Max Haiven's Blog, page 5

The Sacrificial Altar of Extractive Capitalism: Notes on Abolition and Transition (Mediapart/Berliner Gazette)

This text, published in English on Mediapart, is a contribution to the Berliner Gazette’s “After Extractivism” text series; its German version is available on Berliner Gazette. You can find more contents on the English-language “After Extractivism” website.

It is difficult to find a more fitting and terrifying insignia than palm oil of the intersection of capitalism’s economy of exploitation and ecological destruction. For nearly 200 years, this plantation commodity’s development has been marked by sacrificial violence where, in the name of profits and cheap prices, human and non-human beings have been placed on the altar of the market.

Today, palm oil is estimated to be present in some form in at least 50% of supermarket products. It is a cheap oil for the frying and fattening of processed baked goods, a base for soaps, detergents, and cosmetics, and a trace ingredient in the surfactants, preservatives, and stabilizing agents that are increasingly part of our diets. It’s also an important source of biofuels, touted as the key to a “green” transition within capitalism.

But over the past two decades, environmental and human rights groups have sounded the alarm.

Growing markets for palm oil have led to catastrophic tropical deforestation as biodiverse ecosystems are razed to make way for lucrative monoculture plantations, releasing massive quantities of sequestered carbon. On the ever-expanding palm oil frontier, land-grabbing is rampant. In Indonesia and Malaysia, from whom some 70% of the global palm oil demand is exported, as well as, increasingly, Brazil, Columbia, and Honduras, a handful of extremely powerful companies control the market. In spite of two decades of efforts by a roundtable of these corporations, alongside sympathetic governments and wary non-governmental organizations, towards voluntary regulation and auditing schemes, human rights abuses are rampant, including the intimidation and assassination of union organizers, Indigenous activists, and environmental journalists.

The colonial h orror of palm oil

The horrors of the palm oil industry are exhaustively documented and the subject of major campaigns by human rights and environmental groups and many government task forces. But what few of these attend to, and what I want to highlight, is the deeper entanglement of palm oil and extractive capitalism.

Artwork: Colnate Group (2022) cc by nc

The story of palm oil’s emergence as a global commodity has plenty to teach us. The oil palm has been cultivated and harvested for millennia in it’s native West Africa, where its products played a foundational culinary, spiritual, cultural, political, and economic role. When enslaved people and their allies around the world rose up and forced the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in the preeminent British Empire in 1807, Liverpool merchants who had made their fortunes in that horrific economy-defining business searched for new, non-human cargo for their ships. They found in palm oil an abundant commodity to extract from Africa that could, in Europe, be transformed into a cheap grease to lubricate the locomotives and steam engines of the dawning industrial revolution.

The same networks of ecological and economic violence that were used to extract and commodify African people were turned towards exploitation and enslavement within Africa itself to secure artificially cheapened palm oil. Industrial chemists in Europe soon found ways to refine the stuff into candles and soap, two of the first mass commodities, which, ironically, were both sold to European publics using racist imagery that encouraged consumers to identify with the allegedly noble ambitions of empire: to bring commerce, Christianity, and civilization to African people painted as barbaric savages.

To this day, the trope persists.

A history of violence hidden in plain sight

The consumer is led to believe that, in partnership with benevolent “green” corporations, they can do their part for the world simply by buying “sustainable” products. Beyond the falsity of claims to “sustainability,” such discourses reiterate a colonial and white supremacist worldview in which the citizen-consumer in the Global North expresses a self-satisfied benevolence through their capitalist transactions. Both in the 19th century and today, this approach abandons any struggle for global solidarity – which we desperately need – for a kind of consumer narcissism.

It also hides something deeper and more perverse. In the 19th century, as Europe’s predatory states expanded ever-deeper into West Africa and aimed at securing more and more palm oil exports, these incursions were often justified in the name of a humanitarian intervention to “liberate Africans from local kings” whose practices included human sacrifice. Gory details of these practices were salaciously depicted in the British press to build support for imperial invasion. But this was a form of misdirection: the goal was always to build an economy of extractivism.

Further, rendered invisible was the fact that the British Empire itself was a society of human sacrifice: whole civilizations were wiped off the face of the earth in the name of its capitalists’ need for palm oil and other basic materials; even in the British factories where those materials were transformed into commodities, workers, many of them children, were sacrificed to the machines as industrial accidents, overwork or chronic poverty took their toll.

The alleged human-sacrificial customs of the non-white, colonized “other” helped distract and deflect attention from the monstrous sacrificial system of capitalism, hidden in plain sight.

Workers, forests, and the world’s poor

Today, such conditions of extractive capitalist human sacrifice persist in new forms. Of course, we can point to the atrocious working conditions on and around oil palm plantations. From Southeast Asian to West African to Latin America, the abuse and exploitation of migrant workers has been a mainstay of the industry, workers often displaced by previous rounds of extractivism that have forced them or their ancestors from traditional land bases and sustainable economies. In the palm oil fields, migrant workers who are often denied protections are exposed to toxic chemicals, dangerous working conditions, conditions of debt-bondage, and sexual exploitation.

Often, these horrific conditions and the burning of forests are perpetrated not by brand-name consumer products companies or even the corporations that supply them with palm oil but sub-contractors and sub-sub-contractors operating at the frontier where auditors and journalists don’t travel and where government officials can be intimidated and bribed, conveniently allowing those capitalists higher up the supply chain to claim ignorance or helplessness.

But palm oil’s economy of sacrifice is not only one that places workers and the forest on the sacrificial altar. While the industry’s defenders brag that they are reforesting the world with fast-growing plantation plants, the net carbon emissions represent a significant contribution to anthropogenic climate change and the destruction of biodiversity, both of which have profound human impacts especially on the world’s poorest people. Ironically, it is precisely the world’s poorest people who have been transformed by sacrificial extractive capitalism into the main consumers of palm oil: it is, today, the fat of the world’s poor.

Middle-class consumers in the Global North may pride themselves on helping save orangutan habitat by forgoing Nutella or other palm oil-laden foods. But for hundreds of millions of people around the world, imported, refined palm oil is a basic foodstuff, having replaced locally-produced plant and animal fats in their diets thanks to its incredible artificial cheapness. The health impacts are significant, not only because palm oil is high in saturated fats which jeopardize heart health, but because it is found in so many cheap, processed and prepackaged foods that have become the staple or poor people’s diets, especially of those poor people who have been displaced from land bases where they can produce their own food.

Feeding surplus populations with palm oil

One demonstrative example is the diet fed to prisoners in the American system of mass incarceration, which disproportionately imprisons working class Black and racialized people. Here, almost every item of a standard prepackaged meal (bread, processed cheese, processed meat, packaged cookie, sugary drink-mix) is heavy in cheap palm oil. Indeed, in the US prison system the prepackaged ramen instant noodle (basically: wheat flour, palm oil, and sodium) has become a significant alternative currency among imprisoned people who, without it, are often denied enough calories to survive.

In her landmark 2007 book “Golden Gulag” geographer and prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore takes such prison environments as indicative of a broader shift within capitalism towards what she, instructively, calls an “era of human sacrifice.” Her book focuses on the prison as a capitalist technology for the management of “surplus populations,” people who have been made dependent on wages within a capitalist economy to purchase the necessities of life, but for whom capitalism increasingly has no waged work, forcing them to accept extractive forms of exploitation or survive in the “informal economy.”

Claims that this “surplus population” is due simply to automation – suggesting that capitalist industries require fewer workers – are largely bogus and ahistorical: the reality is that capitalism has always generated large populations of would-be workers that represent two things: a “reserve army” of unemployed people to help depress wages in the broader economy and a hyper-exploitable population on whose backs the broader economy is built. Today, palm oil is chief among the “cheapened” foods that sustains the life of these and other sacrificial victims of the extractive capitalist economy.

Against and beyond the system of human sacrifice

As was the case with the British Empire, today’s global form of extractive capitalism is a system of human sacrifice hidden in plain sight. I am attracted to this term not simply for dramatic effect. Surely, the horrors of the global economy don’t need to be the subject of hyperbole: they’re bad enough on their own. Rather, thinking about human sacrifice invites us to consider the cosmological dimensions of this economic violence. In the name of a god-like “market” we, today, legitimate extreme forms of human and non-human sacrifice and suffering. The high priests of this god insist that, to question or interfere in the will of the market will bring chaos and calamity. But do not the high priests and beneficiaries of all sacrificial societies claim something similar? Were they not to place the victim on the altar and cut out their heart, the gods would starve or be angered and unleash terrible violence on everyone.

Deeper still, framing extractive capitalism as a system of human sacrifice helps us understand the magnitude of the task before us to achieve some horizon after extractivism. Our task will not simply be to abolish the old economy and install a new one. It must necessarily include a radical transformation of belief, of value, and of meaning-making. At stake is the creation or rekindling of other modes of post-capitalist interdependence.

We are already in an interdependent world, but that interdependence is encrypted and managed by capital, a force that is driven by competition and profit compulsion, and that has been exhausting people and the planet in the name of its own reproduction. The past two centuries of palm oil’s history show us how deeply enmeshed we all our, materially and culturally, with an order of capitalism that, today for example, manages to sustain itself by promoting ever more “green consumerism.” Here, the subjecthood of the capitalist consumer is revamped as a solution, even though it is a leading contributor to the problem.

To overcome this system and to pave the way for a transition into a just world, then, requires we not only transform the palm oil industry, not only transform the global food system, but transform ourselves and our communities on a fundamental level. Here, we must dare to dream dangerously of global commoning and global forms of socialism, and new ways of configuring the dynamic triangle between the individual, the collective, and the public.

The post The Sacrificial Altar of Extractive Capitalism: Notes on Abolition and Transition (Mediapart/Berliner Gazette) appeared first on Max Haiven.

A reflection on the radical imagination: From finance to social movements to games (Junkyard)

This piece was first published on April 27, 2022 by The Junkyard: A scholarly blog devoted to the study of imagination.

As a child, I was slow to learn, not because of any specific diagnosable developmental delay but because of some deep, abiding and often angry skepticism towards anything that seems to me to be an arbitrary social convention that was presented as an unquestionable truth. For example, I remember being called before the class for some task in school at the age of 7 or 8, only to inadvertently reveal I could not tell my right from my left. Red-faced, I threw a tantrum before my shocked and bemused classmates, explaining that the distinction was purely conventional, calibrated solely by, so far as I could tell, the doctrines of our forebears. Such orientation was a form of guided narcissism, rather than a material point of reference: My left, I ranted from in front of the room, was my classmates’ right, after all. Why do we even use these words? Wasn’t it a matter of arbitrary perception being passed off as an iron law of nature. How many other things had we been taught as truth that were, in fact, habits of collective thought? What made North up and South down? Why did certain letters have to make the sounds we associated with them when they were all funny symbols that exist nowhere in nature?

I relate this anecdote not to impress or terrify the reader with my childish precociousness: credit here really ought to go to my parents and teachers who humored and tolerated this stormy little self-styled philosopher; it can’t have been easy. Rather, I think it’s a revealing place to start an account of what has been a life-long interest–perhaps an obsession–with the power of the imagination to shape our collective life. Just because the distinction between right and left is, ultimately, a figment of the collective imagination, that doesn’t make it any less real. Money is equally an invention of the imagination, but try to survive in a capitalist society without it and you run into very real difficulties. The way the imaginary becomes real, and the way reality shapes the imagination, is a riddle that has sustained my curiosity.

Growing up in a household of activists must have made its contribution to my skpeticial disposition, and it would later lead me, as a young adult around the turn of the millennia, to become an organizer in Canada in what was then called the alter-globalization movement, then, quickly following that, the anti-war and anti-racism struggles surrounding the advent of the War on Terror. I witnessed the power over the imagination of the neoliberal discourse of the End of History, what Mark Fisher would later call “capitalist realism.” In spite of the manifold injustices in the global capitalist order, the abiding belief that this was the best of all possible systems, or that in any case it was impossible to change matters, was profoundly demobilizing. I sensed, in the course of my activism, that, while not without some success, my comrades and I were only ever reaching about 5% of the population with our impassioned calls for global solidarity. Part of the problem, I realized at the time, is that most people had convinced themselves that the reigning order was natural, normal or inevitable. But many more simply had no time, or were denied the opportunity, to imagine the world broadly, and to recognize that much of how the world works is an arbitrary human construction, held in place by convention and unquestioned belief in the status quo. Worse still, capitalism increasingly seemed to find ways to seduce and co-opt the imagination, a trend that has reached a fevered pitch in the gig economy and in influencer culture, where we are told that expressions of our creative imagination can be our ticket to fame, riches or even simply a modicum of material stability in an otherwise unstable world.

This led me to enroll in graduate school, in a then-new program in the then-topical Globalization Studies. It was here that I came first into contact with the theories of Cornelius Castoriadis, the Greek-French philosopher of the radical imagination. Castoriadis, who was a core protagonist in the influential French journal Socialisme ou Barbarie in the late 1950s and early 1960s, sought to merge the insights of Marxism and psychoanalysis while, at the same time, discarding the more conservative dimensions of both traditions. His work would become highly influential on a generation of students and workers who, in 1968, almost brought down the French government through militant protests and strikes. For Castoriadis, the radical imagination was not the property of this or that ideological position but a fundamental force in all human affairs, active underneath society and within each and every social subject. Castoriadis’s ontological claim was that the imagination is the protean stuff out of which both subjects and institutions are made, a magma-like, flowing substance, between liquid and solid, that flows beneath the surface. Like magma, when it erupts it soon solidifies, and we take these solidifications as hard, fast and eternal, forgetting their tectonic origins. But both on the level of the subject and society at large, another eruption awaits, which will either be channeled by the existing crystallizations to reproduce their order or sweep them away to make room for new institutions.

Like Castoriadis, I became fascinated by the way the unique socioeconomic system of capitalism both relied on and shaped the imagination. The highly mediated capitalism of early 21st century Canada was, of course, quite different than 1950s France, and my interest increasingly gravitated towards the way the imagined systems of human categorization organized around the idea of “race” (a pure fiction invented to justify imperialism, but which became and remains deadly real) continued to have such sway and to be one of the key ways that exploitation and inequality was reproduced in the interests of corporations and the extremely wealthy. But I also, starting in 2005, became fixated on another intersection of capitalism and the imagination that was to captivate everyone’s attention a few years later: the financial sector.

In the wake of the 2008 global financial meltdown many commentators and theorists sought to understand how the arcana of finance caused such chaos: credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, structured investment vehicles and other derivatives seemed to be figments of the contorted imagination of Wall Street bankers calculated to clothe naked exploitation in the garb of scientific calculation. But I argued that is only part of the story, and the least interesting part at that. More broadly, a process that critics have called “financialization” has not only seen the growing wealth and power of the financial sector around the world, it was leading to profound social and cultural transformations. Here, I drew deeply on the work of New York University’s Randy Martin, who would later host me as a postdoctoral fellow in 2011, shortly before his tragic premature death four years later. For Martin, financialization also meant the way each and every social subject is encouraged to embrace and adopt the dispositions, ideas and value system of finance, even if they have nothing to do with the movement of stocks or bonds. In a neoiliberal age, where forms of public social security have been cut or privatized, we are all instructed, sometimes explicitly, more often implicitly from a million cultural points, to see ourselves as savvy risk-managers, navigating a world of opportunities for personal enrichment and betterment. Education is recast as an investment in one’s human capital; housing is recast as a financial opportunity or liability; in an age of the gig-worker, one’s passions, hobbies, personal networks, friendships and dispositions all become assets to be put in play. The entrepreneurial self theorized by Michel Foucault and Nicholas Rose in the 1970s and 80s is accelerated into a financier of the self. 

We witness this imperative in, for instance, the enthusiasm for “financial literacy” education for children and adults which almost always obscures or mystifies the sociological sources of poverty, debt and economic precarity and, instead, instructs individual learners to embrace a world of risk. It can also be observed in the popularity of reality television where house-buyers, antique hunters or junk collectors are celebrated for their quotidian financial skills. In general, for Martin, financialization implies the “profaning” of the future, the narrowing of personal and collective horizons towards an endless “now.” To the extent we are each instructed to turn our imaginations towards mapping out the future as a grid of cost and benefit, risk and reward, any sense that the future of society might be different recedes from individual and collective view. 

My contribution to this debate was to draw on the work of Castoriadis, as well as David Graeber, to explicitly insist on the importance of the imagination to this process. Financialization doesn’t kill the imagination, it excites, conscripts and harnesses its power. And, in turn, financialization, as a social process, depends on the imagination. It not only depends on the imagination of financiers who invent highly creative, if diabolical, ways of making money out of money. It also depends on nearly everyone, even the world’s poorest people reimagining themselves as financialized subjects and reimagining their world as one of assets, risks and potential rewards. In later work, I theorized that it is, in fact, this financialized imagination that is fertile ground for the growth of the kinds of reactionary, far-right and (post-)fascist ideological ideology and activism that have recently proven themselves so profoundly dangerous to any truly democratic project.

At the same time as I was developing this theoretical work, I also began what would become a decade-long collaboration with my colleague Alex Khasnabish to mobilize insights from Castoriadis to develop a methodology for studying with social movements. We were also deeply inspired by Robin D.G. Kelley’s phenomenal work on the Black radical imagination. We identified two dominant strategic trends in scholars who seek to work in solidarity with movements: sometimes they simply seek to invoke those movements in their writing, dignifying them with attention and offering outside reflections; other times scholars embrace a strategy of avocation, putting their time, skills and resources at the disposal of those movements. There are merits to both, but we wanted to experiment with a strategy we came to call convocation. How might scholars be active in calling together social movement actors to have conversations or encounters they might not otherwise have, in the name of opening and holding a space for the radical imagination to spark and catch light? For the better part of a decade, we experimented with this approach in the conservative Canadian city of Halifax, where progressive movements were generally far from successful. How did they sustain hope and energy in the face of so little success? We theorized that most movements dwell in a space between success and failure, and that critical scholars, working in solidarity, have a role to play in fostering moments of critical reflection and communion that movements rarely create for themselves.

In 2017 I took up a new position as Canada Research Chair in Culture Media and Social Justice (later Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination) at Lakehead University in the small, very remote Canadian city of Thunder Bay, a place plagued by extremely violent anti-Inidgenous racism. There, I took the insights from the Radical Imagination Project to found RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab as a platform for fostering research and organizing public outreach on topics of social justice, decolonization and the radical imagination. With the support of the Canada Research Chairs program and the Canadian Foundation for Innovation we have, in the past 5 years, offered dozens of workshops, held film screenings and public talks and worked closely with grassroots anti-racist and anti-poverty movements on these themes. 

The lab has also been a platform for my international scholarly activities. In addition to fostering my further research into financialization we have been exploring new participatory methods for bringing academics, artists, activists and diverse publics together to “convoke” the radical imagination. For example, we have organized collectively-created walking tours of the financial districts of London and Toronto to explore financialization from new, embodied perspectives. We have begun to integrate podcasting into the way we explore issues and develop communities of common inquiry. And we are in the process of developing a board game lab to explore the way analogue game design can be a method for theorizing and catalyzing a discussion around difficult social issues. Our first game, Clue-Anon, explores why conspiracy theories are both so fun and so dangerous.

The post A reflection on the radical imagination: From finance to social movements to games (Junkyard) appeared first on Max Haiven.

A reflection on the radical imagination: From finance to social movements to games

This piece was first published on April 27, 2022 by The Junkyard: A scholarly blog devoted to the study of imagination.

As a child, I was slow to learn, not because of any specific diagnosable developmental delay but because of some deep, abiding and often angry skepticism towards anything that seems to me to be an arbitrary social convention that was presented as an unquestionable truth. For example, I remember being called before the class for some task in school at the age of 7 or 8, only to inadvertently reveal I could not tell my right from my left. Red-faced, I threw a tantrum before my shocked and bemused classmates, explaining that the distinction was purely conventional, calibrated solely by, so far as I could tell, the doctrines of our forebears. Such orientation was a form of guided narcissism, rather than a material point of reference: My left, I ranted from in front of the room, was my classmates’ right, after all. Why do we even use these words? Wasn’t it a matter of arbitrary perception being passed off as an iron law of nature. How many other things had we been taught as truth that were, in fact, habits of collective thought? What made North up and South down? Why did certain letters have to make the sounds we associated with them when they were all funny symbols that exist nowhere in nature?

