Max Haiven's Blog, page 7

Wages of Dreamwork, Wages for Dreamwork

Original: https://transmediale.de/almanac/wages-for-dreamwork

https://archive.transmediale.de/sites/default/files/public/node/audio/field_audio_upload/fid/63456/Cassie%2C%20Max%2C%20Phanuel%20and%20Ben%20broadcast%281%29.mp3

In 1838, Louis Daguerre captured a streetscape including a Parisian shoe-shiner at work, in what is said to be the first photograph of a human being. Another fabled image, never published, included two workers, napping under a bridge. Ben Evans James, Max Haiven, Phanuel Antwi, and Cassie Thornton take this absent image as a point of departure to think over our relationship today to sleeping, dreaming, and working in a world plagued by the injustices of racial capitalism. The participants ask what labour is required to rest? How might sleep manifest as protest? And how might we dream in a state of wakefulness? As the conversation unfolds, sleep and dreams appear as spaces and times for learning and imagining rebellion. Understanding sleep as a field of biopolitical struggles, the participants speculate on the potential of learning how to dream collectively.

This broadcast is co-produced by RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab in collaboration with transmediale.

Speakers

Ben Evans James is film curator at transmediale festival, researcher at Film is an Architecture and tutors at The Bartlett, UCL, and Falmouth University. He is based in Berlin and Vancouver.

Max Haiven is a writer, teacher, and Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice. His most recent books are Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (2018) and Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (2020). Haiven is editor of VAGABONDS, a series of short radical books from Pluto Press. He teaches at Lakehead University, where he co-directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL).

Phanuel Antwi is an artist, organizer and teacher concerned with race, poetics, movements, intimacy and struggle. He works with text, dance, film and photography to intervene in artistic, academic, and public spaces. He is a curator, activist and assistant professor at the University of British Columbia. His forthcoming publications include; monograph: On Cuddling: Loved to Death in the Racial Embrace (2022), as well as two edited journal collections: one on dub poetry for the Journal of West Indian Literature (2021); the other on “Weather” for The Capilano Review (2021).

Cassie Thornton is an artist and activist who makes a “safe space” for the unknown, for disobedience, and for unanticipated collectivity. She uses social practices including Institutional Critique, insurgent architecture, and “healing modalities” like hypnosis and yoga to find soft spots in the hard surfaces of capitalist life. Cassie has invented a grassroots alternative credit reporting service for the survivors of gentrification, hypnotized hedge fund managers, finger-painted with the grime found inside banks, donated cursed paintings to profiteering bankers, and taught feminist economics to yogis (and vice versa). Her new book, The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future, is available from Pluto Press.

The post Wages of Dreamwork, Wages for Dreamwork appeared first on Max Haiven.

Our age of uprisings

I’m very pleased to have contributed a framing article to the ROAR Magazine special issue MOBILIZE!, Published on 15 December 2021.

The original can be found here: https://roarmag.org/magazine/our-age-of-uprisings/

Our age of uprisings: We are a world remaking itself

Max Haiven

The global pandemic unfolds amidst a world of uprisings. Some have seen huge numbers gather in the streets and become ungovernable, including the victorious farmer’s strike in India, the efforts to expropriate the landlords in Berlin, the mass refusal of anti-Black police violence in the US, and the mobilizations against the neoliberal regime in Chile.

Elsewhere, in Chiapas, Kerala, Rojava and an archipelago of smaller “zones to defend,” the uprisings take more sustained forms as people reinvent or reclaim life in common. Indigenous people around the world are refusing to allow their lands and lives to be sacrificed on the altar of extractive capitalism. The great global struggle against capitalism’s climate apocalypse is escalating.

Other uprisings are occurring on the level of everyday life. A whole generation is rising up against the authoritarian regimes of the gender binary that were forged in the crucible of capitalist and colonial patriarchy. Others are refusing to be labeled as pathologically “mentally ill” for their vulnerability and interdependence. They, along with queer, feminist and decolonial struggles are seeking to reinvent the fabric of sociality, mutual aid and care and in so doing helping us envision the futures we are called to create.

What connects these struggles in this moment, when the fate of the world hangs in the balance? Perhaps they are not only struggles against domination but struggles to tell new collective stories about who we are as human beings in an interdependent world. I am seeking a common undercurrent in all these struggles. In spite of their differences and disagreements, together they are opening a space for imagining who “we” are and who “we” might yet become, beyond colonialism and capitalism’s prized subject, homo oeconomicus, and the ruined world made in his image. They are not only telling these stories in theory or culture but also through their very actions which show us not only that another world is possible but that it has always been here, among us and between us, striving for freedom.

We are fighting back, but we are not yet winning. We now have no choice but to win, though we don’t yet know what victory will mean. But what seems increasingly clear is that  people everywhere are reinventing the world in a million different ways. In the shadow of a global system of capitalism that seeks to turn all forms of human cooperation and care into commodities, we are developing new ways of relating to one another, new ways of imagining and practicing the collective power-to-become, new ways of governing ourselves, new ways of organizing an economy to sustain us in relation to the complex earth of which we are a part. In telling a story of our collective refusal and reinvention through our actions, we are making a new world real within the ruins of the old.

Against homo oeconomicus

In an age when our technologies are capable of changing and destroying the ecosphere on which we depend, humanity stands at a historic crossroads. And yet in this dangerous moment, even our conception of what we are and what we are capable of has been shaped by the very system of global racial capitalism that brought us to this dire moment.

Jamaican writer Sylvia Wynter argues that we appear to be the only species who transform ourselves through stories. A cooperative species, the stories we tell about who and what is desirable fundamentally shape social organization, economic provisioning and the way we cooperate with one another and with the more-than-human (“natural”) world. Sometimes these stories are explicit, including shared myths, narratives and cultural media. Sometimes they are implicit, embodied in unspoken ideologies, cloaked in scientific arguments or encoded in religion. Through transformative storytelling humans create a dazzling multitude of forms of life. These stories make sense under and help to reproduce overarching cosmologies which often go unquestioned, but that define what it means to be human, what it means to grapple with our unique entanglements with one another and the world. In this sense, the collective stories we tell are crucial to how we come to recognize our cooperative potential. But they can also facilitate monumental cruelty and violence, especially when certain people are, through those stories, cast as subhuman, or when the dominant myth of the human is shaped by logics of domination.

Today’s global regime of neocolonial racial capitalism is held in place by just such a cosmology, a self-perpetuating set of stories about what it means to be human. As Wynter argues, this cosmology has been under development since before the invasion of the Americas in 1492 by European male elites and is today built around the figure of the able-bodied, wealthy, self-interested and competitive white man: homo oeconomicus. Retroactively, this mythical figure is presented as the natural and true expression of human nature: the survival of the fittest, the war of all against all. With roots in the world-defining event of the transatlantic slave trade, and with anti-Blackness as its fundamental platform, the mythos of homo oeconomicus fundamentally disavows and denigrates other ways of being human, other ways of organizing social and political and economic life, in order to present  its own reign as natural, justified and inevitable. Forged in five centuries of the subhumanization of non-Europeans, as well as the subjugation of women and the exploitation of the earth, the story of homo oeconomicus has unleashed a form of global capitalism that threatens to annihilate even the very species, humanity, that narrates it.

