a moment to share the book on social media
Consider recommending it to a magazine, website or podcast you love for review
Do you know someone who might be interested in writing a book review? (If so, they can email Chris at chrisb@plutobooks.com to obtain a free review copy)
Forward this email or information on to people you know or email lists.

Overview

Capitalism is in a profound state of crisis. Beyond the mere dispassionate cruelty of ‘ordinary’ structural violence, it appears today as a global system bent on reckless economic revenge; its expression found in mass incarceration, climate chaos, unpayable debt, pharmaceutical violence and the relentless degradation of common life.

In Revenge Capitalism, Max Haiven argues that this economic vengeance helps us explain the culture and politics of revenge we see in society more broadly. Moving from the history of colonialism and its continuing effects today, he examines the opioid crisis in the US, the growth of ‘surplussed populations’ worldwide and unpacks the central paradigm of unpayable debts – both as reparations owed, and as a methodology of oppression.

Revenge Capitalism offers no easy answers, but is a powerful call to the radical imagination.

Endorsements

Perhaps the most theoretically creative radical thinker of the moment.

David Graeber, author of ‘Debt: The First 5000 Years’
Max Haiven retraces the roots of the current regression, of the reactionary trend that is driving the world toward a new darkness. These roots are humiliation and revenge. In my opinion, this book is of strategic importance.

Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, author of ‘Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility’
A deeply learned debt warrior, Haiven lays bare the abject cruelty of financial capitalism, and provides us with a rich supply of sources and arguments for a fightback that gives as good as it takes.

Andrew Ross, author of ‘Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal’

Bio

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). His previous books include Art After Money, Money After Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (2018), Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life(2014) and (with Alex Khasnabish) The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity (2014).

Table of Contents

Introduction: We Want Revenge
Ch1. Toward a materialist theory of revenge
Interlude: Shylock’s vindication, or Venice’s bonds?
Ch2. The work of art in an age of unpayable debts: Social reproduction, geopolitics, and settler colonial
Interlude: Ahab’s coin, or Moby Dick’s currencies?
Ch3. Money as a medium of vengeance: Colonial accumulation and proletarian practices
Interlude: Khloé Kardashian’s revenge body, or the Zapatisa nobody?
Ch4. Our opium Wars: Pain, race, and the ghosts of empire
Interlude: V’s vendetta, or Joker’s retribution?
Ch5. The dead zone: Financialized nihilism, toxic wealth, and vindictive technologies
Conclusion: Revenge fantasy or avenging imaginary?
Coda: 11 Theses on revenge capitalism
Postscript: After the pandemic: Against the vindictive normal

Things to read

Short

“ No return to normal : For a post-pandemic liberation” (post-script) in ROAR.

Tambien en español (with thanks to Mario Morales).
Aussi en français (with thanks to Éloi Halloran).
An audio version




Medium

“ Capital’s Vengeful Utopia : Unpayable Debts from Above and Below” in L’Internationale
“Introduction: We Want Revenge” to Revenge Capitalism


Longer

“Capitalism as Revenge :: Revenge Against Capitalism– An Interview with Max Haiven” in Socialism and Democracy.

Also available as an audio interview.





Things to watch/listen

Short

Book trailer, a one-minute teaser.
Overview: a five minute video about Revenge Capitalism.


Medium

A revenge tour of London, a 22-minute video exploring the book’s main chapters


Long

“Money as a Medium of Vengeance: Colonial Accumulation and Proletarian Practices,” A 44-minute illustrated video version of one of the book’s chapters.
“Our opium Wars: Pain, race, and the ghosts of empire,”  55-minute audio interview about one the book’s chapters.


Longest

Four video lectures  (45-minutes each) on the book’s chapters and themes, recorded as part of a seminar in April and May



Online events

May 7 – “‘Revenge is a human dream.’ On the poetics and politics of avenging” a conversation with Max Haiven and Phanuel Antwi.

Archived in video and in audio.


May 20 – “Is ours an age of revenge capitalism?” University College London Institute for Advanced Study Talking Points Seminar. 6pm BST. Online and open to all.
May 27 – “Art, debt, capitalism and revenge.” Slade School of the Arts public lecture. 5pm BST. 6pm BST. Online and open to all. Link coming soon.
More events coming soon

Art by Amanda Priebe

The post Revenge Capitalism is out now! appeared first on Max Haiven.