I relate this anecdote not to impress or terrify the reader with my childish precociousness: credit here really ought to go to my parents and teachers who humored and tolerated this stormy little self-styled philosopher; it can’t have been easy. Rather, I think it’s a revealing place to start an account of what has been a life-long interest–perhaps an obsession–with the power of the imagination to shape our collective life. Just because the distinction between right and left is, ultimately, a figment of the collective imagination, that doesn’t make it any less real. Money is equally an invention of the imagination, but try to survive in a capitalist society without it and you run into very real difficulties. The way the imaginary becomes real, and the way reality shapes the imagination, is a riddle that has sustained my curiosity.

Growing up in a household of activists must have made its contribution to my skpeticial disposition, and it would later lead me, as a young adult around the turn of the millennia, to become an organizer in Canada in what was then called the alter-globalization movement, then, quickly following that, the anti-war and anti-racism struggles surrounding the advent of the War on Terror. I witnessed the power over the imagination of the neoliberal discourse of the End of History, what Mark Fisher would later call “capitalist realism.” In spite of the manifold injustices in the global capitalist order, the abiding belief that this was the best of all possible systems, or that in any case it was impossible to change matters, was profoundly demobilizing. I sensed, in the course of my activism, that, while not without some success, my comrades and I were only ever reaching about 5% of the population with our impassioned calls for global solidarity. Part of the problem, I realized at the time, is that most people had convinced themselves that the reigning order was natural, normal or inevitable. But many more simply had no time, or were denied the opportunity, to imagine the world broadly, and to recognize that much of how the world works is an arbitrary human construction, held in place by convention and unquestioned belief in the status quo. Worse still, capitalism increasingly seemed to find ways to seduce and co-opt the imagination, a trend that has reached a fevered pitch in the gig economy and in influencer culture, where we are told that expressions of our creative imagination can be our ticket to fame, riches or even simply a modicum of material stability in an otherwise unstable world.

This led me to enroll in graduate school, in a then-new program in the then-topical Globalization Studies. It was here that I came first into contact with the theories of Cornelius Castoriadis, the Greek-French philosopher of the radical imagination. Castoriadis, who was a core protagonist in the influential French journal Socialisme ou Barbarie in the late 1950s and early 1960s, sought to merge the insights of Marxism and psychoanalysis while, at the same time, discarding the more conservative dimensions of both traditions. His work would become highly influential on a generation of students and workers who, in 1968, almost brought down the French government through militant protests and strikes. For Castoriadis, the radical imagination was not the property of this or that ideological position but a fundamental force in all human affairs, active underneath society and within each and every social subject. Castoriadis’s ontological claim was that the imagination is the protean stuff out of which both subjects and institutions are made, a magma-like, flowing substance, between liquid and solid, that flows beneath the surface. Like magma, when it erupts it soon solidifies, and we take these solidifications as hard, fast and eternal, forgetting their tectonic origins. But both on the level of the subject and society at large, another eruption awaits, which will either be channeled by the existing crystallizations to reproduce their order or sweep them away to make room for new institutions.

Like Castoriadis, I became fascinated by the way the unique socioeconomic system of capitalism both relied on and shaped the imagination. The highly mediated capitalism of early 21st century Canada was, of course, quite different than 1950s France, and my interest increasingly gravitated towards the way the imagined systems of human categorization organized around the idea of “race” (a pure fiction invented to justify imperialism, but which became and remains deadly real) continued to have such sway and to be one of the key ways that exploitation and inequality was reproduced in the interests of corporations and the extremely wealthy. But I also, starting in 2005, became fixated on another intersection of capitalism and the imagination that was to captivate everyone’s attention a few years later: the financial sector.

In the wake of the 2008 global financial meltdown many commentators and theorists sought to understand how the arcana of finance caused such chaos: credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, structured investment vehicles and other derivatives seemed to be figments of the contorted imagination of Wall Street bankers calculated to clothe naked exploitation in the garb of scientific calculation. But I argued that is only part of the story, and the least interesting part at that. More broadly, a process that critics have called “financialization” has not only seen the growing wealth and power of the financial sector around the world, it was leading to profound social and cultural transformations. Here, I drew deeply on the work of New York University’s Randy Martin, who would later host me as a postdoctoral fellow in 2011, shortly before his tragic premature death four years later. For Martin, financialization also meant the way each and every social subject is encouraged to embrace and adopt the dispositions, ideas and value system of finance, even if they have nothing to do with the movement of stocks or bonds. In a neoiliberal age, where forms of public social security have been cut or privatized, we are all instructed, sometimes explicitly, more often implicitly from a million cultural points, to see ourselves as savvy risk-managers, navigating a world of opportunities for personal enrichment and betterment. Education is recast as an investment in one’s human capital; housing is recast as a financial opportunity or liability; in an age of the gig-worker, one’s passions, hobbies, personal networks, friendships and dispositions all become assets to be put in play. The entrepreneurial self theorized by Michel Foucault and Nicholas Rose in the 1970s and 80s is accelerated into a financier of the self. 

We witness this imperative in, for instance, the enthusiasm for “financial literacy” education for children and adults which almost always obscures or mystifies the sociological sources of poverty, debt and economic precarity and, instead, instructs individual learners to embrace a world of risk. It can also be observed in the popularity of reality television where house-buyers, antique hunters or junk collectors are celebrated for their quotidian financial skills. In general, for Martin, financialization implies the “profaning” of the future, the narrowing of personal and collective horizons towards an endless “now.” To the extent we are each instructed to turn our imaginations towards mapping out the future as a grid of cost and benefit, risk and reward, any sense that the future of society might be different recedes from individual and collective view. 

My contribution to this debate was to draw on the work of Castoriadis, as well as David Graeber, to explicitly insist on the importance of the imagination to this process. Financialization doesn’t kill the imagination, it excites, conscripts and harnesses its power. And, in turn, financialization, as a social process, depends on the imagination. It not only depends on the imagination of financiers who invent highly creative, if diabolical, ways of making money out of money. It also depends on nearly everyone, even the world’s poorest people reimagining themselves as financialized subjects and reimagining their world as one of assets, risks and potential rewards. In later work, I theorized that it is, in fact, this financialized imagination that is fertile ground for the growth of the kinds of reactionary, far-right and (post-)fascist ideological ideology and activism that have recently proven themselves so profoundly dangerous to any truly democratic project.

At the same time as I was developing this theoretical work, I also began what would become a decade-long collaboration with my colleague Alex Khasnabish to mobilize insights from Castoriadis to develop a methodology for studying with social movements. We were also deeply inspired by Robin D.G. Kelley’s phenomenal work on the Black radical imagination. We identified two dominant strategic trends in scholars who seek to work in solidarity with movements: sometimes they simply seek to invoke those movements in their writing, dignifying them with attention and offering outside reflections; other times scholars embrace a strategy of avocation, putting their time, skills and resources at the disposal of those movements. There are merits to both, but we wanted to experiment with a strategy we came to call convocation. How might scholars be active in calling together social movement actors to have conversations or encounters they might not otherwise have, in the name of opening and holding a space for the radical imagination to spark and catch light? For the better part of a decade, we experimented with this approach in the conservative Canadian city of Halifax, where progressive movements were generally far from successful. How did they sustain hope and energy in the face of so little success? We theorized that most movements dwell in a space between success and failure, and that critical scholars, working in solidarity, have a role to play in fostering moments of critical reflection and communion that movements rarely create for themselves.

In 2017 I took up a new position as Canada Research Chair in Culture Media and Social Justice (later Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination) at Lakehead University in the small, very remote Canadian city of Thunder Bay, a place plagued by extremely violent anti-Inidgenous racism. There, I took the insights from the Radical Imagination Project to found RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab as a platform for fostering research and organizing public outreach on topics of social justice, decolonization and the radical imagination. With the support of the Canada Research Chairs program and the Canadian Foundation for Innovation we have, in the past 5 years, offered dozens of workshops, held film screenings and public talks and worked closely with grassroots anti-racist and anti-poverty movements on these themes. 

The lab has also been a platform for my international scholarly activities. In addition to fostering my further research into financialization we have been exploring new participatory methods for bringing academics, artists, activists and diverse publics together to “convoke” the radical imagination. For example, we have organized collectively-created walking tours of the financial districts of London and Toronto to explore financialization from new, embodied perspectives. We have begun to integrate podcasting into the way we explore issues and develop communities of common inquiry. And we are in the process of developing a board game lab to explore the way analogue game design can be a method for theorizing and catalyzing a discussion around difficult social issues. Our first game, Clue-Anon, explores why conspiracy theories are both so fun and so dangerous.

The post A reflection on the radical imagination: From finance to social movements to games appeared first on Max Haiven.

Far from Ukraine, Putin’s War Worsens Palm Oil Crisis (Boston Review)

This article appeared on April 27, 2022 in Boston Review. The title is slightly misleading as the bulk of the article is actually about the long entanglements of war, empire and palm oil, with the ongoing Russian invasion as the jumping-off point.

In the global protests against Vladimir Putin’s “special operation,” the sunflower has become a potent emblem of solidarity with Ukraine, for which it is not only a national symbol but a key export. Native to the Americas, it was established in Eastern Europe by the turn of the nineteenth century, and ever since Ukraine and Russia have cultivated it and prized its oil. Together the two countries now produce at least 70 precent of the globe’s sunflower oil.

Ukraine and Russia produce at least 70 precent of the globe’s sunflower oil. But the invasion has disrupted this export, sending the global price of all cooking oils skyrocketing.

But the invasion has disrupted this export, sending the global price of all cooking oils skyrocketing. This has forced fast and processed food companies to scramble for alternatives. The resulting price hikes on these commodities threaten to put an essential foodstuff, cooking oil, out of reach for many of the world’s poor. And it has caused a dangerous resurgence of palm oil as a substitute, to the great dismay of environmental and human rights campaigners. This demand has so greatly increased the market value of palm oil that Indonesia, which exports 56 percent of the world’s supply, announced this week that it would halt all exports until it could secure its own country’s food supply. This move will certainly only further destabilize markets.

Over the past decades, environmental and human rights organizations have had some measure of success in drawing attention to the dire impacts of palm oil production, notably in Indonesia and Malaysia, which together export 85 percent of the world’s supply, as well as in Latin America, West Africa, and other tropical regions where oil palms are grown. Taking inspiration from earlier consumer-oriented campaigns to associate diamond mining with war and violence, several large global NGOs have used the term “conflict palm oil.” The term seeks to draw attention to the link between the expansion of palm oil plantations deep into tropical forests and the systematic abuse of workers and the environment. The expansion of oil palm farming is often accomplished through violent land-grabs that robs Indigenous people and peasants of their traditional territories. Palm barons are known to employ gangs and death squads to intimidate or murder journalists, trade unionists, and environmentalists.

In the last decade, a number of high-profile brands, including Iceland-brand frozen foods and Barilla (the world’s largest pasta maker), have bowed to pressure and removed palm oil from their products, turning to sunflower, soy, coconut, and other oils as substitutes. Others have pledged to purchase only from suppliers who abide by voluntary (and dubious) “sustainable” benchmarks. But with prices of alternative oils rising as markets rush to compensate for the disruption to Ukraine’s and Russia’s sunflower exports, those modest advances are in jeopardy. Palm oil remains a reliably cheap, readily available alternative. Environmental campaigners fear another wave of land-grabbing and forest-burning for palm oil production will follow, as happened in the wake of decisions in the United States (2007) and EU (2009) to increase the proportion of ethanol in gasoline, leading to a boom in the market for biofuels.

But the link between palm oil and war has a longer history, and that history has a lot to teach us about the capitalist economy of which we are a part.

Palm oil has been used for millennia in West Africa, where it remains not only a staple of the diet but also a substance freighted with cultural, spiritual, and economic significance. The term “palm oil” refers in fact to two separate products: the oil pressed from the fleshy orange seed bunches of the oil palm, and the distinct, harder-to-access oil locked in the kernels. While oil can be extracted from at least three different palm species, Elaeis guineensis, native to West Africa, is the most common cash crop. In its native region, the cultivation, harvest, and refining of its fruits have often constituted the bedrock of economic relations. As oil palm historian Jonathan Robins reports, it was critical to trade relations between the regions’ kingdoms and empires, including during the period of the transatlantic slave trade. But it was only after the British Empire banned the slave trade in 1807 that Liverpool’s merchants, denied their source of wealth, began to take an interest in the substance. Europe’s industrial revolution demanded lubricants for factory machines and the locomotives that brought their goods to market.

What palm oil’s story reveals is that, beyond the episodic disruptions of supply chains by “hot” conflicts, like Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, there is a deeper current of violence.

Soon, industrial chemists learned how to refine the pungent orange oil to manufacture, among other things, soap and candles. It also became vital to the miraculous new technology of preserving food in tin cans. Tinned food enabled the safe transportation of food throughout the empire, a necessity as troops were stationed in tropical zones where supplies easily spoiled and poisoning by locals was feared. All of this was make possible by the artificially cheapened labor of Africans, who cultivated, harvested, processed, and transported palm oil to the coasts, first under local taskmasters and later on European plantations in Africa.

These newly cheap commodities were sold to European consumers by companies like Lever, ancestor of today’s Unilever, still one of the world’s largest consumers of palm oil. They were promoted as the shared bounty of empire, benefiting rich and poor alike. Innovations in advertising driven by the soap, candle, and canned goods industries propounded a repertoire of racist imagery that still haunt us today, depicting Africans as desperate and thankful for European consumers’ largesse. European consumers were told that buying palm oil goods would gently, through the magic of the market, even help to defeat African slavery.

The reality, of course, is that, in the name of free trade, British and other European powers licensed themselves to invade Africa’s civilizations, slaughter military and civilian targets alike with machine guns, depose rulers, and impose exploitative trading relations that were anything but “free.” All this was undertaken in the name of securing the export of cheap palm oil and other commodities. Key to palm oil’s global trade, and to Europeans’ successful push inland into West Africa, was the advent of the steamship, its gears lubricated by palm oil too. For all these reasons and more, I have dubbed palm oil the grease of empire.

A short recounting of the 1897 British invasion and destruction of the Edo Kingdom in present-day Nigeria helps to illustrate how palm oil was central to the machinations of empire. In Edo, the British consul, in service to the empire’s merchant capitalists, orchestrated the conditions where his trade envoy would be attacked for ignoring the travel restrictions of Edo’s oba (king). This in turn justified the mobilization of a “punitive expedition,” complete with rockets and machine guns, a campaign that was celebrated in the English press as a humanitarian mission to save the Edo people from their oba’s (salaciously exaggerated) rituals of human sacrifice. The invasion resulted in the complete destruction of Edo’s magnificent capital city, admired by European visitors since the sixteenth century for its impressive architecture and organization. The oba was tried for crimes by a British tribunal and forced into exile. The upshot: the kingdom’s palm oil was secured for European import. Among the additional spoils of war were thousands of art objects collectively known as the Benin Bronzes. To this day, most are still incarcerated in European collections and museums, though there is a growing global movement to see them returned. That repatriation inspired the opening scene of Black Panther (2018), in which the villain, Killmonger, stages a daring raid on a museum that unmistakably resembles the Sainsbury Wing of the British Museum, where the largest collection of the bronzes is kept.

As the Industrial Revolution and the age of empire proceeded, palm oil found new uses. It was still too stigmatized by its association with Africa, and with industrial application, to be marketed as a source of cheap edible fat in Europe, despite the growing destitute urban proletariat and shortages of butter and lard. It was, however, a cheap and ready source of glycerin which, when combined with nitric acid, produced a volatile explosive substance that promised to revolutionize warfare. When, in 1867, Alfred Nobel discovered a way to fix nitroglycerin to clay in his lab near Hamburg, dynamite was born. Seventy-six years later, in 1943, the British Royal Air Force’s Operation Gomorrah would use the refined fruits of Nobel’s invention to almost completely raze Hamburg and kill 37,000 civilians in the span of a week, only one of many examples of the devastating impact of such explosives when combined with air power.

True: explosives also put a powerful weapon in the hands of working-class and anti-colonial rebels around the world, who could steal it from work sites and use it to target kings, conquerors, and capitalists in their carriages, homes, and clubs. But the myth of the deranged, bomb-hurling anarchist, like today’s myth of the terrorist, in fact helped distract attention from a far greater violence. Around the world, explosives were being used to blast open rockfaces and level terrain for railways and mining, leading nearly everywhere to new frontiers of resource extraction and labor exploitation, with catastrophic environmental and humanitarian consequences that haunt us to this day.

British and other European powers licensed themselves to invade Africa’s civilizations and slaughter military and civilian targets alike, all in the name of securing the export of cheap palm oil.

The “opening” of the American West, for example, and especially the transit of railways through the Rockies to resource-rich California, was accomplished with the help of dynamite, at the horrific expense of debt-bonded Asian workers who were often killed in the explosions or buried alive by the resulting rockslides. The toxic effluent from new mines in those territories was a significant contributor to the genocide waged against Indigenous nations.

Southeast Asia was another such location of rapacious empire-building and resource extraction. Whereas once European empires had been content to dominate coastal entrepots, new technologies including explosives, steamships, and railways allowed entrepreneurs to expand inland, including to establish plantations cut out from the lush tropical forests. With imperial troops (and hired gangs) nearby to put down revolts and a ready supply of displaced, migrant workers at their disposal, European capitalists made vast fortunes growing export-oriented crops, including oil palms. Soon the territories that would, after decolonization, become Indonesia and Malaysia displaced West Africa as the world’s leading exporters of palm oil, and so they remain.

The catalog of violence unleashed by plantation owners and colonial governments is chilling. This horror was abetted by the cunning with which they manipulated preexisting and fabricated ethnoreligious tensions to sabotage worker solidarity. Debt-bonded and enslaved laborers, many of them dispossessed by British imperialism in the Indian subcontinent, were made to try to survive deadly working conditions, pestilent accommodations, and brutal overseers. Plantation managers did not find it untoward to report mortality rates in excess of 10 percent a season due to accidents, disease, and violence. In Sumatra, at least a quarter of workers died as the result of their exploitation in the last decades of the nineteenth century. When workers rose up—and they indeed did—plantation owners were largely free to suppress them with lethal force, or to call on colonial forces to target not only the workers but their communities as well.

In the wake of World War II, the British and Dutch empires fought vicious wars against anti-colonial guerillas to hold on to their colonies at the behest of the large firms and European planter class (and their local agents) who ruled. It was in contexts such as these—and later in the U.S. neocolonial folly of the Vietnam War—that one of the deadliest legacies of palm oil was deployed, that murderous substance that bears its name: napalm. The substance was first developed during World War II in laboratories on Harvard’s quiet campus by merging incendiary explosives with palmitic acid initially derived from palm and other tropical oils (in later large-scale deployment, these natural derivatives were replaced with synthetic alternatives). Napalm proved to be a devastating weapon for empires to use in what they euphemized as “counterinsurgency.” Especially when dropped from planes and helicopters, it indiscriminately ravaged both civilians and forests, both of which sheltered and hid insurgents and, unlike machine guns and dynamite, napalm is difficult for anti-colonial fighters to appropriate and repurpose.

Ultimately, both Malaysia and Indonesia won their independence, but the plantation economy remained, sometimes with different owners. By the 1950s, these nations saw palm oil as an important source of economic development and, with the help of international organizations including the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, aggressively pursued intensive development that led to millions of acres of forest being destroyed. This had catastrophic impacts on biodiversity and contributed to what the world would later come to recognize as anthropogenic climate change. While in some senses these schemes worked to enrich these countries, the wealth was unevenly distributed toward the top, with a powerful palm oil oligarchy emerging. It retains its power and influence to this day. Meanwhile, to ensure the sustainability of these inequalities, communist insurgencies in both countries were repressed in ways that unleashed horror upon horror on civilian populations. These wars laid the groundwork for the conditions in those regions that we see today, with violence, intimidation, and lawlessness defining the palm oil industry. The haunting documentary The Act of Killing (2012) vividly depicts the conditions of injustice, impunity, and exploitation caused by Indonesia’s sixties-era anti-communist purge: campaigns of wanton murder, sadistic torture, and systematic rape were commonplace, with perpetrators never brought to justice.

A similar story can be seen in Latin America, where palm oil has more recently been introduced in countries including Honduras, Guatemala, Brazil, and Colombia. Though each situation is unique, all share a recent history of U.S.-backed authoritarian regimes that targeted civilians with violence in order to defend local and foreign capitalists. For example, the United States worked extensively during the midcentury to support the regionally destabilizing business practices of the United Fruit Company, whose descendent company, Chiquita Brand Foods, remains a major player in the palm oil economy.