As Peter Fleming argues, in line with Wynter, to the extent we tell ourselves a story of society in which homo oeconomicus is the main character, we come to co-create that society. And that society is destroying the world as we, each in isolation, are compelled to seek to compete to protect ourselves from the destructive power of that system which we are co-creating. It is a colonial, capitalist society oriented around homo oeconomicus that has created the climate crisis. Today, the idealization of that figure encourages two catastrophic courses of action: On the one hand, business elites and neoliberals argue that the only way to address climate change is to incentivize homo oeconomicus to solve the problem through carbon taxes, cap-and-trade schemes and subsidies. On the other, the reactionaries and eco-fascists insist on a dark “realism” of diminishing resources which justifies homo oeconomici banding together into increasingly paranoid and violent ethnostates.

This set of stories, with homo oeconomicus as its main character, fundamentally undermines the kinds of global solidarity we need to deal with our global dilemmas. It also dictates that those who cannot or will not embrace the truth of homo oeconomicus have only themselves to blame for their cruel fate: Indigenous people who have other cosmologies, racialized people who were never intended to participate in capitalism as anything more than slaves or workers, women and trans people who refuse to abide by the patriarchal logic of competition and indifference, those who are not considered “able” within capitalism’s logic of work-and-compete. All these and more are presented as failed and doomed.

The great lie of global colonial capitalism in its current neoliberal manifestation is that we can all be or become homo oeconomicus or, indeed, that we have always been him the whole time, underneath, and that those who will survive and be celebrated are those who embrace this reality. But in reality only a handful can or will succeed in emulating his figure and helping reproduce his world and reap the rewards. Beyond that, the reality is that this figure has almost nothing to do with how we actually live our lives, which are in fact sustained and made meaningful by relationships of reciprocity, care, dependence, non-competitive exchange and what Ricahrd Gilman-Opalsky calls the “communism of love.” Other cosmologies have existed and continue to exist, other ways of approaching the riddle of what we are and of our powers to cooperate and shape our world.

The task before us is not only to act in resistance to the world made by and for homo oeconomicus but to, in such collective action, prove to ourselves we can tell a radically different story about who we are and, in so doing, make that story real.

The struggle for humanities, plural

My suggestion here is that many of the movements we have seen over the past decade, in spite of their vast diversity and abundant disagreements, share at some level an implicit or explicit rejection of the grim paradigm of homo oeconomicus. They each, in their own way, either propose or experiment with other, anti-colonial and anti-capitalist ways of being human. Though none of these movements is perfect and free of contradictions, each is based on and helps tell a different story about who and what matters, of what is of value in the world and of what it means to be part of a species with the unique power to drastically shape its world.

For instance, in Chile and Argentina, feminism has been at the forefront of rebellions against neoliberalism in ways that prioritize not only reproductive justice, but also the importance of the work of social reproduction, whose devaluation has always been at the core of capitalism’s paradigm. In place of a colonial capitalist worldview, in which competition and extraction are key, these movements promote a logic of care, reciprocity and ecological entanglement. From Beirut to Belarus to Brazil, young people are rising up to reject the regimes that adjudicate who should live and who should die or be left to suffer. Across Europe and around the world, youth echo an increasingly desparate scream that their futures not be cancelled by corporate climate terrorism, demanding that those who claim to represent “the people” move beyond their obedience to some ghoulish belief that markets must come first. Others are taking matters of climate into their own hands through actions that range from forming new ecological communities and commoning initiatives to militant forms of sabotage.

Around the world, new waves of unionization and worker militancy (including of the tech and gig workers) are challenging the neoliberal ideal of the flexible worker who competes tooth and nail against their colleagues for the right to survive. To this we can add the wave of efforts to revivify community gardens, neighbourhood economies, transition towns and radical degrowth practices that envision growing an insurgent economy within the ruins of capitalism.

The movement for Black Lives, while its present iteration originated in the United States, has inspired worldwide protests led by members of the expansive African diaspora, who have always been placed at the lowest rung of the ladder of humanity that has a white, European homo oeconomicus enthroning itself at the top. Manifestations insisting that Black lives indeed matter have transformed the political stage in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and beyond. Inspired by the resistance of South African students in the past decade, this movement has also encouraged a vast wave of struggles to remove or tear down the statues of homo oeconomicus’s ancestors: the colonial and capitalist warlords of history who today, from their plinths, enforce obedience to white supremacy. Beyond merely being symbolic, these movements aim to unseat homo oeconomicus from his throne and avenge the subhumanization of generation upon generation of enslaved people, women, trans and nonbinary people, disabled people and workers.

To this we must add the incredible imaginative and political power gathered around demands for the abolition of prisons and police, often stemming from the protagonism of incarcerated people themselves. Here, in the face of relentless subhumanization and scapegoating which justify a regime of carceral vengeance, the insistence on the humanity of those who are incarcerated fundamentally undermines the presumptions of homo oeconomicus.

Likewise, Indigenous uprisings around the world, notably in Canada, Brazil, India and the United States, represent the resurgence of forms of being human that have survived the wars of annihilation waged against them by colonial capitalism and now emerge on the world stage to lead the turning of the tide. The steadfast determination of the Palestinian people continues to resonate around the world, with the understanding that whatever techniques of dehumanization we allow to be enacted against the Palestinians may be enacted against any of us, sooner or later. In Rojava, Chiapas and a multitude of smaller enclaves like the zad or an archipelago of squatted houses and social centres, militants have reclaimed their place on the earth, with the earth, as part of the earth as a space to remember and reinvent what it might mean to be human.

Yet today’s struggles are not only visible in the streets and on the barricades, as important as these theatres may be. They also occur on the level of everyday life.

Without diminishing the vital support many receive from psychopharmaceuticals, care activists are insisting that a generation’s depression and anxiety are not personal faults but public, shared problems, including being trapped in an omnicidal system. Dismissed by their elders as a spoiled generation, young people today are learning from decades of disability activists how to build communities of care and mutual aid in the face of a completely justified “epidemic” of what the biomedical system classifies as “mental illness.” To be human, in this view, is to be vulnerable and dependent on one another, a far cry from the wretched, alienated, competitive version of the human promoted by colonial capitalism. These movements, too, learn from the history of queer and trans struggles which continue to this day and whose refusal to succumb quietly to AIDS has shown us how viruses (including SARS-Cov2) are always already political.

Such movements have been inspired by a long legacy of feminist organizing where the personal has always been political, a recognition emblematized by a new wave of struggles over reproductive freedom that make the links explicitly to the way patriarchy and racial capitalism have always worked hand-in-hand. At stake is the recognition that, in a world that insists on making us choose between individualism or dehumanization, one must become many to reinvent new forms of kinship, solidarity, collective power, love, thriving and joy.