It was in the U.S. neocolonial folly of the Vietnam War that one of the deadliest legacies of palm oil was deployed, that murderous substance that bears its name: napalm.

In present-day Colombia, incentives to transition the agricultural economy away from cocaine have encouraged landowners and land-grabbers to turn to palm oil, not because it is particularly lucrative but because it is a “flex crop,” with so many end markets that its price is relatively stable. Even though oil palms grow slowly relative to oil sources such as soy, it is easy for entrepreneurs to raze forest in the hinterlands, establishing new plantations far from the eyes of regulators and journalists. This is often accomplished by simply taking Indigenous or peasant lands. In the process, forests that have supplied communities with sustainable livelihoods are destroyed. Oil palms grow well on scorched land, and so fire has become the preferred method for clearing large tracts of forested land. This releases huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and has a catastrophic impact on the non-human species for which the forests are home.

These patterns are repeated around the world. Palm oil is a fundamentally and devastatingly violent industry and has been since its origins in European imperialism in Africa. This violence is not unique to palm oil, and arguably other export-oriented crops and even oil-producing industries are no different: the soybean industry is an environmental nightmare, for example. But what palm oil’s story reveals is that, beyond the episodic disruptions of supply chains by “hot” conflicts, like Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, there is a deeper current of violence. That violence is usually hidden from consumers behind the colorful packaging of the instant ramen and shampoo we buy at the supermarket.

Or not hidden at all: some of these commodities might even come to us proudly displaying a crest boasting that the palm oil from which they are made is “sustainable.” This labeling was an innovation of a global roundtable of palm oil exporters, corporate buyers, government officials, and representatives of NGOs that was established to respond to increasingly vociferous criticism of the industry in the early 2000s. It now purports to audit and enforce voluntary environmental and human rights codes for palm oil producers. But even the roughly 40 percent of the industry that subscribes to the scheme has shown lackluster results at best. Refining and exporting companies complain (with some honesty) that they can’t possibly track all suppliers, who often are connected through a byzantine network of subcontractors and sub-subcontractors. Much of the world’s palm oil is sourced from deep in the jungle, where forests are being razed, debt-bonded migrant workers are being exposed to toxic chemicals, and local officials might be easily bribed to look the other way. This is very far indeed from the urban offices where journalists, government representatives, and NGOs do their work. In January 2022, Malaysia’s Sime Darby Berhad, the world’s largest palm oil company by land size and a poster child of voluntary regulation, was determined by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (by no means a dovish humanitarian organization) to be guilty of using forced labor, making its assets subject to seizure.

Capitalism is at war with people and the planet. Palm oil is both a weapon in that war and an indicator of its severity.

The flip side to industry voluntary regulation is consumer activism. For large environmental NGOs like Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund, palm oil has proven a compelling cause for campaigns, especially when linked to the plight of charismatic species such as Borneo’s orangutans, whose habitat is profoundly threatened by palm oil plantations. Such campaigns, which put pressure on European and U.S. brands that use palm oil in their products, promise that if consumers “vote with our wallets,” we can stop the worst excesses of the industry. There has been some measure of success, but what Karl Marx called the heavy artillery of cheap prices has, in the wake of the Ukraine conflict, seen many of these gains reversed.

More profoundly, while such campaigns can draw attention to an issue and give environmental and human rights campaigners leverage, they target only the most visible forms of violence. These leave untroubled the profound violence of cheap prices themselves, which have their origins in imperialism and are possible only through the anonymous, dehumanizing machinations of a global capitalist market.

What such campaigns also neglect is the fact that the vast majority of palm oil consumers purchase it not out of ignorance but because of poverty. Palm oil has become the fat of the world’s poor—for example, in India, where cheap cooking oil feeds millions, displacing local artisanal oil-making customs and leading to widespread heart disease (palm oil is extremely high in dangerous saturated fat). Elsewhere, for instance for migrant workers in China’s industrial dormitories or for U.S. prisoners, and even on palm oil plantations themselves, cheap packaged foods—which, like instant ramen noodles, are mostly loaded with palm oil—are all that can be afforded.

Capitalism is at war with people and the planet. Palm oil is both a weapon in that war and an indicator of its severity. Palm oil could be an important and sustainable part of a diversified array of crops grown by small farmers in tropical regions, but that is far from the reality. Around the world, Indigenous, workers’, and peasants organizations are fighting for their rights and developing plans for alternatives. But these would require halting the industrial palm oil sector, something its beneficiaries will fight against, with politics and guns, and they have abundant resources to do so. To meet this challenge, those who live in palm oil importing countries will have to do more than avoid buying certain projects, assuming they can even afford to do so. We will all need to rededicate ourselves to creating a nonviolent economy. This will require localizing the production of many of the foods and products we depend upon, and building a just and sustainable network of global trade that does not sacrifice people on the altar of cheap prices.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its knock-on effects are a reminder that we are, more than ever, an interconnected global species, with profound and terrible powers to transform the world. Taking responsibility for our power will require much more than individual consumer action: it requires us to transcend the racist, destructive legacies of empire. Solving the palm oil curse is one part of this process.

The post Far from Ukraine, Putin’s War Worsens Palm Oil Crisis (Boston Review) appeared first on Max Haiven.

Far from Ukraine, Putin’s War Worsens Palm Oil Crisis

This article appeared on April 27, 2022 in Boston Review. The title is slightly misleading as the bulk of the article is actually about the long entanglements of war, empire and palm oil, with the ongoing Russian invasion as the jumping-off point.

In the global protests against Vladimir Putin’s “special operation,” the sunflower has become a potent emblem of solidarity with Ukraine, for which it is not only a national symbol but a key export. Native to the Americas, it was established in Eastern Europe by the turn of the nineteenth century, and ever since Ukraine and Russia have cultivated it and prized its oil. Together the two countries now produce at least 70 precent of the globe’s sunflower oil.

Ukraine and Russia produce at least 70 precent of the globe’s sunflower oil. But the invasion has disrupted this export, sending the global price of all cooking oils skyrocketing.

But the invasion has disrupted this export, sending the global price of all cooking oils skyrocketing. This has forced fast and processed food companies to scramble for alternatives. The resulting price hikes on these commodities threaten to put an essential foodstuff, cooking oil, out of reach for many of the world’s poor. And it has caused a dangerous resurgence of palm oil as a substitute, to the great dismay of environmental and human rights campaigners. This demand has so greatly increased the market value of palm oil that Indonesia, which exports 56 percent of the world’s supply, announced this week that it would halt all exports until it could secure its own country’s food supply. This move will certainly only further destabilize markets.

Over the past decades, environmental and human rights organizations have had some measure of success in drawing attention to the dire impacts of palm oil production, notably in Indonesia and Malaysia, which together export 85 percent of the world’s supply, as well as in Latin America, West Africa, and other tropical regions where oil palms are grown. Taking inspiration from earlier consumer-oriented campaigns to associate diamond mining with war and violence, several large global NGOs have used the term “conflict palm oil.” The term seeks to draw attention to the link between the expansion of palm oil plantations deep into tropical forests and the systematic abuse of workers and the environment. The expansion of oil palm farming is often accomplished through violent land-grabs that robs Indigenous people and peasants of their traditional territories. Palm barons are known to employ gangs and death squads to intimidate or murder journalists, trade unionists, and environmentalists.

In the last decade, a number of high-profile brands, including Iceland-brand frozen foods and Barilla (the world’s largest pasta maker), have bowed to pressure and removed palm oil from their products, turning to sunflower, soy, coconut, and other oils as substitutes. Others have pledged to purchase only from suppliers who abide by voluntary (and dubious) “sustainable” benchmarks. But with prices of alternative oils rising as markets rush to compensate for the disruption to Ukraine’s and Russia’s sunflower exports, those modest advances are in jeopardy. Palm oil remains a reliably cheap, readily available alternative. Environmental campaigners fear another wave of land-grabbing and forest-burning for palm oil production will follow, as happened in the wake of decisions in the United States (2007) and EU (2009) to increase the proportion of ethanol in gasoline, leading to a boom in the market for biofuels.

But the link between palm oil and war has a longer history, and that history has a lot to teach us about the capitalist economy of which we are a part.

Palm oil has been used for millennia in West Africa, where it remains not only a staple of the diet but also a substance freighted with cultural, spiritual, and economic significance. The term “palm oil” refers in fact to two separate products: the oil pressed from the fleshy orange seed bunches of the oil palm, and the distinct, harder-to-access oil locked in the kernels. While oil can be extracted from at least three different palm species, Elaeis guineensis, native to West Africa, is the most common cash crop. In its native region, the cultivation, harvest, and refining of its fruits have often constituted the bedrock of economic relations. As oil palm historian Jonathan Robins reports, it was critical to trade relations between the regions’ kingdoms and empires, including during the period of the transatlantic slave trade. But it was only after the British Empire banned the slave trade in 1807 that Liverpool’s merchants, denied their source of wealth, began to take an interest in the substance. Europe’s industrial revolution demanded lubricants for factory machines and the locomotives that brought their goods to market.

What palm oil’s story reveals is that, beyond the episodic disruptions of supply chains by “hot” conflicts, like Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, there is a deeper current of violence.

Soon, industrial chemists learned how to refine the pungent orange oil to manufacture, among other things, soap and candles. It also became vital to the miraculous new technology of preserving food in tin cans. Tinned food enabled the safe transportation of food throughout the empire, a necessity as troops were stationed in tropical zones where supplies easily spoiled and poisoning by locals was feared. All of this was make possible by the artificially cheapened labor of Africans, who cultivated, harvested, processed, and transported palm oil to the coasts, first under local taskmasters and later on European plantations in Africa.

These newly cheap commodities were sold to European consumers by companies like Lever, ancestor of today’s Unilever, still one of the world’s largest consumers of palm oil. They were promoted as the shared bounty of empire, benefiting rich and poor alike. Innovations in advertising driven by the soap, candle, and canned goods industries propounded a repertoire of racist imagery that still haunt us today, depicting Africans as desperate and thankful for European consumers’ largesse. European consumers were told that buying palm oil goods would gently, through the magic of the market, even help to defeat African slavery.

The reality, of course, is that, in the name of free trade, British and other European powers licensed themselves to invade Africa’s civilizations, slaughter military and civilian targets alike with machine guns, depose rulers, and impose exploitative trading relations that were anything but “free.” All this was undertaken in the name of securing the export of cheap palm oil and other commodities. Key to palm oil’s global trade, and to Europeans’ successful push inland into West Africa, was the advent of the steamship, its gears lubricated by palm oil too. For all these reasons and more, I have dubbed palm oil the grease of empire.

A short recounting of the 1897 British invasion and destruction of the Edo Kingdom in present-day Nigeria helps to illustrate how palm oil was central to the machinations of empire. In Edo, the British consul, in service to the empire’s merchant capitalists, orchestrated the conditions where his trade envoy would be attacked for ignoring the travel restrictions of Edo’s oba (king). This in turn justified the mobilization of a “punitive expedition,” complete with rockets and machine guns, a campaign that was celebrated in the English press as a humanitarian mission to save the Edo people from their oba’s (salaciously exaggerated) rituals of human sacrifice. The invasion resulted in the complete destruction of Edo’s magnificent capital city, admired by European visitors since the sixteenth century for its impressive architecture and organization. The oba was tried for crimes by a British tribunal and forced into exile. The upshot: the kingdom’s palm oil was secured for European import. Among the additional spoils of war were thousands of art objects collectively known as the Benin Bronzes. To this day, most are still incarcerated in European collections and museums, though there is a growing global movement to see them returned. That repatriation inspired the opening scene of Black Panther (2018), in which the villain, Killmonger, stages a daring raid on a museum that unmistakably resembles the Sainsbury Wing of the British Museum, where the largest collection of the bronzes is kept.

As the Industrial Revolution and the age of empire proceeded, palm oil found new uses. It was still too stigmatized by its association with Africa, and with industrial application, to be marketed as a source of cheap edible fat in Europe, despite the growing destitute urban proletariat and shortages of butter and lard. It was, however, a cheap and ready source of glycerin which, when combined with nitric acid, produced a volatile explosive substance that promised to revolutionize warfare. When, in 1867, Alfred Nobel discovered a way to fix nitroglycerin to clay in his lab near Hamburg, dynamite was born. Seventy-six years later, in 1943, the British Royal Air Force’s Operation Gomorrah would use the refined fruits of Nobel’s invention to almost completely raze Hamburg and kill 37,000 civilians in the span of a week, only one of many examples of the devastating impact of such explosives when combined with air power.

True: explosives also put a powerful weapon in the hands of working-class and anti-colonial rebels around the world, who could steal it from work sites and use it to target kings, conquerors, and capitalists in their carriages, homes, and clubs. But the myth of the deranged, bomb-hurling anarchist, like today’s myth of the terrorist, in fact helped distract attention from a far greater violence. Around the world, explosives were being used to blast open rockfaces and level terrain for railways and mining, leading nearly everywhere to new frontiers of resource extraction and labor exploitation, with catastrophic environmental and humanitarian consequences that haunt us to this day.

British and other European powers licensed themselves to invade Africa’s civilizations and slaughter military and civilian targets alike, all in the name of securing the export of cheap palm oil.

The “opening” of the American West, for example, and especially the transit of railways through the Rockies to resource-rich California, was accomplished with the help of dynamite, at the horrific expense of debt-bonded Asian workers who were often killed in the explosions or buried alive by the resulting rockslides. The toxic effluent from new mines in those territories was a significant contributor to the genocide waged against Indigenous nations.

Southeast Asia was another such location of rapacious empire-building and resource extraction. Whereas once European empires had been content to dominate coastal entrepots, new technologies including explosives, steamships, and railways allowed entrepreneurs to expand inland, including to establish plantations cut out from the lush tropical forests. With imperial troops (and hired gangs) nearby to put down revolts and a ready supply of displaced, migrant workers at their disposal, European capitalists made vast fortunes growing export-oriented crops, including oil palms. Soon the territories that would, after decolonization, become Indonesia and Malaysia displaced West Africa as the world’s leading exporters of palm oil, and so they remain.

The catalog of violence unleashed by plantation owners and colonial governments is chilling. This horror was abetted by the cunning with which they manipulated preexisting and fabricated ethnoreligious tensions to sabotage worker solidarity. Debt-bonded and enslaved laborers, many of them dispossessed by British imperialism in the Indian subcontinent, were made to try to survive deadly working conditions, pestilent accommodations, and brutal overseers. Plantation managers did not find it untoward to report mortality rates in excess of 10 percent a season due to accidents, disease, and violence. In Sumatra, at least a quarter of workers died as the result of their exploitation in the last decades of the nineteenth century. When workers rose up—and they indeed did—plantation owners were largely free to suppress them with lethal force, or to call on colonial forces to target not only the workers but their communities as well.

In the wake of World War II, the British and Dutch empires fought vicious wars against anti-colonial guerillas to hold on to their colonies at the behest of the large firms and European planter class (and their local agents) who ruled. It was in contexts such as these—and later in the U.S. neocolonial folly of the Vietnam War—that one of the deadliest legacies of palm oil was deployed, that murderous substance that bears its name: napalm. The substance was first developed during World War II in laboratories on Harvard’s quiet campus by merging incendiary explosives with palmitic acid initially derived from palm and other tropical oils (in later large-scale deployment, these natural derivatives were replaced with synthetic alternatives). Napalm proved to be a devastating weapon for empires to use in what they euphemized as “counterinsurgency.” Especially when dropped from planes and helicopters, it indiscriminately ravaged both civilians and forests, both of which sheltered and hid insurgents and, unlike machine guns and dynamite, napalm is difficult for anti-colonial fighters to appropriate and repurpose.

Ultimately, both Malaysia and Indonesia won their independence, but the plantation economy remained, sometimes with different owners. By the 1950s, these nations saw palm oil as an important source of economic development and, with the help of international organizations including the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, aggressively pursued intensive development that led to millions of acres of forest being destroyed. This had catastrophic impacts on biodiversity and contributed to what the world would later come to recognize as anthropogenic climate change. While in some senses these schemes worked to enrich these countries, the wealth was unevenly distributed toward the top, with a powerful palm oil oligarchy emerging. It retains its power and influence to this day. Meanwhile, to ensure the sustainability of these inequalities, communist insurgencies in both countries were repressed in ways that unleashed horror upon horror on civilian populations. These wars laid the groundwork for the conditions in those regions that we see today, with violence, intimidation, and lawlessness defining the palm oil industry. The haunting documentary The Act of Killing (2012) vividly depicts the conditions of injustice, impunity, and exploitation caused by Indonesia’s sixties-era anti-communist purge: campaigns of wanton murder, sadistic torture, and systematic rape were commonplace, with perpetrators never brought to justice.

A similar story can be seen in Latin America, where palm oil has more recently been introduced in countries including Honduras, Guatemala, Brazil, and Colombia. Though each situation is unique, all share a recent history of U.S.-backed authoritarian regimes that targeted civilians with violence in order to defend local and foreign capitalists. For example, the United States worked extensively during the midcentury to support the regionally destabilizing business practices of the United Fruit Company, whose descendent company, Chiquita Brand Foods, remains a major player in the palm oil economy.

It was in the U.S. neocolonial folly of the Vietnam War that one of the deadliest legacies of palm oil was deployed, that murderous substance that bears its name: napalm.

In present-day Colombia, incentives to transition the agricultural economy away from cocaine have encouraged landowners and land-grabbers to turn to palm oil, not because it is particularly lucrative but because it is a “flex crop,” with so many end markets that its price is relatively stable. Even though oil palms grow slowly relative to oil sources such as soy, it is easy for entrepreneurs to raze forest in the hinterlands, establishing new plantations far from the eyes of regulators and journalists. This is often accomplished by simply taking Indigenous or peasant lands. In the process, forests that have supplied communities with sustainable livelihoods are destroyed. Oil palms grow well on scorched land, and so fire has become the preferred method for clearing large tracts of forested land. This releases huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and has a catastrophic impact on the non-human species for which the forests are home.

These patterns are repeated around the world. Palm oil is a fundamentally and devastatingly violent industry and has been since its origins in European imperialism in Africa. This violence is not unique to palm oil, and arguably other export-oriented crops and even oil-producing industries are no different: the soybean industry is an environmental nightmare, for example. But what palm oil’s story reveals is that, beyond the episodic disruptions of supply chains by “hot” conflicts, like Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, there is a deeper current of violence. That violence is usually hidden from consumers behind the colorful packaging of the instant ramen and shampoo we buy at the supermarket.

Or not hidden at all: some of these commodities might even come to us proudly displaying a crest boasting that the palm oil from which they are made is “sustainable.” This labeling was an innovation of a global roundtable of palm oil exporters, corporate buyers, government officials, and representatives of NGOs that was established to respond to increasingly vociferous criticism of the industry in the early 2000s. It now purports to audit and enforce voluntary environmental and human rights codes for palm oil producers. But even the roughly 40 percent of the industry that subscribes to the scheme has shown lackluster results at best. Refining and exporting companies complain (with some honesty) that they can’t possibly track all suppliers, who often are connected through a byzantine network of subcontractors and sub-subcontractors. Much of the world’s palm oil is sourced from deep in the jungle, where forests are being razed, debt-bonded migrant workers are being exposed to toxic chemicals, and local officials might be easily bribed to look the other way. This is very far indeed from the urban offices where journalists, government representatives, and NGOs do their work. In January 2022, Malaysia’s Sime Darby Berhad, the world’s largest palm oil company by land size and a poster child of voluntary regulation, was determined by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (by no means a dovish humanitarian organization) to be guilty of using forced labor, making its assets subject to seizure.

Capitalism is at war with people and the planet. Palm oil is both a weapon in that war and an indicator of its severity.

The flip side to industry voluntary regulation is consumer activism. For large environmental NGOs like Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund, palm oil has proven a compelling cause for campaigns, especially when linked to the plight of charismatic species such as Borneo’s orangutans, whose habitat is profoundly threatened by palm oil plantations. Such campaigns, which put pressure on European and U.S. brands that use palm oil in their products, promise that if consumers “vote with our wallets,” we can stop the worst excesses of the industry. There has been some measure of success, but what Karl Marx called the heavy artillery of cheap prices has, in the wake of the Ukraine conflict, seen many of these gains reversed.