The deceptively simple, profoundly honest slogan that “no one is illegal” strikes at the very rotten heart of colonial capitalism’s Malthusian premise and defies the power of the border to determine who will live and who will die based on imaginary distinctions made violently real through five centuries years of racist imperialism. Like calls for both a global basic guaranteed income or basic guaranteed services, it takes as its premise not the myth of ruthless scarcity but the promise of global abundance, a promise so far denied by a horrifyingly racist global division of wealth, the residue of five centuries  of colonial pillage.

The past ten years has also seen struggles that do not so neatly fit into such a vision, or that are animated by contradictory tendencies. The uprisings in the Arab world, the global Occupy Movement, the Movement of the Squares in Spain and Greece, the Gezi Park reclamation in Turkey, the Hong Kong demonstrations and other struggles that staged takeovers of public space necessarily opened themselves up to a wide variety of ideological positions. However, within these, the radical left played a central role in opening up new spaces for grassroots, participatory democracy and built infrastructures of collective care and mutual aid. These fundamentally moved these struggles outside of the conventional bounds of liberal representative democracy and transformed them into experimental zones for new forms of human cooperation and autogestion.

Even the electoral turn, including the Corbyn and Sanders campaigns in the North Atlantic, the municipalist turn towards institutions in some parts of Southern Europe and beyond has been marked by a refusal of the idea that the state is destined to be little more than the enforcer of neoliberalism or the vehicle for a murderous nationalism. Here, they have learned from and built on the optimism of the Pink Tide in the first decade of the 21st century and that today animate hopes of its revival in Latin America. In an attempt to ride (some might say capture) the momentum of grassroots movements, new left party formations are  being forced to move beyond a vision of a better managed capitalism and contend with the need to remake politics at the level of everyday life. And yet in the wake of their electoral and political defeats, movements once again are faced with the question of how the desires and dreams expressed in the streets can find the power to change the world.

Beyond a system of revenge

Though focused on the struggles of the Black diaspora and the particular forms of oppression that emerge from the legacies of slavery on which global capitalism was built, Wynter’s writing invites a much wider cross section of humanity to liberate itself from a neoliberal orthodoxy and cosmology. This cosmology even constrains some of the most radical movements of our day. Though they might reject neoliberalism or even capitalism, many remain concerned with proposing the better management of scarce resources and of populations.

Today, we are adrift in cynical public relations gambits that seek to appropriate the language and spirit of struggles to sell us on “green consumerism” or fool us into thinking that new technology like blockchains or cryptocurrencies will, in and of themselves, lead to human liberation. At the same time, stories of movement struggle, when told through the individualizing and manichean lens of capitalist entertainment industries, are transmuted into liberalist fantasies that justify the status quo.

In the face of this, we need, more than ever, powerful and inspiring stories of collective struggle and transformation. More broadly, we need forms of writing, theory and storytelling that reveal to us what it means to take action for the world of which we are a part, not as isolated individuals but as common movements. But even beyond new modes of verbal, written or artistic storytelling, we also need to tell ourselves such stories in the streets, in our actions, in the comedy and tragedy of material struggle.

The task before us is monumental and unprecedented. We must, on the one hand, follow the Zapatistas in striving for “a world in which many worlds fit.” At the same time, somehow, we need to take responsibility for ourselves as a global species with profound and terrible powers to transform itself and the world.

The ideological architects of neoliberalism told us the story that their system of free market globalization was the only one that could truly and safely express and contain the aspirations of our global species. Only if we all submitted to the peaceful rule of the market would we be safe from ourselves: the great ideological, religious and ethnic struggles would fade away as an inherently greedy species took their competitive drives to the fair capitalist arena. Revenge, xenophobia, ignorance and scarcity would be conquered. It was an appealing dream, not only because it promised us a kind of peace that would literally be the “end of history” but because it would be so easy: rather than some kind of global awakening and transformation, all we had to do was sit back, relax and act “normally” as homo oeconomicus.

And yet now, almost half a century into the neoliberal revolution, much of our world is in ruins, or perhaps more accurately the ruination of the planet, which began with the capture of slaves and invasion of the “new world,” now is reaching its terrifying endgame. Though it promised the final conquest of revenge as a human political drama, global colonial capitalism has become a system of revenge. Not only has it fostered the growth of far-right revenge politics, it also, without anyone intending or orchestrating it, is taking a strange revenge on our species, notably through climate chaos but also the mass murder of migrants, the mass incarceration of racialized people, and the universal terror of socioeconomic abandonment that haunts us all.

We are now faced with the grim reality that, even if we were to somehow, magically, summon a global revolution that could fulfill our dreams, we would inherit a damaged world. Climate tipping points have been triggered. Generations have been traumatized. In their desperation to protect their property and privilege, the ruling class has bred the hellhounds of reactionary hatred and resentment and given them a taste for flesh. The world and our bodies are laced with toxins. We have, each and every one of us, become habituated to a form of capitalist survival that, in small or large ways, seeks to turn us into agents of the system’s reproduction. These wounds will take generations of intentional effort to heal.

And yet in spite of this we persist in struggle, we thrive in solidarity and we are reconnecting with our birthright: mutual aid and interdependent collective becoming. The question before us is how we can tell a new, different story about who “we” are, “we” the many, the many “we”s. How can we tell a story through our actions that helps us remember and rekindle our powers of refusal and co-creation in ways that make the world larger, not more confined, that entitle us to claim the wealth we cooperatively produce rather than seek the scraps leftover from a system of death? This storytelling is occurring all around us and will not only be found in visionary works of theory or literature, though these are indeed vital. They are, most importantly, stories told in the doing of daily life and that speak from the character of our struggles. We can tell another story of what it means to be human, or many stories, and make those stories real.

The post Our age of uprisings appeared first on Max Haiven.

Our age of uprisings (ROAR Magazine)

I’m very pleased to have contributed a framing article to the ROAR Magazine special issue MOBILIZE!, Published on 15 December 2021.

The original can be found here: https://roarmag.org/magazine/our-age-of-uprisings/

Our age of uprisings: We are a world remaking itself

Max Haiven

The global pandemic unfolds amidst a world of uprisings. Some have seen huge numbers gather in the streets and become ungovernable, including the victorious farmer’s strike in India, the efforts to expropriate the landlords in Berlin, the mass refusal of anti-Black police violence in the US, and the mobilizations against the neoliberal regime in Chile.

Elsewhere, in Chiapas, Kerala, Rojava and an archipelago of smaller “zones to defend,” the uprisings take more sustained forms as people reinvent or reclaim life in common. Indigenous people around the world are refusing to allow their lands and lives to be sacrificed on the altar of extractive capitalism. The great global struggle against capitalism’s climate apocalypse is escalating.