More profoundly, while such campaigns can draw attention to an issue and give environmental and human rights campaigners leverage, they target only the most visible forms of violence. These leave untroubled the profound violence of cheap prices themselves, which have their origins in imperialism and are possible only through the anonymous, dehumanizing machinations of a global capitalist market.

What such campaigns also neglect is the fact that the vast majority of palm oil consumers purchase it not out of ignorance but because of poverty. Palm oil has become the fat of the world’s poor—for example, in India, where cheap cooking oil feeds millions, displacing local artisanal oil-making customs and leading to widespread heart disease (palm oil is extremely high in dangerous saturated fat). Elsewhere, for instance for migrant workers in China’s industrial dormitories or for U.S. prisoners, and even on palm oil plantations themselves, cheap packaged foods—which, like instant ramen noodles, are mostly loaded with palm oil—are all that can be afforded.

Capitalism is at war with people and the planet. Palm oil is both a weapon in that war and an indicator of its severity. Palm oil could be an important and sustainable part of a diversified array of crops grown by small farmers in tropical regions, but that is far from the reality. Around the world, Indigenous, workers’, and peasants organizations are fighting for their rights and developing plans for alternatives. But these would require halting the industrial palm oil sector, something its beneficiaries will fight against, with politics and guns, and they have abundant resources to do so. To meet this challenge, those who live in palm oil importing countries will have to do more than avoid buying certain projects, assuming they can even afford to do so. We will all need to rededicate ourselves to creating a nonviolent economy. This will require localizing the production of many of the foods and products we depend upon, and building a just and sustainable network of global trade that does not sacrifice people on the altar of cheap prices.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its knock-on effects are a reminder that we are, more than ever, an interconnected global species, with profound and terrible powers to transform the world. Taking responsibility for our power will require much more than individual consumer action: it requires us to transcend the racist, destructive legacies of empire. Solving the palm oil curse is one part of this process.

The post Far from Ukraine, Putin’s War Worsens Palm Oil Crisis appeared first on Max Haiven.

“Revenge Politics, Revenge Economy, Revenge Culture” dossier (Social Text Periscope)

Social Text, the venerable journal of critical theory, has published a dossier of short pieces on revenge in their online annex, Periscope. The pieces either respond to or depart from themes raised in my 2018 book Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts.

The dossier includes:

Introduction: Revenge Politics, Revenge Economy, Revenge CultureTheses on Revenge Capitalism by Max HaivenAnd the Last Shall be First: On the (Im)possibility of Revenge by Bedour AlagraaClimate, Literature, Revenge by S. L. LimFigurations of Naziism as a Foil for (Violent) Revenge Fantasies: Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and the Making of a “New White Man” Post-9/11 by Anna-Esther YounesA Work Fatality: Parasite and Class Antagonism by Eunsong KimThe Vengeance of Unpayable Debts: Art, Activism, and Agitation in Puerto Rico and the United States a conversation with Hannah Appel and Frances Negrón-Muntaner

Below is the text of the introduction, which I wrote.

Introduction: Revenge Politics, Revenge Economy, Revenge CultureMax Haiven

The contributions to this Social Text Periscope dossier are the outcome of a pandemic year’s worth of online conversations between scholars, artists, and activists on themes related to my 2020 book Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts. That book and these contributions seek to understand the broad shape and the specific nuances of the (re)appearance of revenge on the political landscape of the twenty-first century.

But beyond the hand-wringing of liberal pundits and theorists who see the resurgence of right-wing, neofascist, and ethnonationalist parties and movements as aberrations from a noble neoliberal norm, the collected authors locate a politics of revanchism within a neocolonial economic system of global racial capitalism.

As I argue in Revenge Capitalism, it’s not only that this system’s roots are to be found in the horrific vindictive violence that were used to enforce colonialism and slavery. It’s also that the system’s institutions and patterns can, themselves, be understood to be acting vengefully. The US system of mass incarceration, for instance, evidently has nothing to do with public safety or reformation of wrongdoers but, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore shows, is a highly profitable system of retribution. This is a retribution that works to stabilize a capitalism offset by its own contradictions, that works to repress struggles, and that takes its authorless revenge on Black, Latinx, and working class people not simply for specific infractions but, in a sense, preemptively.

The terror of climate change is, likewise, an example of revenge capitalism at work. Even though no corporation or billionaire intends, like some James Bond villain, to wreak ecological vengeance on the world’s poor, nonetheless the outcome (rather than the intent) of global racial capitalism is a kind of needless, unwarranted, and potentially self-sabotaging vengeance. This vengeance will almost certainly lead to the deaths of millions and displacement of billions. Those who suffer will disproportionately be those whose ancestors were colonized or enslaved in earlier moments of this world system. No individual needs to intend this vengeance, yet it occurs. It emerges not from conspiracy but from the contradictions of capital accumulation.

We might, too, recognize capitalism’s vengeance in the remaking of the world into a network of infinite, unpayable debts, a kind of punitive and extractive retribution imposed on individuals and whole polities for the crime of simply desiring to be free. Recent examples include Puerto Rico’s economic situation, wherein debt reprises its long historical role in entrenching colonialism, and the racialized burden of student debt.

The vengeance of capitalism occurs in a moment when a liberal opprobrium towards even speaking of revenge stifles the radical imagination. Throughout the history of global racial capitalism that system’s normalized, routine vengeance against the oppressed has been hidden by the high-minded rhetoric of its beneficiaries. These beneficiaries see rational moderation, Christian forgiveness, and Western institutions of justice, as humanity’s only escape from a universal human prehistory of endless, cyclincal revenge. This vengeful atavistic loop is projected onto “backwards” non-European civilizations as a means to justify those civilization’s  subjugation, a form of preemptive revenge allegedly undertaken for those “backwards” civilizations’ own good. Meanwhile, resistance to colonialism and imperialism, and the rebellions of the European working class, have been framed as pathologically, vengeful, threatening to reopen the Pandora’s Box of revenge.

II.

As such, we not only inherit a world created by global racial capitalism’s vengefulness but also one where that vengeance has been hidden or projected onto the oppressed. We also inherit a dominant discourse of revenge, shaped within and for the perpetuation of that system. As such,  a struggle over the very meaning of revenge is worthy and overdue. In this dossier, radical thinkers revisit revenge as a category for rethinking global racial capitalism and what might be done about it.

It is for this reason that it becomes increasingly important to dwell with and challenge the ways that revenge has been depicted and deployed in art, literature and culture. Doubtless, revenge is one of the truly timeless themes in human narrative. But in each time and place its cutting edge of meaning and moral heft are forged, discursively, by social and economic power relations.

In our moment of “late capitalism,” revenge has proven a highly profitable theme across many genres of popular culture, ranging from sentimental and Manichean tropes of comic books (and blockbuster films based on them) to the campy oeuvre of Quentin Tarntino. Often, revenge is depicted in reactionary ways, for instance in the blockbuster Game of Thrones series where this allegedly timeless human curse was tapped to fuel eight seasons depicting an endless war of all against all. While obviously a fantasy, the pessimistic depiction of “realistic” pre-modern barbarism whets the ideological appetite for bestselling texts like Stephen Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature, a book intended to show us that modern, capitalist “democracy” has finally solved revenge’s dark riddle. Other times, tropes of revenge is mobilized in the name of progressive or radical  causes, as for instance in recent feminist reappropriations of the rape-revenge subgenre in films like The Nightingale or Promising Young Woman. The ambiguously presented political vengefulness of Killmonger in Marvel’s Black Panther introduced the specter of the revenge of the oppressed, that specter that has so long haunted the colonial imagination. These themes have been taken up in the independent Brazilian hit Bacurau, or the films of experimental Ojibwe filmmakers Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil. In these latter, more experimetal examples, the very meaning of revenge is reshaped, away from the passion of a pathalogical individual and towards horizons of collective liberation.

In this dossier, many of the authors explore the politics and economics of revenge in reference to popular culture. Eunsong Kim discusses the Oscar-winning Parasite as a parable of class war in a new gilded age. Anna-Esther Younes skewers Quentin Tarantino’s “Jewish wish-fulfillment fantasy” Inglourious Basterds as, in fact, an American fantasy where historical events are conscripted into the service of the very white supremacist narratives that the film claims to fight against. Bedour Alaagra’s meditation on Black and anti-colonial vengeance is prompted by a visit to Johannesburg’s Apartheid Museum and its tourist-friendly imperative towards forgiveness and reconciliation.

Some of these contributions were the result of guest presentations in an online revenge-themed critical film club I organized over the New Year’s holiday as we entered 2021. Other contributions derive from conversations organized to discuss themes in Revenge Capitalism, including one organized by the radical publisher Common Notions in November of 2020 and one organized in February of 2021 by RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab in cooperation with the Race and Capitalism Project​ at the University of Chicago, the Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy​ at the University of California Los Angeles, and the Institute for Advanced Studies​ at University College London.

III.

To dwell with revenge as a category of critical thought is not to advocate for it as a political strategy. As Fanon warns, “‘a legitimate desire for revenge’ cannot sustain a war of liberation.” Rather, I take all the contributions to this dossier to be inviting us to recognize that the age of revenge politics is already upon us, and has been with us for some time, in spite of claims that ours is (or was) a world of the “capitalist peace” at the proverbial “end of history.” These contributions indicate that revenge is not simply an atavistic politics of reaction existing in the borderlands of global racial capitalism’s empire but, rather, they are at work at the system’s center. These texts challenge us to grapple with the idea that the rise of revenge politics today, where reactionary forces seem to promise no brighter future but only more and better vengeance, might be a dialectic expression of an underlying revenge economy. They show how we might best glimpse the broad shape and manifold complexities of this revenge economy through cultural works which rehearse its dreams and its nightmares.

If, today, we are in an era of revenge politics, revenge economics, and revenge culture, what would the revenge of the repressed, the oppressed, the dispossessed, look like and feel like? Are the commodified fantasies of revenge offered by the culture industries accelerating reactionary politics? To what extent are they offering a tranquilizing catharsis for legitimate rage? To what extent are they providing wish-images that might stoke the flames of rebellion? By what measures might some “we” organize itself around the dream of avenging history, and with what consequences?

As I concluded this introduction in the summer of 2021, the territories currently known as Canada were rocked by the “discovery” of mass graves of Indigenous children who had been seized from their communities and forced to attend Church-run “Residential Schools” where abuse and neglect was rampant and where the objective was, in the words of Canada’s 2017 Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report, “cultural genocide.” Indigenous communities had long known that bodies were literally buried at or near the schools and the Commission had advised the Canadian government to invest in their discovery as part of its efforts towards “reconciliation.” When this was not pursued and Indigenous communities took it upon themselves to hire forensic teams to investigate.

The aftermath of these “discoveries” has seen the targeting of churches in Canada, especially in Indigenous communities, for arson, presumably as revenge for what these institutions did to the protagonists’ kin, as well, perhaps, as a response to the strong wave of genocide denialism, minimization, and outright racist vitriol from non-Indigenous reactionaries in the colonial settler state. Media narratives about the property destruction has been cautious, but online comments reveal the full scope of the racist assumptions: such vindictive “attacks” against churches are, we are told, only to be expected from “savages” who were rescued from their own beastly, vengeful nature by the Church and the colonial imposition of the “Rule of Law.”

But here, instead, we might follow Unangax̂ theorist Eve Tuck and wonder if revenge might be a theory of change, especially in an age when the ongoing genocidal campaign of settler colonialism continues to be waged under the stifling and silencing blanket of an official discourse of “reconciliation.” As Glen Coulthard notes, those who refuse to be reconciled are conveniently (once again) cast as enemies of civilization. Writing with C. Ree, Tuck asks us to consider how “to  the  (purported) (would-be), hero, revenge is monstrous, heard but not seen, insatiable, blind with desire, the Cyclops robbed of her eye. To the self-designated hero, revenge hails a specter of something best forgotten, a ghost from a criminal past.” Revenge, then “is the work of now  and  future  ghosts  and  monsters” of settler colonialism, “the  supply  of which is ever-growing.” Vengeful haunting, she writes “is the relentless remembering and reminding that will not be appeased by settler society’s assurances of innocence and reconciliation.” It “doesn’t hope to change people’s perceptions, nor does it hope for reconciliation. Haunting lies precisely in its refusal to stop. Alien (to settlers) and generative for (ghosts), this refusal to stop is its own form of resolving.  For ghosts, the haunting is the resolving, it is not what needs to be resolved.”

The post “Revenge Politics, Revenge Economy, Revenge Culture” dossier (Social Text Periscope) appeared first on Max Haiven.

“Revenge Politics, Revenge Economy, Revenge Culture” dossier in Social Text Periscope

Social Text, the venerable journal of critical theory, has published a dossier of short pieces on revenge in their online annex, Periscope. The pieces either respond to or depart from themes raised in my 2018 book Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts.

The dossier includes:

Introduction: Revenge Politics, Revenge Economy, Revenge CultureTheses on Revenge Capitalism by Max HaivenAnd the Last Shall be First: On the (Im)possibility of Revenge by Bedour AlagraaClimate, Literature, Revenge by S. L. LimFigurations of Naziism as a Foil for (Violent) Revenge Fantasies: Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and the Making of a “New White Man” Post-9/11 by Anna-Esther YounesA Work Fatality: Parasite and Class Antagonism by Eunsong KimThe Vengeance of Unpayable Debts: Art, Activism, and Agitation in Puerto Rico and the United States a conversation with Hannah Appel and Frances Negrón-Muntaner

Below is the text of the introduction, which I wrote.

Introduction: Revenge Politics, Revenge Economy, Revenge CultureMax Haiven

The contributions to this Social Text Periscope dossier are the outcome of a pandemic year’s worth of online conversations between scholars, artists, and activists on themes related to my 2020 book Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts. That book and these contributions seek to understand the broad shape and the specific nuances of the (re)appearance of revenge on the political landscape of the twenty-first century.

But beyond the hand-wringing of liberal pundits and theorists who see the resurgence of right-wing, neofascist, and ethnonationalist parties and movements as aberrations from a noble neoliberal norm, the collected authors locate a politics of revanchism within a neocolonial economic system of global racial capitalism.

As I argue in Revenge Capitalism, it’s not only that this system’s roots are to be found in the horrific vindictive violence that were used to enforce colonialism and slavery. It’s also that the system’s institutions and patterns can, themselves, be understood to be acting vengefully. The US system of mass incarceration, for instance, evidently has nothing to do with public safety or reformation of wrongdoers but, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore shows, is a highly profitable system of retribution. This is a retribution that works to stabilize a capitalism offset by its own contradictions, that works to repress struggles, and that takes its authorless revenge on Black, Latinx, and working class people not simply for specific infractions but, in a sense, preemptively.

The terror of climate change is, likewise, an example of revenge capitalism at work. Even though no corporation or billionaire intends, like some James Bond villain, to wreak ecological vengeance on the world’s poor, nonetheless the outcome (rather than the intent) of global racial capitalism is a kind of needless, unwarranted, and potentially self-sabotaging vengeance. This vengeance will almost certainly lead to the deaths of millions and displacement of billions. Those who suffer will disproportionately be those whose ancestors were colonized or enslaved in earlier moments of this world system. No individual needs to intend this vengeance, yet it occurs. It emerges not from conspiracy but from the contradictions of capital accumulation.

We might, too, recognize capitalism’s vengeance in the remaking of the world into a network of infinite, unpayable debts, a kind of punitive and extractive retribution imposed on individuals and whole polities for the crime of simply desiring to be free. Recent examples include Puerto Rico’s economic situation, wherein debt reprises its long historical role in entrenching colonialism, and the racialized burden of student debt.

The vengeance of capitalism occurs in a moment when a liberal opprobrium towards even speaking of revenge stifles the radical imagination. Throughout the history of global racial capitalism that system’s normalized, routine vengeance against the oppressed has been hidden by the high-minded rhetoric of its beneficiaries. These beneficiaries see rational moderation, Christian forgiveness, and Western institutions of justice, as humanity’s only escape from a universal human prehistory of endless, cyclincal revenge. This vengeful atavistic loop is projected onto “backwards” non-European civilizations as a means to justify those civilization’s  subjugation, a form of preemptive revenge allegedly undertaken for those “backwards” civilizations’ own good. Meanwhile, resistance to colonialism and imperialism, and the rebellions of the European working class, have been framed as pathologically, vengeful, threatening to reopen the Pandora’s Box of revenge.

II.

As such, we not only inherit a world created by global racial capitalism’s vengefulness but also one where that vengeance has been hidden or projected onto the oppressed. We also inherit a dominant discourse of revenge, shaped within and for the perpetuation of that system. As such,  a struggle over the very meaning of revenge is worthy and overdue. In this dossier, radical thinkers revisit revenge as a category for rethinking global racial capitalism and what might be done about it.

It is for this reason that it becomes increasingly important to dwell with and challenge the ways that revenge has been depicted and deployed in art, literature and culture. Doubtless, revenge is one of the truly timeless themes in human narrative. But in each time and place its cutting edge of meaning and moral heft are forged, discursively, by social and economic power relations.

In our moment of “late capitalism,” revenge has proven a highly profitable theme across many genres of popular culture, ranging from sentimental and Manichean tropes of comic books (and blockbuster films based on them) to the campy oeuvre of Quentin Tarntino. Often, revenge is depicted in reactionary ways, for instance in the blockbuster Game of Thrones series where this allegedly timeless human curse was tapped to fuel eight seasons depicting an endless war of all against all. While obviously a fantasy, the pessimistic depiction of “realistic” pre-modern barbarism whets the ideological appetite for bestselling texts like Stephen Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature, a book intended to show us that modern, capitalist “democracy” has finally solved revenge’s dark riddle. Other times, tropes of revenge is mobilized in the name of progressive or radical  causes, as for instance in recent feminist reappropriations of the rape-revenge subgenre in films like The Nightingale or Promising Young Woman. The ambiguously presented political vengefulness of Killmonger in Marvel’s Black Panther introduced the specter of the revenge of the oppressed, that specter that has so long haunted the colonial imagination. These themes have been taken up in the independent Brazilian hit Bacurau, or the films of experimental Ojibwe filmmakers Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil. In these latter, more experimetal examples, the very meaning of revenge is reshaped, away from the passion of a pathalogical individual and towards horizons of collective liberation.

In this dossier, many of the authors explore the politics and economics of revenge in reference to popular culture. Eunsong Kim discusses the Oscar-winning Parasite as a parable of class war in a new gilded age. Anna-Esther Younes skewers Quentin Tarantino’s “Jewish wish-fulfillment fantasy” Inglourious Basterds as, in fact, an American fantasy where historical events are conscripted into the service of the very white supremacist narratives that the film claims to fight against. Bedour Alaagra’s meditation on Black and anti-colonial vengeance is prompted by a visit to Johannesburg’s Apartheid Museum and its tourist-friendly imperative towards forgiveness and reconciliation.

Some of these contributions were the result of guest presentations in an online revenge-themed critical film club I organized over the New Year’s holiday as we entered 2021. Other contributions derive from conversations organized to discuss themes in Revenge Capitalism, including one organized by the radical publisher Common Notions in November of 2020 and one organized in February of 2021 by RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab in cooperation with the Race and Capitalism Project​ at the University of Chicago, the Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy​ at the University of California Los Angeles, and the Institute for Advanced Studies​ at University College London.

III.

To dwell with revenge as a category of critical thought is not to advocate for it as a political strategy. As Fanon warns, “‘a legitimate desire for revenge’ cannot sustain a war of liberation.” Rather, I take all the contributions to this dossier to be inviting us to recognize that the age of revenge politics is already upon us, and has been with us for some time, in spite of claims that ours is (or was) a world of the “capitalist peace” at the proverbial “end of history.” These contributions indicate that revenge is not simply an atavistic politics of reaction existing in the borderlands of global racial capitalism’s empire but, rather, they are at work at the system’s center. These texts challenge us to grapple with the idea that the rise of revenge politics today, where reactionary forces seem to promise no brighter future but only more and better vengeance, might be a dialectic expression of an underlying revenge economy. They show how we might best glimpse the broad shape and manifold complexities of this revenge economy through cultural works which rehearse its dreams and its nightmares.

If, today, we are in an era of revenge politics, revenge economics, and revenge culture, what would the revenge of the repressed, the oppressed, the dispossessed, look like and feel like? Are the commodified fantasies of revenge offered by the culture industries accelerating reactionary politics? To what extent are they offering a tranquilizing catharsis for legitimate rage? To what extent are they providing wish-images that might stoke the flames of rebellion? By what measures might some “we” organize itself around the dream of avenging history, and with what consequences?