Other uprisings are occurring on the level of everyday life. A whole generation is rising up against the authoritarian regimes of the gender binary that were forged in the crucible of capitalist and colonial patriarchy. Others are refusing to be labeled as pathologically “mentally ill” for their vulnerability and interdependence. They, along with queer, feminist and decolonial struggles are seeking to reinvent the fabric of sociality, mutual aid and care and in so doing helping us envision the futures we are called to create.

What connects these struggles in this moment, when the fate of the world hangs in the balance? Perhaps they are not only struggles against domination but struggles to tell new collective stories about who we are as human beings in an interdependent world. I am seeking a common undercurrent in all these struggles. In spite of their differences and disagreements, together they are opening a space for imagining who “we” are and who “we” might yet become, beyond colonialism and capitalism’s prized subject, homo oeconomicus, and the ruined world made in his image. They are not only telling these stories in theory or culture but also through their very actions which show us not only that another world is possible but that it has always been here, among us and between us, striving for freedom.

We are fighting back, but we are not yet winning. We now have no choice but to win, though we don’t yet know what victory will mean. But what seems increasingly clear is that  people everywhere are reinventing the world in a million different ways. In the shadow of a global system of capitalism that seeks to turn all forms of human cooperation and care into commodities, we are developing new ways of relating to one another, new ways of imagining and practicing the collective power-to-become, new ways of governing ourselves, new ways of organizing an economy to sustain us in relation to the complex earth of which we are a part. In telling a story of our collective refusal and reinvention through our actions, we are making a new world real within the ruins of the old.

Against homo oeconomicus

In an age when our technologies are capable of changing and destroying the ecosphere on which we depend, humanity stands at a historic crossroads. And yet in this dangerous moment, even our conception of what we are and what we are capable of has been shaped by the very system of global racial capitalism that brought us to this dire moment.

Jamaican writer Sylvia Wynter argues that we appear to be the only species who transform ourselves through stories. A cooperative species, the stories we tell about who and what is desirable fundamentally shape social organization, economic provisioning and the way we cooperate with one another and with the more-than-human (“natural”) world. Sometimes these stories are explicit, including shared myths, narratives and cultural media. Sometimes they are implicit, embodied in unspoken ideologies, cloaked in scientific arguments or encoded in religion. Through transformative storytelling humans create a dazzling multitude of forms of life. These stories make sense under and help to reproduce overarching cosmologies which often go unquestioned, but that define what it means to be human, what it means to grapple with our unique entanglements with one another and the world. In this sense, the collective stories we tell are crucial to how we come to recognize our cooperative potential. But they can also facilitate monumental cruelty and violence, especially when certain people are, through those stories, cast as subhuman, or when the dominant myth of the human is shaped by logics of domination.

Today’s global regime of neocolonial racial capitalism is held in place by just such a cosmology, a self-perpetuating set of stories about what it means to be human. As Wynter argues, this cosmology has been under development since before the invasion of the Americas in 1492 by European male elites and is today built around the figure of the able-bodied, wealthy, self-interested and competitive white man: homo oeconomicus. Retroactively, this mythical figure is presented as the natural and true expression of human nature: the survival of the fittest, the war of all against all. With roots in the world-defining event of the transatlantic slave trade, and with anti-Blackness as its fundamental platform, the mythos of homo oeconomicus fundamentally disavows and denigrates other ways of being human, other ways of organizing social and political and economic life, in order to present  its own reign as natural, justified and inevitable. Forged in five centuries of the subhumanization of non-Europeans, as well as the subjugation of women and the exploitation of the earth, the story of homo oeconomicus has unleashed a form of global capitalism that threatens to annihilate even the very species, humanity, that narrates it.

As Peter Fleming argues, in line with Wynter, to the extent we tell ourselves a story of society in which homo oeconomicus is the main character, we come to co-create that society. And that society is destroying the world as we, each in isolation, are compelled to seek to compete to protect ourselves from the destructive power of that system which we are co-creating. It is a colonial, capitalist society oriented around homo oeconomicus that has created the climate crisis. Today, the idealization of that figure encourages two catastrophic courses of action: On the one hand, business elites and neoliberals argue that the only way to address climate change is to incentivize homo oeconomicus to solve the problem through carbon taxes, cap-and-trade schemes and subsidies. On the other, the reactionaries and eco-fascists insist on a dark “realism” of diminishing resources which justifies homo oeconomici banding together into increasingly paranoid and violent ethnostates.

This set of stories, with homo oeconomicus as its main character, fundamentally undermines the kinds of global solidarity we need to deal with our global dilemmas. It also dictates that those who cannot or will not embrace the truth of homo oeconomicus have only themselves to blame for their cruel fate: Indigenous people who have other cosmologies, racialized people who were never intended to participate in capitalism as anything more than slaves or workers, women and trans people who refuse to abide by the patriarchal logic of competition and indifference, those who are not considered “able” within capitalism’s logic of work-and-compete. All these and more are presented as failed and doomed.

The great lie of global colonial capitalism in its current neoliberal manifestation is that we can all be or become homo oeconomicus or, indeed, that we have always been him the whole time, underneath, and that those who will survive and be celebrated are those who embrace this reality. But in reality only a handful can or will succeed in emulating his figure and helping reproduce his world and reap the rewards. Beyond that, the reality is that this figure has almost nothing to do with how we actually live our lives, which are in fact sustained and made meaningful by relationships of reciprocity, care, dependence, non-competitive exchange and what Ricahrd Gilman-Opalsky calls the “communism of love.” Other cosmologies have existed and continue to exist, other ways of approaching the riddle of what we are and of our powers to cooperate and shape our world.

The task before us is not only to act in resistance to the world made by and for homo oeconomicus but to, in such collective action, prove to ourselves we can tell a radically different story about who we are and, in so doing, make that story real.

The struggle for humanities, plural

My suggestion here is that many of the movements we have seen over the past decade, in spite of their vast diversity and abundant disagreements, share at some level an implicit or explicit rejection of the grim paradigm of homo oeconomicus. They each, in their own way, either propose or experiment with other, anti-colonial and anti-capitalist ways of being human. Though none of these movements is perfect and free of contradictions, each is based on and helps tell a different story about who and what matters, of what is of value in the world and of what it means to be part of a species with the unique power to drastically shape its world.

For instance, in Chile and Argentina, feminism has been at the forefront of rebellions against neoliberalism in ways that prioritize not only reproductive justice, but also the importance of the work of social reproduction, whose devaluation has always been at the core of capitalism’s paradigm. In place of a colonial capitalist worldview, in which competition and extraction are key, these movements promote a logic of care, reciprocity and ecological entanglement. From Beirut to Belarus to Brazil, young people are rising up to reject the regimes that adjudicate who should live and who should die or be left to suffer. Across Europe and around the world, youth echo an increasingly desparate scream that their futures not be cancelled by corporate climate terrorism, demanding that those who claim to represent “the people” move beyond their obedience to some ghoulish belief that markets must come first. Others are taking matters of climate into their own hands through actions that range from forming new ecological communities and commoning initiatives to militant forms of sabotage.