As I concluded this introduction in the summer of 2021, the territories currently known as Canada were rocked by the “discovery” of mass graves of Indigenous children who had been seized from their communities and forced to attend Church-run “Residential Schools” where abuse and neglect was rampant and where the objective was, in the words of Canada’s 2017 Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report, “cultural genocide.” Indigenous communities had long known that bodies were literally buried at or near the schools and the Commission had advised the Canadian government to invest in their discovery as part of its efforts towards “reconciliation.” When this was not pursued and Indigenous communities took it upon themselves to hire forensic teams to investigate.

The aftermath of these “discoveries” has seen the targeting of churches in Canada, especially in Indigenous communities, for arson, presumably as revenge for what these institutions did to the protagonists’ kin, as well, perhaps, as a response to the strong wave of genocide denialism, minimization, and outright racist vitriol from non-Indigenous reactionaries in the colonial settler state. Media narratives about the property destruction has been cautious, but online comments reveal the full scope of the racist assumptions: such vindictive “attacks” against churches are, we are told, only to be expected from “savages” who were rescued from their own beastly, vengeful nature by the Church and the colonial imposition of the “Rule of Law.”

But here, instead, we might follow Unangax̂ theorist Eve Tuck and wonder if revenge might be a theory of change, especially in an age when the ongoing genocidal campaign of settler colonialism continues to be waged under the stifling and silencing blanket of an official discourse of “reconciliation.” As Glen Coulthard notes, those who refuse to be reconciled are conveniently (once again) cast as enemies of civilization. Writing with C. Ree, Tuck asks us to consider how “to  the  (purported) (would-be), hero, revenge is monstrous, heard but not seen, insatiable, blind with desire, the Cyclops robbed of her eye. To the self-designated hero, revenge hails a specter of something best forgotten, a ghost from a criminal past.” Revenge, then “is the work of now  and  future  ghosts  and  monsters” of settler colonialism, “the  supply  of which is ever-growing.” Vengeful haunting, she writes “is the relentless remembering and reminding that will not be appeased by settler society’s assurances of innocence and reconciliation.” It “doesn’t hope to change people’s perceptions, nor does it hope for reconciliation. Haunting lies precisely in its refusal to stop. Alien (to settlers) and generative for (ghosts), this refusal to stop is its own form of resolving.  For ghosts, the haunting is the resolving, it is not what needs to be resolved.”

The post “Revenge Politics, Revenge Economy, Revenge Culture” dossier in Social Text Periscope appeared first on Max Haiven.

Notes towards a theory of risk management as human sacrifice (and vice versa) (Schemas of Uncertainty)

The following text was originally published in April of 2022 in the online almanac of Schemas of Uncertainty for whose online lecture series it was first prepared in November of 2021.

Notes towards a theory of risk management as human sacrifice (and vice versa)Max Haiven

For two decades now, noted abolitionist theorist Ruth Wilson Gilmore has been alerting us that ours is an “era of human sacrifice,” a profoundly evocative title that was inspired by her study of the american Prison Industrial Complex and its vastly disproportionate incarceration of working class Black and racialized people.1 The phrase, which Gilmore has not yet fully developed, helps us recognize the depravity of a system of capitalism that depends on making certain populations vulnerable to what she characterizes as “premature death.” Tantalizingly, it evokes the question of the sacred, at the root of the term sacrifice, and via the sacred invites us to consider what kind of cosmology allows and indeed necessitates the exposure of certain people to death.

In this, Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s formulation might help move us beyond a number of limitations that have beset radical thinkers trying to understand, for instance, how global racial capitalism leaves so many people to die. At around the time Wilson was writing, Giorgio Agamben’s reinterpretation of Foucault’s biopolitics was a touchstone. But his is a theory of the state (rather than capitalism) and is built on an interpretation of the Roman laws pertaining to homo sacer : the non-foreign figure who can be freely killed and has no legal standing, but who cannot be sacrificed.2 In the decades since, Achille Mbmbe’s correction to Agamben’s eurocentrism has been vital:  rather than biopolitics, it has been necropolitics, the management of death, that has been decisive in shaping the capitalist world order, a necropolitics that was developed in the forms of extractive colonial administration that was the material and ideological substrate on which modern European governance was built.3 Certainly necropolitics has been useful as a term to describe the prison industrial complex or the global archipelago of murderous border regimes that, as Nadine El-Enany notes, have been built to defend rich countries from people whose ancestors were robbed to produce wealth.4

Yet for me something is missing in the discourse on necropolitics, which arrives via Foucault and Fanon. It is missing, too, from the extremely capacious Marxist discourse on “surplus populations,” and certainly from Zygmunt Bauman’s influential theories of wasted life.5
It is the cosmological dimension which I see opened up by Gilmore’s notion of an era of human sacrifice. By cosmological here I am thinking along with Sylvia Wynter, who argues that the world we inhabit today is one caught in the grips not only of a capitalist, white supremacist, (neo)colonial political and economic order but also a particular cosmology that orbits the central figure of homo oeconomicus.6

For Wynter, we humans are a unique alchemical storytelling species: the stories we tell literally transform us both physically, genetically and socially. Civilizations form around typically unacknowledged narratives of symbolic life and death which shape kinship and value structures. The history of colonial capitalism has been the ascendency of one particular cosmology or framework for narratives that lionizes homo oeconomicus, that hyper-rational, competitive, calculating agent. It exalts him (a pronoun I use intentionally) as the paragon against which all other “genres” of being human are judged and it clothes him in the robes of evolutionary science, insisting that he is at once the original and the highest expression of the human species. In an earlier moment of colonial capitalism, this cosmology, which associated homo oeconomicus with the European capitalist, justified the enslavement, exploitation or elimination of all other humans: non-Europeans, women, the working classes, etc., all subordinated to this king of the jungle or, more accurately, this self-anointed king who made the world his jungle. Today, in the allegedly post-racial, “lean in” age of global cosmopolitan neoliberal global capitalism, all humans are (deceptively) invited to embrace their “true” nature as homo oeconomicus and compete tooth and nail to survive the hostile world we are, collectively, creating.

those who fail to embrace the subjecthood of homo oeconomicus and its calculative powers of risk-management are held to be destined for either biopolitical management or necropolitical abandonment

What the language of cosmology allows is a reckoning with Arjun Appadurai’s Weberian invitation to recognize that the field we call economics is actually a field of sociality and culture, and vice versa.7 His work in general reminds us that while the field of capitalist economic action may present itself as a terrain of rational action and calculation, in fact it relies upon and helps to reproduce complex cosmologies in areas of life declared non-economic. Weber’s famous example is the pairing of, on the one hand, Calvinist devotional self-discipline and, on the other, double-entry bookkeeping. Here, the fundamental, terrifying unknowability of God’s favour is counterbalanced by the meticulous, self-disciplined calculative procedures of worldly accounting, without which modern capitalism would have been impossible.8 Appadurai encourages us to recognize that now, some centuries later, an inscrutable Christian god has been fully replaced by the market itself. In that earlier moment of capitalism, God named the source and arbiter of a sublime uncertainty which could be met through the judicious and relentless management of the self. Today, the market is the source and arbiter of such a sublime uncertainty, which is to be managed, in this cosmology, by the powers of calculation, notably the transmutation of uncertainty into risk and the use of both intuition and powerful mathematical tools for its management, leveraging and transmutation.7

I would like to place Appadurai and Wynter into conversation. We are all called, today, to become homo oeconomicus through adopting a cosmology where the fundamental uncertainty of the market-made world is addressed by the techniques of risk-management. This is a world, as Randy Martin argues, where the haves and the have-nots increasingly take the guise of the lauded and celebrated risk-takers and the abject, loathsome “at risk.”9 Within this cosmology, the risk-takers are those who recognize that the financialized, competitive global market is not only the system we happen to have but the inevitable, beneficial and natural expression of human sociality and so develop a disposition that interprets nearly everything about one’s life as assets to be leveraged: one’s material stuff (a house), one’s forms of cultivation (a degree), one’s innate cognitive gifts (passions), one’s personal relationships (social capital). On the other side, those who fail to embrace the subjecthood of homo oeconomicus and its calculative powers of risk-management are held to be destined for either biopolitical management or necropolitical abandonment.

The biopolitics of managing the “at risk” are, as Jackie Wang and Ananya Roy each show, increasingly coercive and calibrated to manage whole (typically racialized) populations as sources for the extraction of wealth.10 From “social impact” investment in bail bond programs in the United States to the predation of microcredit schemes on women in the Global South, the riskiness of the at-risk are transmuted into bespoke investable opportunities for the risk-takers to fold into their counter-leveraged portfolios. In some cases, they succeed in transforming the at-risk subject into a risk-taker, with much fanfare. But more often than not the true value of these schemes to the system as a whole is to create a framework where the at-risk are blamed for their own failures.

This cosmology hides, in the first place, the extractive and imbalance nature of the relationship and, in the second place, the reality that in this world order some are destined to be sacrificed, burdened with lives of unmanageable risk, yet who will be blamed for their failure to manage risk and thereby thrive. The sacrificial victim appears to have chosen their fate and, in so doing, consented to it.

Here we see at work what Nick Partyka calls the “comedy of guilt.”11 In ancient Greece, animals to be sacrificed were made to take part in a “comedy of innocence” in which the profane beast would be holy because it providentially touched a sacred object or made a specific movement, an act that was, in fact, orchestrated or staged by the worshippers but then, post hoc, mystified as divine intervention. In our times, we, via the capitalist economy, orchestrate “comedies of guilt” (comedy here in the classic sense of a morality tale with a happy ending intended to reinforce the cosmological order) to justify why some people must be sacrificed. For instance, the prison industrial complex is built on such spectacles where individuals are allegedly punished for crimes against society, but in fact in the vast majority of cases their criminalized behaviour (theft, violence, fraud, breach of conditions, unpaid fines, narcotic trafficking) is the direct result of their abandonment or oppression within that society that now condemns them.

in this world order some are destined to be sacrificed, burdened with lives of unmanageable risk, yet who will be blamed for their failure to manage risk and thereby thrive. The sacrificial victim appears to have chosen their fate and, in so doing, consented to it

Meanwhile, there are those untolled billions of “at risk” whose exploitation is not even profitable enough to be considered, that “planet of slums” as Mike Davis puts it, who are simply abandoned and left to die, denied by their citizenship status or the cruel lottery of their birth any access to what few social welfare provisions or human rights are grudgingly still offered by some neoliberal governments.12

The fig leaf over these forms of human sacrifice has increasingly come to take the shape of a prophesy of austerity. In the beginning, at the dawn of the neoliberal age and with increasingly triumphant notes sounded after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the becoming-capitalist of China in the 1990s, this prophesy claimed that the evisceration of the regulatory welfare state, cuts to social spending, privatization and the liberalization of global trade might mean a painful temporary loss for some, but would ultimately bring about the benevolence of the market for all. States, like individuals, must refashion themselves on the natural model of homo oeconomicus and recast themselves as a manager of a global riskscape. For Martin, this not only took place on the level of economics, with the state now reconfigured as a sleek dreadnought for its risk-taking corporate adventurers but at the level of geopolitics.13 The American empire, for one, reconfigured itself as a global risk-management machine, no longer interested in the lofty goals of a coercive global security but in endless securitization, leveraging a world of “hotspots” with increasingly calculative interventions. Both within the United States and in its zone of influence, sacrifice now would be rewarded later. The welfare state and its universal guarantees would be abolished and replaced by “smart”, targeted investments aimed at giving the “at-risk” an “hand up.” Devastating aerial bombardments with smart weapons and special forces strikes would leverage regime change. The sacrifice would be worth it to bring those laggards of the world up to date at the end of history.

Over a decade after the 2008 financial crisis and austerity’s logic of sacrifice remains, but without any believable promise of payoff. We should recall that, essentially, that financial crisis emerged from the way that a million tiny, individual acts of highly calculative, mathematically sophisticated, hyper-rational risk management in the financial sphere murmurated into an irrational swarm that manifested an unforeseen metarisk. The sleep of reason indeed produced monsters. But the liberalist approach to this “black swan” event14, which is based on the idea that finance’s calculative instruments can be fundamentally improved to prevent future eruptions, hides at least two important dimensions.

The first is that, as Appadurai implies, the techniques of risk-management were and have always been, for all their incredible sophistication, the ornate robes and ceremonial trappings—in other words the magical paraphernalia—of a capitalist cosmological order which, at its root, is just as much in the dark about how to handle uncertainty as any other human cosmological order.15 In any cosmological system, when times are good, the rites and rituals seem to work and most adherents (even those who are oppressed and exploited) believe that the rituals are securing divine providence. When a crisis arrives—even if that crisis was created as a natural outcome of a society (mis)managed by its cosmology—doubt is cast on the cosmology, or at least on its priestly caste. On the one hand, this might help explain how, over the past ten years, we have seen the rise not only of anti-systemic movements seeking to overturn capitalism but, more frustratingly, many tendencies—ranging from calls for a turn to crypto-currencies to  calls for a turn to capitalist ethnostates—that demand a better or differently managed capitalism, a swapping of one faction of the market theocracy for another. On the other hand, as William Pietz has shown, when societies built on human sacrifice encounter crises where uncertainty erupts, rather than question their beliefs they typically double-down on them, accelerating and intensifying their brutality in a vain hope to appease the deaf or dead gods.16 Here, we can certainly obsersve not only the deeper entrenchment of austerity after 2008, but its turn to what I characterize as a kind of frantic vengefulness, as if those (poor, racialized, migrant, gender non-conforming) who have the least to gain under this cosmology, and the least power within it, are somehow responsible for its failure.17

The second thing hidden by “Black Swan” narratives, that in some sense aim for a kind of Reformation within the market cosmology, is that, in their focus on the exceptional moments when risk-management produces unforeseen systemic risks, they tend to erase the incredible violence and forms of human sacrifice that is constantly being produced by capitalist risk-management. Almost 20 years ago, Brian Li Puma and Benjamin Lee argued that while in the world’s financial metropoles derivative instruments offered profoundly ingenious instruments for managing and leveraging risk to generate massive profits for financial firms, on the other side of the world they helped foster extreme volatility and socioeconomic violence, empowering and accelerating the extraction of resources, the footloose movement of industries, urban and rural landgrabs and the use of financial power to undermine ecological and human rights.18 In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Paula Chakvarrty and Denise Ferreira da Silva showed that the subprime lending industry transformed housing for some (largely wealthy, white) into a vehicle for profitable risk-management but consigned others (largely racialized and poor) to a sacrificial world of unmanageable risks and unpayable debts.19

the trial focused on whether the Zong’s crew were competent and correct in their ghoulish act of “risk management” and who, the—investors or the insurers—was the legal bearer of this risk. And yet what is hidden from view here is the sacrificial act itself, as well as the bigger question of risk-management: why were the captured Africans “at risk” at all? It was, of course, because of the system of risk- and asset-management that had enslaved them and sought to transport them across the ocean for sale

This is, of course, not new but at the very core of the logic of the financial sector, where the technologies of risk management are forged. An illustrative example comes from Ian Baucom’s reading of the Zong trial as pivotal to the formation of modern insurance (on which all other forms of finance and, indeed, modern capitalism depends).20 In 1781 the crew of the slave ship, lost en route to Jamaica, threw 142 enslaved Africans, many still alive, overboard in the name of saving enough water to ensure the healthy arrival (and thence profitable sale) of the remainder. Back in London, the investors sought but were denied compensation from the insurer, leading them to sue the latter in a trial that became front-page news. This publicity was in large part thanks to abolitionist campaigners who rightly pointed to the horror that the legal proceedings were focused entirely on the matter of corporate property and fiduciary responsibilities and not at all on mass murder and the morality of the slave trade. For Baucom, this episode speaks to the way that, in the slave trade, Africans were transmuted not only into a fungible commodity (something explored more recently by Tiffany Lethabo King)21 but also, at the same time, into a speculative asset (something explored in more detail recently by Zenia Kisch and Justin Leroy).2220

To bring this example into dialogue with our concerns here, the trial focused on whether the Zong’s crew were competent and correct in their ghoulish act of “risk management” and who, the—investors or the insurers—was the legal bearer of this risk. And yet what is hidden from view here is the sacrificial act itself, as well as the bigger question of risk-management: why were the captured Africans “at risk” at all? It was, of course, because of the system of risk- and asset-management that had enslaved them and sought to transport them across the ocean for sale. It’s not simply that the sanitized rhetoric of risk management hid this extreme violence; it is that this violence is made to appear natural, normal and even providential within a cosmology wherein the calculative management of risk is sacred.

In the time of the Zong this cosmology was in some ways still in its infancy and in conflict with other cosmologies. Today, the sacred imperative to manage risk is unspoken and ubiquitous, now offered not only to financiers and capitalist actors but increasingly expected of each and every socio-economic subject. We are to each become competitive risk-takers and have only ourselves to blame if we fail. As Ananya Roy makes clear in her analysis of the way risky subjects are constructed in the Global South by global investors, what is erased from view is the system within which all of these actors are participants.23 Finance does not simply measure and manage the risks of capitalism; it foments a vastly unequal global riskscape where the historical patterns of racialization and colonialism now appear in the neutral and sometimes even beneficent garb of market rationality.

In this sense, we can finally come to discuss the enigmatic title of this paper: risk-management as human sacrifice (and vice versa). Risk management is, ultimately, not (just) a scientific process for managing resources. It is (also) the liturgical and ceremonial (i.e. magical) trappings of a cosmology which (as most cosmologies do) mistakes itself for the natural and normal order of the universe. And yet, on their underside, this social order creates a vast, global scene of human sacrifices whose doom is normalized as the inevitable, indeed natural, progress of the market. What is perhaps different here is that whereas in other civilizations that practice human sacrifice it is typically a gory, public affair, under today’s capitalism these sacrifices are less spectacular. Why? I believe it has something to do with the unique character of capitalism’s cosmology that, unlike any other cosmology, encourages everyone to assume the habit of homo oeconomicus.XIX

There is a wide body of literature that identifies practices of human sacrifice across civilizations as largely spectacular. A large cross-cultural historical study, for instance, (of whose mythology I am suspicious) suggests that, indeed, most societies that have practiced human sacrifice do so to reinforce stratification. Here, a social elite typically take as their victims slaves, members of lower classes or castes, prisoners of war, people found guilty of criminalized acts (including sedition or treason) or others who cannot, individually or collectively, protect themselves.24 The grisly act of sacrifice both reinforces their domination but also provides a convenient piece of propaganda for intermediary people and groups in the social hierarchy: fear of falling to the level of the sacrificial victim must indeed be a strong motivator to keep to one’s station and play by the rules.

The grisly act of sacrifice both reinforces… domination but also provides a convenient piece of propaganda… fear of falling to the level of the sacrificial victim must indeed be a strong motivator to keep to one’s station and play by the rules… [but it is] not only intended to intimidate and exalt, it is intended in a sense to make all complicit, both those who wield the knife and those who watch, in a cosmological act of collective risk management.

Yet this highly materialist approach perhaps does not pay close enough attention to the cosmological trappings which make such sacrifices so effective. Here, the sacrificer typically claims to be acting not out of their own self-interest or to reinforce their power, but in the name of the public good: In the absence of the sacrifice, a terrible fate might befall the whole society as gods or other supernatural forces would become displeased or hungry. The sacrificer masks their own interests by claiming that theirs is an act of cosmic risk management on the behalf of the society as a whole. Of course, the risk that is actually being managed is the risk of insurrection: human sacrifice conveniently gets rid of potentially rebellious vassals, slaves and oppressed and exploited people while, at the same time, providing the illusion that, without the sacrificer to do the sacrificing, calamity would befall everyone. Within the cosmology, the sacrifice becomes necessary and natural. The gory, public scene is not only intended to intimidate and exalt, it is intended in a sense to make all complicit, both those who wield the knife and those who watch, in a cosmological act of collective risk management.

In Tvetan Todorov’s The Conquest of America he contrasts the Aztec practices of human sacrifice, which Cortez and other conquistadors used as an alibi for their genocidal actions, with the massacres unleashed by the Spanish.25 For Todorov, the Aztec “society of sacrifice” was one where public acts of execution brought political-economic violence to the literal and metaphorical core and used it as a (coercive) form of social cohesion, intended to reinforce the cosmology and its hierarchies that justified their power. In contrast, the Spanish “society of massacre” carried out heinous atrocities, but hid them at the frontiers and borders while preserving the illusion, back in Spain, that the empire was the very model of Christian benevolence. 