Around the world, new waves of unionization and worker militancy (including of the tech and gig workers) are challenging the neoliberal ideal of the flexible worker who competes tooth and nail against their colleagues for the right to survive. To this we can add the wave of efforts to revivify community gardens, neighbourhood economies, transition towns and radical degrowth practices that envision growing an insurgent economy within the ruins of capitalism.

The movement for Black Lives, while its present iteration originated in the United States, has inspired worldwide protests led by members of the expansive African diaspora, who have always been placed at the lowest rung of the ladder of humanity that has a white, European homo oeconomicus enthroning itself at the top. Manifestations insisting that Black lives indeed matter have transformed the political stage in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and beyond. Inspired by the resistance of South African students in the past decade, this movement has also encouraged a vast wave of struggles to remove or tear down the statues of homo oeconomicus’s ancestors: the colonial and capitalist warlords of history who today, from their plinths, enforce obedience to white supremacy. Beyond merely being symbolic, these movements aim to unseat homo oeconomicus from his throne and avenge the subhumanization of generation upon generation of enslaved people, women, trans and nonbinary people, disabled people and workers.

To this we must add the incredible imaginative and political power gathered around demands for the abolition of prisons and police, often stemming from the protagonism of incarcerated people themselves. Here, in the face of relentless subhumanization and scapegoating which justify a regime of carceral vengeance, the insistence on the humanity of those who are incarcerated fundamentally undermines the presumptions of homo oeconomicus.

Likewise, Indigenous uprisings around the world, notably in Canada, Brazil, India and the United States, represent the resurgence of forms of being human that have survived the wars of annihilation waged against them by colonial capitalism and now emerge on the world stage to lead the turning of the tide. The steadfast determination of the Palestinian people continues to resonate around the world, with the understanding that whatever techniques of dehumanization we allow to be enacted against the Palestinians may be enacted against any of us, sooner or later. In Rojava, Chiapas and a multitude of smaller enclaves like the zad or an archipelago of squatted houses and social centres, militants have reclaimed their place on the earth, with the earth, as part of the earth as a space to remember and reinvent what it might mean to be human.

Yet today’s struggles are not only visible in the streets and on the barricades, as important as these theatres may be. They also occur on the level of everyday life.

Without diminishing the vital support many receive from psychopharmaceuticals, care activists are insisting that a generation’s depression and anxiety are not personal faults but public, shared problems, including being trapped in an omnicidal system. Dismissed by their elders as a spoiled generation, young people today are learning from decades of disability activists how to build communities of care and mutual aid in the face of a completely justified “epidemic” of what the biomedical system classifies as “mental illness.” To be human, in this view, is to be vulnerable and dependent on one another, a far cry from the wretched, alienated, competitive version of the human promoted by colonial capitalism. These movements, too, learn from the history of queer and trans struggles which continue to this day and whose refusal to succumb quietly to AIDS has shown us how viruses (including SARS-Cov2) are always already political.

Such movements have been inspired by a long legacy of feminist organizing where the personal has always been political, a recognition emblematized by a new wave of struggles over reproductive freedom that make the links explicitly to the way patriarchy and racial capitalism have always worked hand-in-hand. At stake is the recognition that, in a world that insists on making us choose between individualism or dehumanization, one must become many to reinvent new forms of kinship, solidarity, collective power, love, thriving and joy.

The deceptively simple, profoundly honest slogan that “no one is illegal” strikes at the very rotten heart of colonial capitalism’s Malthusian premise and defies the power of the border to determine who will live and who will die based on imaginary distinctions made violently real through five centuries years of racist imperialism. Like calls for both a global basic guaranteed income or basic guaranteed services, it takes as its premise not the myth of ruthless scarcity but the promise of global abundance, a promise so far denied by a horrifyingly racist global division of wealth, the residue of five centuries  of colonial pillage.

The past ten years has also seen struggles that do not so neatly fit into such a vision, or that are animated by contradictory tendencies. The uprisings in the Arab world, the global Occupy Movement, the Movement of the Squares in Spain and Greece, the Gezi Park reclamation in Turkey, the Hong Kong demonstrations and other struggles that staged takeovers of public space necessarily opened themselves up to a wide variety of ideological positions. However, within these, the radical left played a central role in opening up new spaces for grassroots, participatory democracy and built infrastructures of collective care and mutual aid. These fundamentally moved these struggles outside of the conventional bounds of liberal representative democracy and transformed them into experimental zones for new forms of human cooperation and autogestion.

Even the electoral turn, including the Corbyn and Sanders campaigns in the North Atlantic, the municipalist turn towards institutions in some parts of Southern Europe and beyond has been marked by a refusal of the idea that the state is destined to be little more than the enforcer of neoliberalism or the vehicle for a murderous nationalism. Here, they have learned from and built on the optimism of the Pink Tide in the first decade of the 21st century and that today animate hopes of its revival in Latin America. In an attempt to ride (some might say capture) the momentum of grassroots movements, new left party formations are  being forced to move beyond a vision of a better managed capitalism and contend with the need to remake politics at the level of everyday life. And yet in the wake of their electoral and political defeats, movements once again are faced with the question of how the desires and dreams expressed in the streets can find the power to change the world.

Beyond a system of revenge

Though focused on the struggles of the Black diaspora and the particular forms of oppression that emerge from the legacies of slavery on which global capitalism was built, Wynter’s writing invites a much wider cross section of humanity to liberate itself from a neoliberal orthodoxy and cosmology. This cosmology even constrains some of the most radical movements of our day. Though they might reject neoliberalism or even capitalism, many remain concerned with proposing the better management of scarce resources and of populations.

Today, we are adrift in cynical public relations gambits that seek to appropriate the language and spirit of struggles to sell us on “green consumerism” or fool us into thinking that new technology like blockchains or cryptocurrencies will, in and of themselves, lead to human liberation. At the same time, stories of movement struggle, when told through the individualizing and manichean lens of capitalist entertainment industries, are transmuted into liberalist fantasies that justify the status quo.

In the face of this, we need, more than ever, powerful and inspiring stories of collective struggle and transformation. More broadly, we need forms of writing, theory and storytelling that reveal to us what it means to take action for the world of which we are a part, not as isolated individuals but as common movements. But even beyond new modes of verbal, written or artistic storytelling, we also need to tell ourselves such stories in the streets, in our actions, in the comedy and tragedy of material struggle.

The task before us is monumental and unprecedented. We must, on the one hand, follow the Zapatistas in striving for “a world in which many worlds fit.” At the same time, somehow, we need to take responsibility for ourselves as a global species with profound and terrible powers to transform itself and the world.