This is much to be gained from revisiting Todorov’s contrast today, which would help us explain why today’s “era of human sacrifice” so often hides or masks it massacres and consigns them to the border or frontier, with the proviso that, as Harsha Walia, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, and Greg Grandin all explain in different ways, the border and the frontier have now become mobile technologies of power, no longer consigned to the geographical margin but increasingly instantiated throughout society.26 Here, schools, hospitals, police street-checks, social services offices all become manifestations of the border where the movement of humans is policed and where certain people and populations are excluded from the right to have rights. Likewise, in a world with “no more frontiers” the frontier is everywhere as speculative logics seek to transform urban neighbourhoods, rural territory, remote lands and even the human mind itself into sites of extraction and consequent elimination. This helps explain, in Gargi Bhattacharyya’s terms, why we increasingly witness the mutual enfolding of zones of biopolitics and necropolitics: walled enclaves of the super rich amidst sacrifice zones; a hidden city of illegalized, hyperexploited people as the hidden infrastructure of today’s metropoli.27

But the theory of a society of massacre only gets us so far. In spite of the phonic resemblance, massacre does not share an etymological root with sacrifice in the sacred. Massacre does not help us explain how the killing or exposure to death is intimately connected to the cosmology that underwrites a political-economic system. While Todorov’s theory of a society of massacre would help us explain why, today, capitalism keeps its murders largely hidden from view, it is not enough.

At the same time, perhaps these sacrifices are not so hidden. We seem to revisit them time and again in allegory. As I write this paper the most popular program in the history of the now preeminent digital streaming service Netflix in over 90 markets is the Korean series Squid Game, which essentially depicts a gladiatorial battle royale, where heavily indebted individuals are made to compete with one another for the pleasure of a perverse cabal of global ruling class scumbags. Observations from critics that this series is fairly derivative, reminiscent of the blockbuster Hunger Games book and film franchise or the popular episodes of Black Mirror, compound this point: popular allegory seems to capitalize on the idea that capitalism today is a system of human sacrifice.

But the problem with these allegories is that they relentlessly focus on the individual villain. Whether it is Squid Game’s VIPs or President Snow and his clique in the Hunger Games, we are inevitably led to imagine that this era of human sacrifice is officiated by a monstrous cabal of bloodthirsty or at least power-hungry individuals who, like Nietzschean superman, eschew and mock conventional morality and put their own pleasure or greed ahead of the collective good. This narrative is actually very dangerous, perhaps inevitably so, given that by and large the history of mainstream cinema has been shaped by capitalist forces that have an ideological propensity for Manichean narratives and individual agency. It is, for instance, as Wu Ming 1 notes, that narrative that animates the QAnon conspiracy fantasy, which has taken America and the world by storm. This fantasy holds that the world is actually run by a secret society of blood-drinking pedophiles that includes an a-list of major political figures and celebrities.28 A recent study suggested that if belief in the basic precepts of QAnon were classified as a religion, it would be among the largest in the United States, and it has inspired both isolated acts of violence as a well as dangerous forms of collective action, including contributing to the January 6, 2021 siege of the US Capitol building.29

the problem with these allegories is that they relentlessly focus on the individual villain. Whether it is Squid Game’s VIPs or President Snow and his clique in the Hunger Games, we are inevitably led to imagine that this era of human sacrifice is officiated by a monstrous cabal of bloodthirsty or at least power-hungry individuals… our moment of racial capitalism… certainly includes conspiracies of powerful people, [but it] is built on a different model of domination, one that, to greater and less extents, conscripts all of us.

What these depictions hide is the fact that our moment of racial capitalism, though it certainly includes conspiracies of powerful people, is built on a different model of domination, one that, to greater and less extents, conscripts all of us. In the Aztec civilization, only a small handful of hereditary elites could ascend to oversee the sacrificial altar. In an earlier moment of colonial capitalism, only wealthy white men were permitted or encouraged to meaningfully emulate homo oeconomicus. In both, a high level of stratification separated the sacrificers and the sacrifices. In our time, the disparity between rich and poor is enormous, and grows wider day by day, with tragic consequences. And, indeed, there are those in this world who are extremely unlikely to be made into a human sacrifice (the author of this paper, for one) and many others who seem destined for it. And yet what makes our society and cosmology different from any other is that we are all encouraged to become homo oeconomicus now, to adjust and recalibrate our behaviour to emulate and take on the habits of the risk-manager, no matter how lofty or humbler our station in this global regime. Risk-management and the broader calculative ethos of which it is a part has taken from its protestant foundations a kind of upside-down egalitarianism: all are at least theoretically equal before the market. Indeed, it is this equality before the market that justifies sacrifice: give up your state-afforded protections, your communal customs, your ways of life, and embrace the equality of the market and you shall inherit the end of history.

Or at least that was the offer, once. Now it is more dire and direct: the market has become–has rendered itself–the natural, normal and inevitable terrain of our shared uncertainty. Compete, manage risk, form alliances and struggle to survive, or become the sacrifice. As Angela Mitropoulos writes of the increasing overlaps between evangelical christianity and Malthusian capitalism, the world is presented as a lifeboat without sufficient resources for all.30 Survival, which amounts to sacrificing others, is seen as the result of a kind of market providence. Within this grim cosmology, new forms of market-oriented ethnonationalism (which present themselves as alternatives to cosmopolitan neoliberalism) come to the fore. They present the nation-state as a jealous community of risk-takers beset on all sides by spongers, takers and interlopers who not only want to parasite on their hard work but who threaten to overwhelm the lifeboat’s resources. Donald Trump in a way emblematized this approach: he never said he wasn’t a ruthless, conniving, lying cheat. But wouldn’t you rather have him on your side or as your leader in the world he and his ilk will create, a world we have been taught is already here with us, the whole time?  Colonial capitalism creates a world of scarcity that justifies a world of sacrifices. Anything else is unrealistic, if not suicidal.

So in a sense capitalism’s human sacrifices are not hidden, they are all around us. We all always already somehow know they are occurring. No one is surprised anymore by the drowning of migrants in the Mediterranean, the vigilantes hunting humans on the southern border of the US, the atrocities against the people of Gaza, the teenaged iPhone factory workers committing suicide, the unfettered lethal violence of the slums or of the police when they ransack the slums, the prisons, the camps… Even on the streets of the metropolis the sacrificial victims can be found. Indeed, in some small way, we are all sacrificial victims, to the extent our humanity itself is put on the altar every day in a world where we are made to transmute all aspects of our lives into the grammar of economic survival and competition. This is to say nothing of the way we are transforming our very planet into an ecological sacrifice zone.

NotesRuth Wilson Gilmore. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. University of California Press, 2007.Giorgio Agamben. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford University Press, 1998.Achille Mbembe. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, 2003, pp. 11–40, https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11.Nadine El-Enany. Bordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire. Manchester University Press, 2020.Siyaves Azeri. “Surplus-Population and the Political Economy of Fear.” Critical Sociology, vol. 45, no. 6, 2019, pp. 889–905; Bauman, Zygmunt. Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. Polity, 2003.Sylvia Wynter, and Katherine McKittrick. “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?: Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations.” Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, edited by Katherine McKittrick, Duke University Press, 2015.Arjun Appadurai. “The Spirit of Calculation.” Cambridge Anthropology, vol. 30, no. 1, 2012, pp. 3–17.Max Weber. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons, Routledge, 2001.Randy Martin. An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management. Duke University Press, 2007.Ananya Roy. Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development. Routledge, 2010; Wang, Jackie. Carceral Capitalism. Semiotext(e), 2018.Nick Partyka. “Capitalism as a Form of Human Sacrifice: The Comedy of Innocence and The Comedy of Guilt.” The Hampton Institute, 13 Apr. 2016, https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/cap... Davis. Planet of Slums. Verso, 2017.Randy Martin. An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management. Duke University Press, 2007.Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Random House, 2010.Arjun Appadurai. “The Spirit of Calculation.” Cambridge Anthropology, vol. 30, no. 1, 2012, pp. 3–17.William Pietz. “The Spirit of Civilization: Blood Sacrifice and Monetary Debt.” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, vol. 28, 1995, pp. 23–38, https://doi.org/10.1086/resv28n1ms20166927.Max Haiven. Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts. Pluto, 2020.Edward LiPuma, and Benjamin Lee. Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk. Duke University Press, 2004.Paula Chakravartty, and Denise Ferreira da Silva. “Accumulation, Dispossession, and Debt: The Racial Logic of Global Capitalism—An Introduction.” American Quarterly, vol. 64, no. 3, 2012, pp. 361–85.Ian Baucom. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and Philosophy of History. Duke University Press, 2005.21Tiffany Lethabo King. “The Labor of (Re)Reading Plantation Landscapes Fungible(Ly).” Antipode, vol. 48, no. 4, 2016, pp. 1022–39, https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12227.22Zenia Kish, and Justin Leroy. “Bonded Life.” Cultural Studies, vol. 29, no. 5–6, 2015, pp. 630–51, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2015.1017137.Ananya Roy. Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development. Routledge, 2010.Joseph Watts, et al. “Ritual Human Sacrifice Promoted and Sustained the Evolution of Stratified Societies.” Nature, vol. 532, no. 7598, 2016, pp. 228–31, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature17159.T... Todorov. The Conquest of America : The Question of the Other. Translated by Richard Howard, Harper Torchbooks, 1984.Greg Grandin. The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. Metropolitan, 2019; Sandro Mezzadra, and Brett Neilson. Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Duke University Press, 2013; Harsha Walia. Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism. Haymarket, 2021.27Gargi Bhattacharyya. Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival. Rowman and Littelfield, 2018.Wu Ming 1. La Q Di Qomplotto: QAnon e Dintorni, Come Le Fantasie Di Complotto Difendono Il Sistema. Alegre, 2021.29Giovanni Russonello. “Qanon Now as Popular in U.S. as Some Major Religions, Poll Suggests.” The New York Times. The New York Times, May 27, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/us/politics/qanon-republicans-trump.html.Angela Mitropoulos. “Lifeboat Capitalism, Catastrophism, Borders.” Dispatches, vol. 001, 2018, http://dispatchesjournal.org/app/uploads/2018/11/dispatches-nov2018-issue001-article02.pdf.

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Notes towards a theory of risk management as human sacrifice (and vice versa)

The following text was originally published in April of 2022 in the online almanac of Schemas of Uncertainty for whose online lecture series it was first prepared in November of 2021.

Notes towards a theory of risk management as human sacrifice (and vice versa)Max Haiven

For two decades now, noted abolitionist theorist Ruth Wilson Gilmore has been alerting us that ours is an “era of human sacrifice,” a profoundly evocative title that was inspired by her study of the american Prison Industrial Complex and its vastly disproportionate incarceration of working class Black and racialized people.1 The phrase, which Gilmore has not yet fully developed, helps us recognize the depravity of a system of capitalism that depends on making certain populations vulnerable to what she characterizes as “premature death.” Tantalizingly, it evokes the question of the sacred, at the root of the term sacrifice, and via the sacred invites us to consider what kind of cosmology allows and indeed necessitates the exposure of certain people to death.

In this, Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s formulation might help move us beyond a number of limitations that have beset radical thinkers trying to understand, for instance, how global racial capitalism leaves so many people to die. At around the time Wilson was writing, Giorgio Agamben’s reinterpretation of Foucault’s biopolitics was a touchstone. But his is a theory of the state (rather than capitalism) and is built on an interpretation of the Roman laws pertaining to homo sacer : the non-foreign figure who can be freely killed and has no legal standing, but who cannot be sacrificed.2 In the decades since, Achille Mbmbe’s correction to Agamben’s eurocentrism has been vital:  rather than biopolitics, it has been necropolitics, the management of death, that has been decisive in shaping the capitalist world order, a necropolitics that was developed in the forms of extractive colonial administration that was the material and ideological substrate on which modern European governance was built.3 Certainly necropolitics has been useful as a term to describe the prison industrial complex or the global archipelago of murderous border regimes that, as Nadine El-Enany notes, have been built to defend rich countries from people whose ancestors were robbed to produce wealth.4

Yet for me something is missing in the discourse on necropolitics, which arrives via Foucault and Fanon. It is missing, too, from the extremely capacious Marxist discourse on “surplus populations,” and certainly from Zygmunt Bauman’s influential theories of wasted life.5
It is the cosmological dimension which I see opened up by Gilmore’s notion of an era of human sacrifice. By cosmological here I am thinking along with Sylvia Wynter, who argues that the world we inhabit today is one caught in the grips not only of a capitalist, white supremacist, (neo)colonial political and economic order but also a particular cosmology that orbits the central figure of homo oeconomicus.6

For Wynter, we humans are a unique alchemical storytelling species: the stories we tell literally transform us both physically, genetically and socially. Civilizations form around typically unacknowledged narratives of symbolic life and death which shape kinship and value structures. The history of colonial capitalism has been the ascendency of one particular cosmology or framework for narratives that lionizes homo oeconomicus, that hyper-rational, competitive, calculating agent. It exalts him (a pronoun I use intentionally) as the paragon against which all other “genres” of being human are judged and it clothes him in the robes of evolutionary science, insisting that he is at once the original and the highest expression of the human species. In an earlier moment of colonial capitalism, this cosmology, which associated homo oeconomicus with the European capitalist, justified the enslavement, exploitation or elimination of all other humans: non-Europeans, women, the working classes, etc., all subordinated to this king of the jungle or, more accurately, this self-anointed king who made the world his jungle. Today, in the allegedly post-racial, “lean in” age of global cosmopolitan neoliberal global capitalism, all humans are (deceptively) invited to embrace their “true” nature as homo oeconomicus and compete tooth and nail to survive the hostile world we are, collectively, creating.

those who fail to embrace the subjecthood of homo oeconomicus and its calculative powers of risk-management are held to be destined for either biopolitical management or necropolitical abandonment

What the language of cosmology allows is a reckoning with Arjun Appadurai’s Weberian invitation to recognize that the field we call economics is actually a field of sociality and culture, and vice versa.7 His work in general reminds us that while the field of capitalist economic action may present itself as a terrain of rational action and calculation, in fact it relies upon and helps to reproduce complex cosmologies in areas of life declared non-economic. Weber’s famous example is the pairing of, on the one hand, Calvinist devotional self-discipline and, on the other, double-entry bookkeeping. Here, the fundamental, terrifying unknowability of God’s favour is counterbalanced by the meticulous, self-disciplined calculative procedures of worldly accounting, without which modern capitalism would have been impossible.8 Appadurai encourages us to recognize that now, some centuries later, an inscrutable Christian god has been fully replaced by the market itself. In that earlier moment of capitalism, God named the source and arbiter of a sublime uncertainty which could be met through the judicious and relentless management of the self. Today, the market is the source and arbiter of such a sublime uncertainty, which is to be managed, in this cosmology, by the powers of calculation, notably the transmutation of uncertainty into risk and the use of both intuition and powerful mathematical tools for its management, leveraging and transmutation.7

I would like to place Appadurai and Wynter into conversation. We are all called, today, to become homo oeconomicus through adopting a cosmology where the fundamental uncertainty of the market-made world is addressed by the techniques of risk-management. This is a world, as Randy Martin argues, where the haves and the have-nots increasingly take the guise of the lauded and celebrated risk-takers and the abject, loathsome “at risk.”9 Within this cosmology, the risk-takers are those who recognize that the financialized, competitive global market is not only the system we happen to have but the inevitable, beneficial and natural expression of human sociality and so develop a disposition that interprets nearly everything about one’s life as assets to be leveraged: one’s material stuff (a house), one’s forms of cultivation (a degree), one’s innate cognitive gifts (passions), one’s personal relationships (social capital). On the other side, those who fail to embrace the subjecthood of homo oeconomicus and its calculative powers of risk-management are held to be destined for either biopolitical management or necropolitical abandonment.

The biopolitics of managing the “at risk” are, as Jackie Wang and Ananya Roy each show, increasingly coercive and calibrated to manage whole (typically racialized) populations as sources for the extraction of wealth.10 From “social impact” investment in bail bond programs in the United States to the predation of microcredit schemes on women in the Global South, the riskiness of the at-risk are transmuted into bespoke investable opportunities for the risk-takers to fold into their counter-leveraged portfolios. In some cases, they succeed in transforming the at-risk subject into a risk-taker, with much fanfare. But more often than not the true value of these schemes to the system as a whole is to create a framework where the at-risk are blamed for their own failures.

This cosmology hides, in the first place, the extractive and imbalance nature of the relationship and, in the second place, the reality that in this world order some are destined to be sacrificed, burdened with lives of unmanageable risk, yet who will be blamed for their failure to manage risk and thereby thrive. The sacrificial victim appears to have chosen their fate and, in so doing, consented to it.

Here we see at work what Nick Partyka calls the “comedy of guilt.”11 In ancient Greece, animals to be sacrificed were made to take part in a “comedy of innocence” in which the profane beast would be holy because it providentially touched a sacred object or made a specific movement, an act that was, in fact, orchestrated or staged by the worshippers but then, post hoc, mystified as divine intervention. In our times, we, via the capitalist economy, orchestrate “comedies of guilt” (comedy here in the classic sense of a morality tale with a happy ending intended to reinforce the cosmological order) to justify why some people must be sacrificed. For instance, the prison industrial complex is built on such spectacles where individuals are allegedly punished for crimes against society, but in fact in the vast majority of cases their criminalized behaviour (theft, violence, fraud, breach of conditions, unpaid fines, narcotic trafficking) is the direct result of their abandonment or oppression within that society that now condemns them.

in this world order some are destined to be sacrificed, burdened with lives of unmanageable risk, yet who will be blamed for their failure to manage risk and thereby thrive. The sacrificial victim appears to have chosen their fate and, in so doing, consented to it

Meanwhile, there are those untolled billions of “at risk” whose exploitation is not even profitable enough to be considered, that “planet of slums” as Mike Davis puts it, who are simply abandoned and left to die, denied by their citizenship status or the cruel lottery of their birth any access to what few social welfare provisions or human rights are grudgingly still offered by some neoliberal governments.12

The fig leaf over these forms of human sacrifice has increasingly come to take the shape of a prophesy of austerity. In the beginning, at the dawn of the neoliberal age and with increasingly triumphant notes sounded after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the becoming-capitalist of China in the 1990s, this prophesy claimed that the evisceration of the regulatory welfare state, cuts to social spending, privatization and the liberalization of global trade might mean a painful temporary loss for some, but would ultimately bring about the benevolence of the market for all. States, like individuals, must refashion themselves on the natural model of homo oeconomicus and recast themselves as a manager of a global riskscape. For Martin, this not only took place on the level of economics, with the state now reconfigured as a sleek dreadnought for its risk-taking corporate adventurers but at the level of geopolitics.13 The American empire, for one, reconfigured itself as a global risk-management machine, no longer interested in the lofty goals of a coercive global security but in endless securitization, leveraging a world of “hotspots” with increasingly calculative interventions. Both within the United States and in its zone of influence, sacrifice now would be rewarded later. The welfare state and its universal guarantees would be abolished and replaced by “smart”, targeted investments aimed at giving the “at-risk” an “hand up.” Devastating aerial bombardments with smart weapons and special forces strikes would leverage regime change. The sacrifice would be worth it to bring those laggards of the world up to date at the end of history.

Over a decade after the 2008 financial crisis and austerity’s logic of sacrifice remains, but without any believable promise of payoff. We should recall that, essentially, that financial crisis emerged from the way that a million tiny, individual acts of highly calculative, mathematically sophisticated, hyper-rational risk management in the financial sphere murmurated into an irrational swarm that manifested an unforeseen metarisk. The sleep of reason indeed produced monsters. But the liberalist approach to this “black swan” event14, which is based on the idea that finance’s calculative instruments can be fundamentally improved to prevent future eruptions, hides at least two important dimensions.