The ideological architects of neoliberalism told us the story that their system of free market globalization was the only one that could truly and safely express and contain the aspirations of our global species. Only if we all submitted to the peaceful rule of the market would we be safe from ourselves: the great ideological, religious and ethnic struggles would fade away as an inherently greedy species took their competitive drives to the fair capitalist arena. Revenge, xenophobia, ignorance and scarcity would be conquered. It was an appealing dream, not only because it promised us a kind of peace that would literally be the “end of history” but because it would be so easy: rather than some kind of global awakening and transformation, all we had to do was sit back, relax and act “normally” as homo oeconomicus.

And yet now, almost half a century into the neoliberal revolution, much of our world is in ruins, or perhaps more accurately the ruination of the planet, which began with the capture of slaves and invasion of the “new world,” now is reaching its terrifying endgame. Though it promised the final conquest of revenge as a human political drama, global colonial capitalism has become a system of revenge. Not only has it fostered the growth of far-right revenge politics, it also, without anyone intending or orchestrating it, is taking a strange revenge on our species, notably through climate chaos but also the mass murder of migrants, the mass incarceration of racialized people, and the universal terror of socioeconomic abandonment that haunts us all.

We are now faced with the grim reality that, even if we were to somehow, magically, summon a global revolution that could fulfill our dreams, we would inherit a damaged world. Climate tipping points have been triggered. Generations have been traumatized. In their desperation to protect their property and privilege, the ruling class has bred the hellhounds of reactionary hatred and resentment and given them a taste for flesh. The world and our bodies are laced with toxins. We have, each and every one of us, become habituated to a form of capitalist survival that, in small or large ways, seeks to turn us into agents of the system’s reproduction. These wounds will take generations of intentional effort to heal.

And yet in spite of this we persist in struggle, we thrive in solidarity and we are reconnecting with our birthright: mutual aid and interdependent collective becoming. The question before us is how we can tell a new, different story about who “we” are, “we” the many, the many “we”s. How can we tell a story through our actions that helps us remember and rekindle our powers of refusal and co-creation in ways that make the world larger, not more confined, that entitle us to claim the wealth we cooperatively produce rather than seek the scraps leftover from a system of death? This storytelling is occurring all around us and will not only be found in visionary works of theory or literature, though these are indeed vital. They are, most importantly, stories told in the doing of daily life and that speak from the character of our struggles. We can tell another story of what it means to be human, or many stories, and make those stories real.

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“Is Marx still a threat?” Extrablatt

In February of 2022, the German Historical Museum in Berlin will open an exhibition on “Karl Marx and Capitalism.” They asked the Berlin-based bimonthly newspaper Arts of the Working Class (AWC) to prepare a special supplement  in response, and the newspaper asked me to co-edit it with AWC co-founder María Inés Plaza Lazo.

AWC has just published an eight-page selection of original texts and excerpts (with online versions to come) dedicated to such provocative questions as:

Was Marx a Conspiracy Theorist? (by Erica Lagalisse, author of The Occult Features of Anarchism)Who Believes in “Cultural Marxism”? (by Marc Tuters)Was Marx a Fetishist? (by J. Lorand Matory, author of The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud and the Gods Black People Make)Why is an analysis of race  and racism crucial to understanding capitalism? (by Gargi Bhattacharyya, author of ReThinking Racial Capitalism)Why Read Marx with Cats? (by Leigh Claire La Berge, author of the forthcoming Marx for Cats as well as Wages Against Artwork)How are anti-Marxism, anti-Blackness and Imperialism Connected? (by Charisse Burden-Stelly, author of the forthcoming Black Scare/Red Scare)Marxism and Disability (by Keith Rosenthal)Marx and Alienation (by Rahel Jaeggi)Contributions from the exhibition curators and museum directorAnd including art by Kara Walker

Copies of the Extrablatt are included in issue 19 of the newspaper, which can be found at arts institutions around the world and sold  street vendors in Berlin. Images and a PDF of the Extrablatt are below.

PDF: https://maxhaiven.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/AWC19_Extrablatt.pdf

The post “Is Marx still a threat?” Extrablatt appeared first on Max Haiven.

“Is Marx still a threat?” Extrablatt for Arts of the Working Class

In February of 2022, the German Historical Museum in Berlin will open an exhibition on “Karl Marx and Capitalism.” They asked the Berlin-based bimonthly newspaper Arts of the Working Class (AWC) to prepare a special supplement  in response, and the newspaper asked me to co-edit it with AWC co-founder María Inés Plaza Lazo.

AWC has just published an eight-page selection of original texts and excerpts (with online versions to come) dedicated to such provocative questions as:

Was Marx a Conspiracy Theorist? (by Erica Lagalisse, author of The Occult Features of Anarchism)Who Believes in “Cultural Marxism”? (by Marc Tuters)Was Marx a Fetishist? (by J. Lorand Matory, author of The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud and the Gods Black People Make)Why is an analysis of race  and racism crucial to understanding capitalism? (by Gargi Bhattacharyya, author of ReThinking Racial Capitalism)Why Read Marx with Cats? (by Leigh Claire La Berge, author of the forthcoming Marx for Cats as well as Wages Against Artwork)How are anti-Marxism, anti-Blackness and Imperialism Connected? (by Charisse Burden-Stelly, author of the forthcoming Black Scare/Red Scare)Marxism and Disability (by Keith Rosenthal)Marx and Alienation (by Rahel Jaeggi)Contributions from the exhibition curators and museum directorAnd including art by Kara Walker

Copies of the Extrablatt are included in issue 19 of the newspaper, which can be found at arts institutions around the world and sold  street vendors in Berlin. Images and a PDF of the Extrablatt are below.

PDF: https://maxhaiven.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/AWC19_Extrablatt.pdf

The post “Is Marx still a threat?” Extrablatt for Arts of the Working Class appeared first on Max Haiven.

Reappointed: Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination

I am honoured to be able to announce that I have been awarded a second term as a tier II Canada Research Chair (CRC) at Lakehead University from 2022-2026. My title is also changing to Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination.

The CRC program was established in 2000 by the Canadian federal government  to “attract and retain some of the world’s most accomplished and promising minds” by funding special professorships at public universities across Canada.

I’m very grateful to the people of Canada who fund the CRC program of which I am the beneficiary, to my colleagues at Lakehead University for nominating me for renewal, and to those who have given me so much help along the way.

The post Reappointed: Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination appeared first on Max Haiven.

Whither Harmony Square?: Conspiracy Games in Late Capitalism

The following piece by Conspiracy Games and Countergames reseachers Max Haiven, A. T. Kingsmith and Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou was printed in the Los Angeles Review of Books on Saturday, 13 November 2021 and is available here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/whither-harmony-square-conspiracy-games-in-late-capitalism

HAS OUR WORLD become a vast game we can’t win? The Matrix-esque premise that we are all trapped in some massive alternate reality game orchestrated by nefarious scientists or rogue supercomputers has grown in popularity in recent times. Championed by the likes of Oxford philosophy professors and pseudo-intellectual billionaires, the most sophisticated version of the theory extrapolates from the growing power of computers and evidence about how easy it can be to trick the human mind. Conspiratorial versions of the theory speculate that the weirdness of our age, notably the election of Donald Trump in 2016, suggest that reality is broken because of a flaw in its intelligent (and malevolent) design.

Beyond such fantasies, the notion that we are all stuck in some sort of game we are not intended to win feels commonplace, with worrying results. Around the world, young people are increasingly practicing forms of social withdrawal and pessimistic malaise based on their (generally well-founded) belief that the late capitalist world holds few opportunities other than hussle, debt, and worry.

We should contextualize the recent rise of conspiracy theories, like the notorious and extremely popular QAnon fantasy, within this pervasive mood of cynicism, suspicion, boredom, and defeat. Today, not only do games (of all types) represent a massive entertainment industry, and not only have they become pivotal to the lives of billions of people, but they also provide a profound cultural front for meaning-making that shapes politics. It has long been recognized that recruitment for the American armed forces, and the skills of new recruits, benefit from a kind of pre-training of mostly boys and young men. Alarming reports have recently revealed how the far-right are using online games to recruit the same demographic.

And so it should also come as no surprise that, in an age when conspiracy fantasies are identified by the White House as a major domestic and international threat, games and gaming should be proposed as an antidote.

In November 2020, the US Departments of State and Homeland Security, together with psychologists from the University of Cambridge, launched Harmony Square, a free-to-play online game. The game is premised on the idea that one can inoculate players against conspiratorial fantasies by exposing them to “small doses” of political misinformation and thus help them develop “antibodies” with which to fight off the real world’s “fake news.” The metaphor of disinformation and conspiracism as a virus was potent even before the pandemic alerted us to the importance of collective, society-wide action of preventing contagion. It has the benefit of making us realize that anyone can be a carrier and can help spread something dangerous to the collective good.

“The idea is to empower people to make their own decisions — better decisions — by giving them simple tools or heuristics, simple rules that can help them,” reports lead author Anastasia Kozyreva, a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. By slotting players into the role of chief disinformation officer, whose job it is to lie and manipulate public opinion to foment political rifts in Harmony Square, an otherwise peaceful town, “obsessed with democracy,” Kozyreva and her team attempt to educate players by devising a mischievously benign game with which to treat a larger and more sinister one: the rising tide of bizarre conspiracy fantasies.

Yet as well intentioned as this “social impact” game may be, we see many limits in Harmony Square. Implicitly grounded in assumptions that see conspiracism as an irrational emotive reaction that can be ameliorated by more and better facts, the game glosses over the broader social, cultural, and economic contexts of conspiracy movements. If we’re all trapped in a game we can’t win, it should come to us as no surprise that people flock together to break the rules of truth, of law, or of convention to find, for a moment, fellow-feeling and a sense of purpose.

While games can and should be an important part of helping us chart alternatives, they cannot simply seek to return us to the norms, conventions, and attitudes of “late capitalism” — which so many people are trying, desperately and tragically, to escape. Addressing individuals solely as rational, calculating agents who must be empowered to judiciously navigate the “marketplace of ideas” reinforces a neoliberal ethos that has, writ large, created a world of precarity, alienation, and fatalism within which conspiratorial communities feel like a reprieve. To truly challenge them we need to not only debunk and “inoculate” people but to address the deeper systemic problems at play. Can games help us do so?

A game called Q

While concerns had been mounting for years, the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol has catalyzed media, academic, and policy-maker interest in conspiracy theories, in particular the dangerous obsession of millions of Americans and people around the world with the gospel of “Q.” In what appears to some critics as a mass participatory game or a strange new millenarian cult, followers believe that a secret government operative, codenamed Q, is using some of the raunchiest channels of the dark web to feed cryptic messages to them about a diabolical plot: a secret cabal of senior politicians, billionaires, and celebrities are trafficking children as part of a satanic sexual abuse ring, and (perhaps even more absurd) Donald Trump is dedicated to a selfless war against them. Countless articles and exposés have interviewed tearful friends and relatives of individuals who have become completely infatuated with this story.

QAnon’s popularity is certainly disturbing: a recent poll indicates that, if categorized as a religion (as advocated by some who have proposed the term “conspirituality”) it would rank among the major faiths of the country, with over 30 million avowing its main tenets. And yet as observers warn, analyses that highlight the jaw-dropping irrationality and millenarian zeal of this strange crusade, largely orchestrated on the so-called dark web, do us a disservice. Commentators have noted the high average level of education of many devotees. As numerous theorists of conspiracy highlight, such fantasies usually stem not from gullibility and ignorance but from skepticism, curiosity, and distrust of the powerful, all important democratic virtues.

No mere passive recipients of absurd propaganda, supporters of Q are invited to follow the “breadcrumbs” regularly dropped by Q and apply their own sleuthing, critical thinking, and imagination to piece together their own never-ending narratives which, today, include numerous politicians, celebrities, and current events in a mindboggling kaleidoscope of often contradictory misdeeds. Theorist James P. Carse has called this kind of ever-expanding fabulation an “infinite game”: a puzzle in which nearly every item of news becomes yet another part of a huge, nefarious storyboard.

It’s not without reason that some game designers have observed with dismay that the QAnon phenomenon may be the largest ever mass participatory game, with potentially millions of players using the internet to egg one another on in dangerous fabulation. Concerned augmented reality game designer Reed Berkowitz introduces the concept of “guided apophenia” to describe how those behind the conspiracy take a devastatingly light touch, inviting “players” to “make their own connections” between random information. The QAnon game is especially seductive in a world that appears increasingly chaotic and draws on adherents’ intelligence and imagination while also providing a sense of a righteous moral community.

The infamy of the January insurrection, the collapse of the Trump administration, and credible revelations about the squalid origins of “Q” in a rats’ nest of internet trolls seem to have put a damper on the phenomenon. Yet QAnon stalwarts have sought to preserve the movement and court mainstream opinion by repackaging themselves around a more generic “save the children” slogan, which taps into long-standing reactionary fantasies that once materialized around the world in the “satanic panic” of the ’80s and ’90s and inherit the paranoia of Europe’s vicious antisemitic blood libels.

Perhaps for this reason QAnon remains profoundly popular, with polls indicating that even many who don’t subscribe to every tenet of faith are still very receptive to the thrust of the underlying fantasies: that satanic ritual sexual abuse is rampant, that it is supported and enjoyed by billionaires, political elites, and celebrities, and that there is a secret order of “good guys” out there that are trying to stop it but who are being stymied.

Just a game?

QAnon is not only the most sensational of conspiracy fantasies on the menu today, but also part of a broader conspiratorial turn in popular and political culture around the world. Along with kindred concerns like “fake news” and “disinformation,” conspiratorial thought is framed as a dangerous threat not only to infatuated individuals but to society at large. For many mainstream critics, these fantasies are threats to democracy and to the Enlightenment principles of rational, evidence-based judgment on which democracy is based.