The first is that, as Appadurai implies, the techniques of risk-management were and have always been, for all their incredible sophistication, the ornate robes and ceremonial trappings—in other words the magical paraphernalia—of a capitalist cosmological order which, at its root, is just as much in the dark about how to handle uncertainty as any other human cosmological order.15 In any cosmological system, when times are good, the rites and rituals seem to work and most adherents (even those who are oppressed and exploited) believe that the rituals are securing divine providence. When a crisis arrives—even if that crisis was created as a natural outcome of a society (mis)managed by its cosmology—doubt is cast on the cosmology, or at least on its priestly caste. On the one hand, this might help explain how, over the past ten years, we have seen the rise not only of anti-systemic movements seeking to overturn capitalism but, more frustratingly, many tendencies—ranging from calls for a turn to crypto-currencies to  calls for a turn to capitalist ethnostates—that demand a better or differently managed capitalism, a swapping of one faction of the market theocracy for another. On the other hand, as William Pietz has shown, when societies built on human sacrifice encounter crises where uncertainty erupts, rather than question their beliefs they typically double-down on them, accelerating and intensifying their brutality in a vain hope to appease the deaf or dead gods.16 Here, we can certainly obsersve not only the deeper entrenchment of austerity after 2008, but its turn to what I characterize as a kind of frantic vengefulness, as if those (poor, racialized, migrant, gender non-conforming) who have the least to gain under this cosmology, and the least power within it, are somehow responsible for its failure.17

The second thing hidden by “Black Swan” narratives, that in some sense aim for a kind of Reformation within the market cosmology, is that, in their focus on the exceptional moments when risk-management produces unforeseen systemic risks, they tend to erase the incredible violence and forms of human sacrifice that is constantly being produced by capitalist risk-management. Almost 20 years ago, Brian Li Puma and Benjamin Lee argued that while in the world’s financial metropoles derivative instruments offered profoundly ingenious instruments for managing and leveraging risk to generate massive profits for financial firms, on the other side of the world they helped foster extreme volatility and socioeconomic violence, empowering and accelerating the extraction of resources, the footloose movement of industries, urban and rural landgrabs and the use of financial power to undermine ecological and human rights.18 In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Paula Chakvarrty and Denise Ferreira da Silva showed that the subprime lending industry transformed housing for some (largely wealthy, white) into a vehicle for profitable risk-management but consigned others (largely racialized and poor) to a sacrificial world of unmanageable risks and unpayable debts.19

the trial focused on whether the Zong’s crew were competent and correct in their ghoulish act of “risk management” and who, the—investors or the insurers—was the legal bearer of this risk. And yet what is hidden from view here is the sacrificial act itself, as well as the bigger question of risk-management: why were the captured Africans “at risk” at all? It was, of course, because of the system of risk- and asset-management that had enslaved them and sought to transport them across the ocean for sale

This is, of course, not new but at the very core of the logic of the financial sector, where the technologies of risk management are forged. An illustrative example comes from Ian Baucom’s reading of the Zong trial as pivotal to the formation of modern insurance (on which all other forms of finance and, indeed, modern capitalism depends).20 In 1781 the crew of the slave ship, lost en route to Jamaica, threw 142 enslaved Africans, many still alive, overboard in the name of saving enough water to ensure the healthy arrival (and thence profitable sale) of the remainder. Back in London, the investors sought but were denied compensation from the insurer, leading them to sue the latter in a trial that became front-page news. This publicity was in large part thanks to abolitionist campaigners who rightly pointed to the horror that the legal proceedings were focused entirely on the matter of corporate property and fiduciary responsibilities and not at all on mass murder and the morality of the slave trade. For Baucom, this episode speaks to the way that, in the slave trade, Africans were transmuted not only into a fungible commodity (something explored more recently by Tiffany Lethabo King)21 but also, at the same time, into a speculative asset (something explored in more detail recently by Zenia Kisch and Justin Leroy).2220

To bring this example into dialogue with our concerns here, the trial focused on whether the Zong’s crew were competent and correct in their ghoulish act of “risk management” and who, the—investors or the insurers—was the legal bearer of this risk. And yet what is hidden from view here is the sacrificial act itself, as well as the bigger question of risk-management: why were the captured Africans “at risk” at all? It was, of course, because of the system of risk- and asset-management that had enslaved them and sought to transport them across the ocean for sale. It’s not simply that the sanitized rhetoric of risk management hid this extreme violence; it is that this violence is made to appear natural, normal and even providential within a cosmology wherein the calculative management of risk is sacred.

In the time of the Zong this cosmology was in some ways still in its infancy and in conflict with other cosmologies. Today, the sacred imperative to manage risk is unspoken and ubiquitous, now offered not only to financiers and capitalist actors but increasingly expected of each and every socio-economic subject. We are to each become competitive risk-takers and have only ourselves to blame if we fail. As Ananya Roy makes clear in her analysis of the way risky subjects are constructed in the Global South by global investors, what is erased from view is the system within which all of these actors are participants.23 Finance does not simply measure and manage the risks of capitalism; it foments a vastly unequal global riskscape where the historical patterns of racialization and colonialism now appear in the neutral and sometimes even beneficent garb of market rationality.

In this sense, we can finally come to discuss the enigmatic title of this paper: risk-management as human sacrifice (and vice versa). Risk management is, ultimately, not (just) a scientific process for managing resources. It is (also) the liturgical and ceremonial (i.e. magical) trappings of a cosmology which (as most cosmologies do) mistakes itself for the natural and normal order of the universe. And yet, on their underside, this social order creates a vast, global scene of human sacrifices whose doom is normalized as the inevitable, indeed natural, progress of the market. What is perhaps different here is that whereas in other civilizations that practice human sacrifice it is typically a gory, public affair, under today’s capitalism these sacrifices are less spectacular. Why? I believe it has something to do with the unique character of capitalism’s cosmology that, unlike any other cosmology, encourages everyone to assume the habit of homo oeconomicus.XIX

There is a wide body of literature that identifies practices of human sacrifice across civilizations as largely spectacular. A large cross-cultural historical study, for instance, (of whose mythology I am suspicious) suggests that, indeed, most societies that have practiced human sacrifice do so to reinforce stratification. Here, a social elite typically take as their victims slaves, members of lower classes or castes, prisoners of war, people found guilty of criminalized acts (including sedition or treason) or others who cannot, individually or collectively, protect themselves.24 The grisly act of sacrifice both reinforces their domination but also provides a convenient piece of propaganda for intermediary people and groups in the social hierarchy: fear of falling to the level of the sacrificial victim must indeed be a strong motivator to keep to one’s station and play by the rules.

The grisly act of sacrifice both reinforces… domination but also provides a convenient piece of propaganda… fear of falling to the level of the sacrificial victim must indeed be a strong motivator to keep to one’s station and play by the rules… [but it is] not only intended to intimidate and exalt, it is intended in a sense to make all complicit, both those who wield the knife and those who watch, in a cosmological act of collective risk management.

Yet this highly materialist approach perhaps does not pay close enough attention to the cosmological trappings which make such sacrifices so effective. Here, the sacrificer typically claims to be acting not out of their own self-interest or to reinforce their power, but in the name of the public good: In the absence of the sacrifice, a terrible fate might befall the whole society as gods or other supernatural forces would become displeased or hungry. The sacrificer masks their own interests by claiming that theirs is an act of cosmic risk management on the behalf of the society as a whole. Of course, the risk that is actually being managed is the risk of insurrection: human sacrifice conveniently gets rid of potentially rebellious vassals, slaves and oppressed and exploited people while, at the same time, providing the illusion that, without the sacrificer to do the sacrificing, calamity would befall everyone. Within the cosmology, the sacrifice becomes necessary and natural. The gory, public scene is not only intended to intimidate and exalt, it is intended in a sense to make all complicit, both those who wield the knife and those who watch, in a cosmological act of collective risk management.

In Tvetan Todorov’s The Conquest of America he contrasts the Aztec practices of human sacrifice, which Cortez and other conquistadors used as an alibi for their genocidal actions, with the massacres unleashed by the Spanish.25 For Todorov, the Aztec “society of sacrifice” was one where public acts of execution brought political-economic violence to the literal and metaphorical core and used it as a (coercive) form of social cohesion, intended to reinforce the cosmology and its hierarchies that justified their power. In contrast, the Spanish “society of massacre” carried out heinous atrocities, but hid them at the frontiers and borders while preserving the illusion, back in Spain, that the empire was the very model of Christian benevolence. 

This is much to be gained from revisiting Todorov’s contrast today, which would help us explain why today’s “era of human sacrifice” so often hides or masks it massacres and consigns them to the border or frontier, with the proviso that, as Harsha Walia, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, and Greg Grandin all explain in different ways, the border and the frontier have now become mobile technologies of power, no longer consigned to the geographical margin but increasingly instantiated throughout society.26 Here, schools, hospitals, police street-checks, social services offices all become manifestations of the border where the movement of humans is policed and where certain people and populations are excluded from the right to have rights. Likewise, in a world with “no more frontiers” the frontier is everywhere as speculative logics seek to transform urban neighbourhoods, rural territory, remote lands and even the human mind itself into sites of extraction and consequent elimination. This helps explain, in Gargi Bhattacharyya’s terms, why we increasingly witness the mutual enfolding of zones of biopolitics and necropolitics: walled enclaves of the super rich amidst sacrifice zones; a hidden city of illegalized, hyperexploited people as the hidden infrastructure of today’s metropoli.27

But the theory of a society of massacre only gets us so far. In spite of the phonic resemblance, massacre does not share an etymological root with sacrifice in the sacred. Massacre does not help us explain how the killing or exposure to death is intimately connected to the cosmology that underwrites a political-economic system. While Todorov’s theory of a society of massacre would help us explain why, today, capitalism keeps its murders largely hidden from view, it is not enough.

At the same time, perhaps these sacrifices are not so hidden. We seem to revisit them time and again in allegory. As I write this paper the most popular program in the history of the now preeminent digital streaming service Netflix in over 90 markets is the Korean series Squid Game, which essentially depicts a gladiatorial battle royale, where heavily indebted individuals are made to compete with one another for the pleasure of a perverse cabal of global ruling class scumbags. Observations from critics that this series is fairly derivative, reminiscent of the blockbuster Hunger Games book and film franchise or the popular episodes of Black Mirror, compound this point: popular allegory seems to capitalize on the idea that capitalism today is a system of human sacrifice.

But the problem with these allegories is that they relentlessly focus on the individual villain. Whether it is Squid Game’s VIPs or President Snow and his clique in the Hunger Games, we are inevitably led to imagine that this era of human sacrifice is officiated by a monstrous cabal of bloodthirsty or at least power-hungry individuals who, like Nietzschean superman, eschew and mock conventional morality and put their own pleasure or greed ahead of the collective good. This narrative is actually very dangerous, perhaps inevitably so, given that by and large the history of mainstream cinema has been shaped by capitalist forces that have an ideological propensity for Manichean narratives and individual agency. It is, for instance, as Wu Ming 1 notes, that narrative that animates the QAnon conspiracy fantasy, which has taken America and the world by storm. This fantasy holds that the world is actually run by a secret society of blood-drinking pedophiles that includes an a-list of major political figures and celebrities.28 A recent study suggested that if belief in the basic precepts of QAnon were classified as a religion, it would be among the largest in the United States, and it has inspired both isolated acts of violence as a well as dangerous forms of collective action, including contributing to the January 6, 2021 siege of the US Capitol building.29

the problem with these allegories is that they relentlessly focus on the individual villain. Whether it is Squid Game’s VIPs or President Snow and his clique in the Hunger Games, we are inevitably led to imagine that this era of human sacrifice is officiated by a monstrous cabal of bloodthirsty or at least power-hungry individuals… our moment of racial capitalism… certainly includes conspiracies of powerful people, [but it] is built on a different model of domination, one that, to greater and less extents, conscripts all of us.

What these depictions hide is the fact that our moment of racial capitalism, though it certainly includes conspiracies of powerful people, is built on a different model of domination, one that, to greater and less extents, conscripts all of us. In the Aztec civilization, only a small handful of hereditary elites could ascend to oversee the sacrificial altar. In an earlier moment of colonial capitalism, only wealthy white men were permitted or encouraged to meaningfully emulate homo oeconomicus. In both, a high level of stratification separated the sacrificers and the sacrifices. In our time, the disparity between rich and poor is enormous, and grows wider day by day, with tragic consequences. And, indeed, there are those in this world who are extremely unlikely to be made into a human sacrifice (the author of this paper, for one) and many others who seem destined for it. And yet what makes our society and cosmology different from any other is that we are all encouraged to become homo oeconomicus now, to adjust and recalibrate our behaviour to emulate and take on the habits of the risk-manager, no matter how lofty or humbler our station in this global regime. Risk-management and the broader calculative ethos of which it is a part has taken from its protestant foundations a kind of upside-down egalitarianism: all are at least theoretically equal before the market. Indeed, it is this equality before the market that justifies sacrifice: give up your state-afforded protections, your communal customs, your ways of life, and embrace the equality of the market and you shall inherit the end of history.

Or at least that was the offer, once. Now it is more dire and direct: the market has become–has rendered itself–the natural, normal and inevitable terrain of our shared uncertainty. Compete, manage risk, form alliances and struggle to survive, or become the sacrifice. As Angela Mitropoulos writes of the increasing overlaps between evangelical christianity and Malthusian capitalism, the world is presented as a lifeboat without sufficient resources for all.30 Survival, which amounts to sacrificing others, is seen as the result of a kind of market providence. Within this grim cosmology, new forms of market-oriented ethnonationalism (which present themselves as alternatives to cosmopolitan neoliberalism) come to the fore. They present the nation-state as a jealous community of risk-takers beset on all sides by spongers, takers and interlopers who not only want to parasite on their hard work but who threaten to overwhelm the lifeboat’s resources. Donald Trump in a way emblematized this approach: he never said he wasn’t a ruthless, conniving, lying cheat. But wouldn’t you rather have him on your side or as your leader in the world he and his ilk will create, a world we have been taught is already here with us, the whole time?  Colonial capitalism creates a world of scarcity that justifies a world of sacrifices. Anything else is unrealistic, if not suicidal.

So in a sense capitalism’s human sacrifices are not hidden, they are all around us. We all always already somehow know they are occurring. No one is surprised anymore by the drowning of migrants in the Mediterranean, the vigilantes hunting humans on the southern border of the US, the atrocities against the people of Gaza, the teenaged iPhone factory workers committing suicide, the unfettered lethal violence of the slums or of the police when they ransack the slums, the prisons, the camps… Even on the streets of the metropolis the sacrificial victims can be found. Indeed, in some small way, we are all sacrificial victims, to the extent our humanity itself is put on the altar every day in a world where we are made to transmute all aspects of our lives into the grammar of economic survival and competition. This is to say nothing of the way we are transforming our very planet into an ecological sacrifice zone.

NotesRuth Wilson Gilmore. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. University of California Press, 2007.Giorgio Agamben. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford University Press, 1998.Achille Mbembe. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, 2003, pp. 11–40, https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11.Nadine El-Enany. Bordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire. Manchester University Press, 2020.Siyaves Azeri. “Surplus-Population and the Political Economy of Fear.” Critical Sociology, vol. 45, no. 6, 2019, pp. 889–905; Bauman, Zygmunt. Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. Polity, 2003.Sylvia Wynter, and Katherine McKittrick. “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?: Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations.” Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, edited by Katherine McKittrick, Duke University Press, 2015.Arjun Appadurai. “The Spirit of Calculation.” Cambridge Anthropology, vol. 30, no. 1, 2012, pp. 3–17.Max Weber. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons, Routledge, 2001.Randy Martin. An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management. Duke University Press, 2007.Ananya Roy. Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development. Routledge, 2010; Wang, Jackie. Carceral Capitalism. Semiotext(e), 2018.Nick Partyka. “Capitalism as a Form of Human Sacrifice: The Comedy of Innocence and The Comedy of Guilt.” The Hampton Institute, 13 Apr. 2016, https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/cap... Davis. Planet of Slums. Verso, 2017.Randy Martin. An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management. Duke University Press, 2007.Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Random House, 2010.Arjun Appadurai. “The Spirit of Calculation.” Cambridge Anthropology, vol. 30, no. 1, 2012, pp. 3–17.William Pietz. “The Spirit of Civilization: Blood Sacrifice and Monetary Debt.” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, vol. 28, 1995, pp. 23–38, https://doi.org/10.1086/resv28n1ms20166927.Max Haiven. Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts. Pluto, 2020.Edward LiPuma, and Benjamin Lee. Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk. Duke University Press, 2004.Paula Chakravartty, and Denise Ferreira da Silva. “Accumulation, Dispossession, and Debt: The Racial Logic of Global Capitalism—An Introduction.” American Quarterly, vol. 64, no. 3, 2012, pp. 361–85.Ian Baucom. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and Philosophy of History. Duke University Press, 2005.21Tiffany Lethabo King. “The Labor of (Re)Reading Plantation Landscapes Fungible(Ly).” Antipode, vol. 48, no. 4, 2016, pp. 1022–39, https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12227.22Zenia Kish, and Justin Leroy. “Bonded Life.” Cultural Studies, vol. 29, no. 5–6, 2015, pp. 630–51, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2015.1017137.Ananya Roy. Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development. Routledge, 2010.Joseph Watts, et al. “Ritual Human Sacrifice Promoted and Sustained the Evolution of Stratified Societies.” Nature, vol. 532, no. 7598, 2016, pp. 228–31, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature17159.T... Todorov. The Conquest of America : The Question of the Other. Translated by Richard Howard, Harper Torchbooks, 1984.Greg Grandin. The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. Metropolitan, 2019; Sandro Mezzadra, and Brett Neilson. Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Duke University Press, 2013; Harsha Walia. Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism. Haymarket, 2021.27Gargi Bhattacharyya. Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival. Rowman and Littelfield, 2018.Wu Ming 1. La Q Di Qomplotto: QAnon e Dintorni, Come Le Fantasie Di Complotto Difendono Il Sistema. Alegre, 2021.29Giovanni Russonello. “Qanon Now as Popular in U.S. as Some Major Religions, Poll Suggests.” The New York Times. The New York Times, May 27, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/us/politics/qanon-republicans-trump.html.Angela Mitropoulos. “Lifeboat Capitalism, Catastrophism, Borders.” Dispatches, vol. 001, 2018, http://dispatchesjournal.org/app/uploads/2018/11/dispatches-nov2018-issue001-article02.pdf.

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Recasting the future with Amazon workers (Routledge Handbook of Creative Futures)

By Max Haiven, Graeme Webb and Xenia Benivolski

This text is forthcoming in the Routledge International Handbook for Creative Futures, edited by Alfonso Montuori and Gabrielle Donnelly and due out in late 2022. The version here has not yet been fully copyedited.

Abstract

Amazon is the world’s largest retailer and one of its largest corporations and employers and is aggressively seeking to reshape the future. This comes at the expense of its workers, who are not only exploited but excluded from dreaming of and shaping that future. We started a science and speculative media club with rank-and-file Amazon workers in North America to explore their perspectives on the future. After relating our methods and some of what we learned, we conclude by exploring the prospects for reclaiming the power of future “fictioning” with workers in a moment of platform capitalism.

Bios

Max Haiven is Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination at Lakehead University and co-director of RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab. Graeme Webb is an instructor in the School of Engineering at the University of British Columbia. Xenia Benivolski is an organiser, researcher and art writer based in Toronto.

Amazon: whose future?

In Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon literary critic Marc McGurl (2021) notes that the corporation, which in a short twenty-five years has become the world’s largest retailer and one of its largest private employers, has been guided by a self-aggrandizing science fiction narrative. The firm has in numerous ways been inspired and shaped by the favourite genre of its founder, Jeff Bezos, who has famously used his massive share of its profits to finance his own private space program (Levy, 2021). Amazon flatters itself as an angel of capitalism’s creative destruction, wielding the flaming sword of digital technology to liberate humanity from the clutches of the past (Delfanti, 2021).

The company has transformed how we buy books but also how and what we read. Today it is by some measures the world’s largest publisher, with a jealous hold over tens of millions of Kindle readers as well as over writers who pen novels (typically genre fiction) on its exclusive platform (Davis, 2020). Via its subsidiary, Audible, Amazon is unrivalled in the realm of audiobooks (Doctorow, 2020). Beyond the written and spoken word, Amazon’s digital streaming services are among the most popular and it has ambitiously sought to finance award-winning films and TV serials to announce itself as a leading studio and media producer; once a platform to merely buy books, the company has become a content creator across multiple media (Brevini & Swiatek, 2021). It shapes the stories we tell ourselves about our world. It is also quickly becoming America’s leading retailer, gobbling up market share in the sale of everything from garments to video games, from household staples to office supplies (Alimahomed-Wilson & Reese, 2020). Tens of thousands of smaller businesses now compete with one another to use Amazon’s order and fulfilment platforms to sell their goods and services to the giant’s dedicated customers, a kind of walled garden version of the free market (Alimahomed-Wilson, Allison & Reese, 2020).

But the firm has not been content to stop there. It has also leveraged its early success to become the world’s largest provider of web services and data management; Amazon servers are the back-end of a huge proportion of the internet and manages the data of many of the world’s top companies, public institutions, governments, and even military and security forces (Williams, 2020). It has also transformed the logistics industry through its advanced employment of machine learning and revolutionized how warehouses work through its extensive use of robotics (Alimahomed-Wilson, 2020). The company has sought to become a ubiquitous presence in our lives: in 2017 it acquired the American grocery giant Whole Foods and in 2019 it introduced Amazon Care in that country, a digital healthcare service aiming to “disrupt” that industry as well (Huberman, 2021; Nosthoff & Maschewski, 2021).

While capitalist firms by their very nature compete by predicting the future to capitalize  on new markets and manage risk, Amazon is actively seeking to leverage its massive wealth and power to create a future in which it is dominant. Their corporate slogan “work hard, have fun, make history” indicates the kind of relentless, progressivist drive to shape human destiny that animates the company’s strategy. Beyond corporate rhetoric, communication scholar Alessandro Defanti and Bronwyn Frey’s recent study of Amazon and its subsidiaries reveal the wide array of patent applications held by the firm indicate the type of mind-bending future they envision for us all (Delfanti & Frey, 2021).

And yet who is building that future? Recent years have seen numerous stories about the horrors endured by workers throughout Amazon’s operations (Struna & Reese, 2020). Workers in the firm’s corporate offices report a culture of overwork, stress, and verbal abuse (Kantor & Streitfeld, 2015). But these white-collar workers have it relatively easy. Delivery drivers work punishing schedules, often forced to compete with one another to quicken their pace, at the expense of their own health, safety, and wellbeing (Alimahomed-Wilson, 2020). Even the independent companies contracted to deliver packages endure punishing forms of self-exploitation in the name of the massive corporation’s profits (Gurley, 2022). In what could have been taken directly from Orwell’s cautionary tale of the future in 1984, warehouse workers toil under conditions of staggering surveillance and micromanagement, often at a pace set by robots, and are forced to wear sensors that track their every gesture and vital sign to maximize efficiency (Delfanti, 2021). Then there are the gig workers on the firm’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) platform, who compete from home against one another for digital micro-contracts often denominated at cents-per-second ratios and usually taking the form of medial data entry or simple coding tasks (Irani, 2015; Sherry, 2020). Often this work trains the very algorithms that will eventually replace them or other workers.

If Amazon is building the future, it is building it on the backs of its workers. And, indeed, many of its techniques seem the stuff of dystopian fantasy.

Around the world, workers are rebelling, forming trade unions and workers’ organizations (Alimahomed-Wilson & Reese, 2020). However, the infamous union-busting techniques of the firm in Bessemer, Alabama, which were condemned by the (by no means union-friendly) Labour Relations Board, indicate its violent and ruthless allergy to this kind of worker protagonism (Scheiber & Weise, 2022).  To push back against these anti-worker strategies, efforts are afoot, under the banner of the global Make Amazon Pay coalition and the American Athena coalition, to coordinate efforts of unions, workers’ centres, civil society organizations and other progressive forces to challenge Amazon’s power (Rubin, 2019; Smith, 2021).

And yet these efforts, as their protagonists would likely be the first to admit, are so deeply in the trenches they have a hard time making space and time to see the horizon. Beyond defending worker’s rights and seeking to halt the relentless advance of Amazon, it is imperative to envision alternate futures. The technology and wealth that, today, Amazon and other “technofeudalist” firms monopolize can and should be used to liberate humanity from toil, not institute an even more punishing regime of exploitation (Dean, 2020; Varoufakis, 2021).

How might such a future be envisioned, let alone instituted? What role will workers themselves have to play in imagining and stewarding its birth? What do workers themselves have to say? Strangely, few people seem to ask. But we did.

Studying speculative fiction with Amazon workers

In November and December of 2021, we recruited around 24 rank-and-file Amazon workers to watch speculative and science fiction (SF) shows with us and talk about the future. We met on Zoom once a week and workers were remunerated for their time. Together, we watched films including Snow Piercer, TV shows like Squid Game, Black Mirror and Star Trek, and played games from radical gamemaker Molleindustria that reflect on the conditions of digital workers. We asked the workers if and how this media content helped them reflect on their work at the corporation. The purpose wasn’t so much to gather data for academic research but to create a space where workers could theorize their experiences for themselves. It was open to both current workers and those who had recently left the company’s workforce, but not to managers. Participants were invited to use false names or no name to protect their identities.

The first thing we learned is that there are a lot of different kinds of workers at Amazon. In our group we had warehouse workers, delivery drivers, content writers, MTurk workers and data analysts from all across the United States, and some from Canada. They had vastly different cultural, linguistic, educational and economic backgrounds, which sometimes made dialogue challenging. Some were huge SF fans with encyclopaedic knowledge of the genre. Others were casual consumers. While some had clear political views on capitalism, in general they seemed happy to lead respectfully non-partisan discussions framed by the collective desire for a better future. Most were forthcoming about how difficult it was to work at Amazon and how demanding they found the company’s management tactics and relentless surveillance. But many were also happy to have the work, either because it provided a stable income or, in other cases, because it provided flexibility.

Most of the participants tended to identify strongly with the dystopian themes in the films and TV series we watched and the games we played. They almost universally felt that the future looked fairly bleak for workers (not only Amazon workers) and that it was likely that technological changes would serve the interests of the rich. Revealingly, many questioned the relevance of wealth in a crumbling world: Would class make much of a difference in the dismal, ecologically ravaged, war-torn future? But others were exasperated by this pessimism and encouraged us to think about what could be done today to prevent both a terrible future and continued hyper-exploitation.

One contradiction that came up again and again was that, while many workers spoke to the dystopian present and future, they also expressed an abstract optimism about their own personal circumstances. Several participants expressed the sentiment that we should stick together and help each other in facing the oppressor which was not necessarily Amazon but systems of inequality at large. Teamwork and working together to overcome challenges were major themes in our conversations, and often reflected in the media we watched together. Most workers also told us that feeling part of a team was the best thing about their job. They were almost all sceptical that Amazon management would ever recognize or appreciate their hard work. They talked a lot about how unfair they found the system of rewards and punishments on the job.  In its factories, Amazon brought back the 80s management fad of the “employee of the month” award to encourage hard work through internal competition. But the workers we talked with felt this was a largely dystopian gimmick. They also resented the constant technological “nudging” towards reward-seeking behaviour. For example, employees with repetitive positions are encouraged to fill out surveys while they work to earn minutes of vacation time.

Many watched or read SF, or played SF themed games as a way to escape from the demanding world of work itself, and so were less enthusiastic about taking critical positions on the content we watched together. Compounding this, some reacted so strongly to the dystopian themes (a few even calling it “triggering”) that they admitted to having difficulty watching or playing the games we had selected. And yet, there was a clear sense that sci-fi, especially dark and dystopian SF, was appealing to the group. Why would people who already lived and worked in what would probably appear to a time traveller from the past as a dystopian sci-fi scenario enjoy the genres? What interest did these texts offer to workers who are relentlessly surveilled, measured, controlled and pitted against one another by a huge corporation that literally uses their exploited energies to realise the megalomaniacal fantasies of their CEO to go to space?

            In our discussion, it became clear that watching SF film and TV was a form of escapist entertainment, a way of winding down after a hard day (or night, or week) of work. But why not romcoms, or period drama, or soap operas? Or why not more optimistic SF, like Star Trek? Certainly, the answer was different for all of the workers we spoke to, but we wonder if, on some level, the dystopian SF was somehow validating.

Methods for fictioning the future of work

In approaching this project, we wanted our research methodology to enable us to collectively labour with Amazon workers to think about and discuss the emerging paradigm of ‘platform capitalism’ under which they work. Under platform capitalism, the profit motive of increasingly concentrated corporations is augmented by the use of digital technology (Srnicek, 2016). Furthermore, workers access employment through the mediation of digital platforms, a process often related to the “gig economy” (Jones, 2021).  Far from the dream of robots liberating humans from toil, this shift has seen an increase in worker precariousness and a diminishment in workers’ capacity to organize collectively for their rights, as well as increased power in the hands of investors and senior management (Bananav, 2020).

Recently, a number of scholars have shown that Amazon is a pioneer in the use of digital technology for the discipline and exploitation of labour (Alimahomed-Wilson & Reese, 2020; Moore & Robinson, 2016). Amazon’s use of digital surveillance, robotics, and metrics to gain ever more productivity from their workers has become notorious as emblematic of the exploitative potential of today’s technology and a grim harbinger of the future of work (Delfanti, 2021; Zuboff, 2019). As numerous scholars argue, beyond the very material struggles workers face in platform capitalism, the paradigm also places the future itself in the hands of corporations that increasingly appear to act outside the scope of public regulation (Dyer-Witheford, 2015).

Our project seeks to contribute to an effervescence of research on Amazon, and on platform capitalism more broadly in a completely new way. While some scholars have focused on workers’ sentiments (Briken & Taylor, 2018; Irani, 2015), no study has examined their approach to the future. While other studies have used surveys or focus groups, none has explored creative writing as a methodology. And while SF has been theorized as a vehicle for critical consciousness raising, this has not been attempted with groups of workers.

To do so, our project draws on and combines in new ways three broad and established methodological approaches and theoretical areas of study.

The first, the Participatory Workers’ Inquiry, was initially developed in Italy in the 1970s and saw scholars approach workers as partners in theorizing the changing nature of capitalism (Woodcock, 2021). Often, this took the form of collective reading and discussion circles and represented a long-term commitment by scholars to a process of personal transformation in the research participants. This was undertaken primarily to help workers better strategize around their struggle for rights and compensation. In recent years, workers’ inquiry has been widely used as a methodology where scholars collaborate with precarious workers and/or those in rapidly changing sectors, the better to understand both workers’ lives and struggles and the broader systems of which they are a part (Brophy, 2017; Holland, 2020; Ovetz, 2020). Given this renewed interest in workers’ inquiry as a method, there is an opportunity to extend and situate this research-action approach in platform capitalism.

Our research, however, seeks to make a novel contribution to the workers’ inquiry methodology by being the first study to make SF and thinking about the future central to the process. By focusing on workers that labour within Amazon’s emergent forms of platform capitalism, their actual experiences and struggles are revealed. Here, our project aims to access what Geoghegan (1990) calls the “negative memories” of exploitation that might animate new forms of cooperation and struggle for workers’ rights with what Bloch (1996) calls a “concrete utopian” dimension. As Kelley (2002) argues, future visions that are catalyzed by such struggles have great potential value to society at large as they provide alternative pathways to social change.

In the second place, our approach is informed by the “convocation” method for researching the “radical imagination” developed by Haiven and Khasnabish (2014) based on theories of Cornelius Castoriadis (1997). Here, the imagination is approached as a collective process, rather than an individual cognitive function. The radical imagination emerges from everyday life and the collective experience of struggle against dominant power relations. Accordingly, Khasnabish and Haiven argue the role of the researcher of the imagination can include efforts to “convoke” the radical imagination by bringing research participants together to learn, create, debate and, in the term provided by Harney and Moten (2013), “study.”  The convocation method measures its success less by delivering data on research participants and more by how it supports them to theorize and reflect on their own experience. Since being introduced nearly a decade ago, the convocation method has been used many times by scholars working with social movements and communities in struggle. It has not yet been attempted with groups of workers and has not yet been integrated with SF or the practices of creative writing.

In the third case, our project draws on a strand of critical pedagogy that mobilizes SF genre, including films, novels, and games, to stimulate critical collective reflection on contemporary society (Truman, 2019). While SF has struggled to overcome its assigned status as a “paraliterature,” not to be taken seriously relative to canonical literature, increasingly both critics and reading publics have come to appreciate the genre for its ability to challenge the imagination (Broderick, 1995; Moylan, 2018). While typically set in the close or distant future, SF inevitably reflects the worldly concerns of the writer and the reader in their own time. In doing so, it enables readers to explore their assumptions about how the world functions, the nature of political relations, social norms and regimes of economic value. The critical power of SF is not in the blueprints of a future society that it offers, but the production of ideas and images that exist (Bloch, 1996) in opposition to what is (Suvin, 1997). At its best, SF can produce a generative estrangement evoked by the appearance of that which is “not yet” (Bloch, 1996). It can help “educate desire” to embolden resistance to the status quo (Levitas, 1997). While the SF genre was forged in the crucible of colonialism and can reinforce and reproduce hegemonic logics, the genre has seen a rise of diverse and subaltern voices over the past 60 years. In particular, the genre’s powers of cognitive estrangement have been especially successful when mobilized by oppressed groups including LGBTQ2+ people, Indigenous people and Black people (brown & Imarisha, 2015; Dillon, 2012).

SF’s critical powers are especially important in a moment of capitalism that, as Haiven (2014) argues, does not simply vanquish the imagination but seeks to harness it to make each social subject conform to its forms of value. As Jameson (2005) makes clear, SF is particularly useful in developing a critique of capitalism from within, a system that is uniquely structurally future-oriented. Amazon is particularly emblematic of this orientation towards the future. Researchers like McGurl (2021) have suggested the centrality of generic SF narrative to the firm’s public image and internal vision. This is clearly evidenced in Amazon’s founding CEO, Jeff Bezos’ frequent declarations of the importance of SF to his life, vision, and corporate strategy and has redirected his massive fortune towards a private space program to make his dreams for humanity a reality (Means & Slater, 2019).

In our project, we are not only interested in consuming SF with workers, but also supporting them to produce it. This approach follows and expands upon successful experiments by scholars and social movements and community educators who have used SF writing workshops as a way to catalyze a collective process of critical discovery. Perhaps best known is Imarisha and brown’s (2015) use of SF writing workshops to foster the imagination of social movement actors in the United States, which they have developed into a set of prompts for similar exercises that we will draw on extensively. Similarly, Truman (2019, 2021) has written on how writing SF can contribute to a feminist and anti-racist pedagogy of liberation in the university and high school classroom. Our project combines this broad approach with inspiration taken from projects like New York’s Workers Writing Workshop, which recognize the importance of supporting the creative writing of working people as a project of social justice but have not so far explored SF (Hsu, 2017). 

Is resistance futile?  

            Jeff Bezos, indelibly linked to Amazon, is intimately connected to the SF genre. In particular, he has at many points identified Star Trek as his single most important inspiration (Roberts & Andrews, 2021). Indeed, he considered naming Amazon makeitso.com after the catch phrase of his hero, Captain Jean-Luc Picard of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which aired new episodes from 1987 until 1994, the year Amazon’s predecessor company was founded. Bezos even styles his appearance on that of Patrick Stewart and is unabashed in his embrace of the thriving and obsessive nerd culture around the franchise. According to his own testimony, and those of other founders and executives, Bezos would regularly refer to Star Trek episodes in corporate strategy meetings and the series was in some senses pivotal to the internal culture of the company (Stone, 2013).

In fact, it is strongly suspected that Amazon was really an effort by the former financier to generate the wealth to launch his own private space program. In 2000 these efforts became reality with the creation of Blue Origin whose mantra is “Earth, in all its beauty, is just our starting place.” When the company was finally successful at launching manned rockets in 2021 one of the first “guests” was the actor William Shatner, famous for playing the maverick Captain Kirk on the original Star Trek series, which a young Bezos watched with an almost religious fervour.

Ironically, the empire Bezos created in some ways resembles the kind of dystopian world that his idolized intergalactic explorers might encounter and seek to liberate. In each incarnation of the franchise, Star Trek has dwelled on the social and philosophical issues related to the prospects of freedom, the nature of exploitation, and the possibilities of peace and cooperation across cultures. The noble United Federation of Planets was dreamed up by the series’ founder, Gene Roddenberry, as an antidote to the culture of fear and xenophobia fostered by the Cold War. He envisioned an interstellar alliance of species, including a multi-ethnic mix of humans, that, together, dedicated themselves to peace and exploration. In the journeys of their flagship starship Enterprise across multiple different series, the Federation encounters numerous planets and societies that act as allegories for our present-day earthly concerns.

Critics have noted that, in the Cold War, Star Trek often appeared as a benevolent fantasy of the American Empire, championing notions of individualist “freedom” in contrast to the collectivist pathologies of alien species (Sarantakes, 2005). But as the series developed it would also, at times, come to critique the kind of ruthless and reckless profiteering associated with capitalism (Hassler-Forest, 2016). However, the Federation is, ultimately, a postcapitalist fantasy based on the presumption that the development of technology will, by the 24th century, have largely eliminated the need for human toil and create a world of abundance and peace.

            If it is Bezos’ dream to create such a world, he seems to be more than willing to sacrifice the lives, health, and wellbeing of millions of workers to achieve it. The exploitative and abusive practices of the company, combined with the larger-than-life corporate culture and megalomaniacal (former) CEO all feel like they were scripted with a heavy hand in the Star Trek writing room: some producer evidently let the concept slide by, without sending it back with a note saying, “too on the nose: make the allegory for the evils of capitalism more subtle or we’ll lose the audience.”

            If Star Trek has been such a large influence on Amazon’s development, perhaps there are clues within its plotlines and tropes that might help us unpack the firm’s deeper dimensions.  In 1997, two years after it started selling books online, Amazon was publicly listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In that same year Star Trek Voyager, then in its fourth season of network syndication, introduced the character Seven of Nine. Seven was a cyborg that the ship’s crew rescued from the Borg, a hive-minded alien species that, since their first appearance in the series in 1989, have terrorized the Federation and its heroes. Like her counterparts in The Collective, before being ‘assimilated’ Seven was once an intelligent, independent human. However, upon being abducted as a child by the virus-like horde they were transformed into a powerful robotic drone dedicated to their collective mission of doing the same to all intelligent, independent lifeforms in the universe. Their monotone mantra, “resistance is futile,” has become so stitched into popular culture its origins have been largely forgotten.

Separated from her fellow drones, Seven eventually reclaims some sense of her individuality and morality and joins Voyager as part of its diverse crew. Her humanity recaptured, she becomes an invaluable strategic asset, not only for her superior strength, endurance, and intellectual capacities, but also because, having once been part of the hive mind, she has special insight into and even contact with it. Now part of the resistance to the Borg’s endless, viral growth, her intimate, embodied knowledge becomes a source of hope.

            Is Amazon The Borg? Will they continue their parasitic expansion to claim ever more ever spheres of life? Addressing their victims, The Borg promise to “add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own” and reassure them that their cultural particularities will “adapt to service us”? As more and more industries fall to Amazon’s relentless, digitally-augmented expansion or recast themselves around its model, the metaphor is tempting. Certainly, it resonates with scenes of warehouses where workers wear sensors linked to Amazon servers, measuring and subtly “nudging” their movements to ensure efficiency in the service of profit. Though they retain their individuality and are framed by the company as “entrepreneurs,” the image of thousands of MTurk workers at computer terminals around the world racing to fulfil endless, mundane digital microtasks fed to them by an Amazon proprietary system transforms these workers into something not unlike drones. Amazon’s fleet of delivery drivers, who are constantly being nudged to do their work faster through arcane digital systems is not altogether foreign. Sure, all these workers are allowed to retain their sense of individual selfhood. Unlike the Borg, they are technically free to quit at any time. But how much does that matter in an economy where increasingly every firm is learning from or being “disrupted” by Amazon’s model?

We speculate that, like Seven of Nine, Amazon workers may have some special insight and intuition of how to resist and rebel not only at the level of their conscious intellectual      reflections but encoded in their very bodies. Workers are, of course, categorically excluded from management decision-making and strategy. The algorithms that govern their bodies and time are opaque. And yet our SF-inspired conjecture is that workers intuit something about the firm and the future it is building by virtue of having been bodily assimilated into spaces and mindsets prescribed by Amazon’s corporate demands. Though their access to and power over Amazon’s “collective intelligence” is limited, they are still in some sense possessed by it and so have some preternatural awareness of it.

If that’s the case, then rank and file Amazon workers themselves may have the most important insights about how to challenge the company’s future-making machine. The wager of our project is that, by creating welcoming, convivial, and creative spaces we can work with Amazon workers to awaken their secret insight into the future-making (or future-killing) power of their exploiter. By using the genre of SF, so pivotal to Amazon’s foundation and operations, we might be able to labour together to envision a near-future world beyond Amazon’s grasp, where the potential to co-create a future is shared democratically, rather than hoarded by a corporate oligarchy. 

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