But as media theorist Jack Bratich points out, we should distrust the idea that today’s phantasmagoria of conspiracy fantasies is a deviation from (or a bastardization of) an otherwise sane or rational social and political order. If anything, the last 30 years of neoliberal capitalism have delivered us a world of unceasing corporate propaganda (advertising and public relations) and bipartisan political bombast, compounded by a two-decade-long War on Terror, whose rhetoric of human rights was weaponized to sell a murderous form of imperialism. Since at least 2008, the triumphant discourse that a rising tide of economic growth would lift all boats, that corporate-friendly policy would allow wealth to “trickle down,” has begun to sound more like a cruel joke. Wages continue their slump for most working people, and work-related stress escalates for nearly everyone (even, notably, the wealthy).

As writer Marcus Gilroy-Ware notes, the narrative about a dangerous drift away from truth, facts, and reason is highly useful precisely because it distracts us from the deeper political and economic shifts that in so many ways gave rise to this drift. Dangerously, this narrative beguiles us into imagining that, if only we could better educate, sensitize, or “inoculate” people to disinformation and fake news, the withering tree of democracy would once again bloom. But in its focus on educating the individual dupe, it all too often ignores the broader structures — what education theorist Henry Giroux calls the “public pedagogy” that has previously educated all of us in a world of, to put it succinctly, bullshit.

The experience of being a compulsory gamer in a game which you can never really win helps explain the scattershot of ideology which animated the Capitol siege. What we are gesturing toward here is the way that the contemporary politics of conspiratorial and reactionary movements emerge and take strength from a gamified world where everyone on some level knows, whether they can admit it or not, that the game is rigged but we must play it anyway.

The QAnon movement’s conspiratorialism offers moments of what appears to be collective gaming. In spite of the hatred and paranoia, participation offers a “joyful” social game in which, for a moment, rigged rules seem to be overturned. True enough: the QAnon phenomenon is also animated by paranoia, anger, rage, hate, and visceral disgust. But there is also curiosity, joy, solidarity, and a sense of righteous purpose to the way participants weave together an elaborate tapestry from the threads of popular culture, current events, received ideology, and imaginative play. These instances can be fruitfully imagined as the dangerous cooperative games of alienated subjects clinging to the vague promise of answers that can help to explain why their lives have turned out the way they have.

Conspiratorialism, in this regard, also provides what all games promise: a sense, even briefly, of community, of shared creativity, of the feeling of being part of something larger and more important, of moving toward some sort of horizon of change. In a world characterized by disaffection, isolation, and futility, conspiratorialism appears to offer the antidote, but not because it claims to offer an accurate compass that might allow one to chart meaningful social change — indeed, arguably the most successful forms of conspiratorialism offer a vague, contradictory, and unreliable cognitive map. This clouded form of mapping is effective precisely because it mirrors the confusing experiences of the game itself.

What conspiratorialism ultimately affords, then, is a community of a dangerous play. That the players may refuse to see it as a game is just part of the game. So too is the game of saying “it’s just a game” when clearly it no longer is.

Prebunking and inoculation

The online game Harmony Square is a prominent attempt to offer an alternative gaming experience to the one permeating contemporary reactionary conspiratorialism. The concept is simple and the gameplay fun, reminiscent of the text-based adventure games and pixelated graphics of early video games. The player is cast as a chief disinformation officer seeking to use a variety of online techniques to polarize the town of Harmony Square.

On the face of it, the game’s attempt at consciousness-raising is a worthy goal, but in our view it is vexed by two key problems. First, the game approaches belief in misinformation as an individual pathology based on ignorance or carelessness, rather than a shared social conundrum symptomatic of the broader socioeconomic structures of our times. Second, in stripping the game’s scenario of recognizable politics and in positioning the player as a nefarious outside agitator, the game implicitly invites its target audience to identify with a kind of vague, contentless “centrism.” This may appeal to people who already tend to conform to mainstream political opinion, but not those who are perhaps most likely to embrace disinformation that targets what are framed as the “extremes.”

Under the hood, the game applies a concept from behavioral economics known as “nudging” — designing environments to steer people toward better choices — to seek to create a healthier digital space. In theory, the same nudging practices used to push targeted ads or outlandish conspiracies on social media could provide a counter to rampant misinformation.

The behavioral nudges informing the game design of Harmony Square are largely based on “inoculation theory,” the belief that exposure to a weaker dose of a particular stimulus — in this case, conspiratorial thinking and the techniques behind it — can help people become more resistant to disinformation in the future. By showcasing how you, the mal-intended actor, can work to incite political division using four manipulation techniques (trolling for outrage, abusing emotions to nurture fear and anger, deploying bots and fake social media accounts to increase credibility, and polarizing users to create and disseminate conspiracy theories) Harmony Square aims to “prebunk” such attempts before they happen.

In contrast to “debunking,” which responds to fake news and conspiratorialism after it has already spread, “prebunking” seeks to achieve a kind of digital “herd immunity.” Harmony Square’s creators posit that prebunking prevents people from being taken in by lies because they can recognize messages that attempt to manipulate the public.

According to the game’s designers, prebunking has proven effective in achieving some of these aims. In a randomized, controlled trial published in the HKS Misinformation Review, Harmony Square developers asked 681 participants to rate the reliability of a series of tangible and falsified news and social media posts. Those who played the game showed a drop in “perceived reliability of ‘real fake news’” by an average 16 percent compared to those in the control group — who played Tetris instead. They were also 11 percent less likely to share fake news than the control group. What’s more, the players’ own politics — whether they identified as left or right leaning — made no difference in such outcomes.

However, upon closer examination, cracks begin to appear in the veneer of these promising results. A 2021 paper circulated by MIT researchers found that debunking a claim after participants were exposed to fake news was more effective in combating misinformation because no amount of prebunking was able to get people to ignore false, attention-grabbing headlines. It was feedback after the exposure, revealing the hoax and demonstrating to the participant how their attention had been manipulated, that made the correct information stick.

This raises several questions: How effective can the purported “immunization” of players be? Given that inoculation only works on people who voluntarily play such a game, how can designers incentivize new players to challenge their beliefs by playing games? And importantly, can a reliance on prebunking — introducing questions about, for example, vaccine efficacy or climate change — in effect sow the very conspiratorial skepticism it is supposed to protect against?

Rational Facts versus Irrational Emotions

The issues with prebunking alluded to by such questions are glossed over by a simplistic moral universe that pervades all aspects of Harmony Square. Here, “bad” actors (trolls, foreign agents) seek to subvert democracy with narratives that run against the status quo, while “good” actors (politicians, journalists) simply want to get to the bottom of things.

Yet from Watergate to Pizzagate, the long shadow of conspiracy stretches across countless political actors and journalists actively proliferating misinformation for their own ends, or for ideological purposes. In “White Lies: A Racial History of the (Post)Truth,” Robert Mejia, Kay Beckermann, and Curtis Sullivan point out that the accusation of disinformation has historically been used to both discredit activists seeking to address racial injustice and to normalize white supremacist disinformation. Similarly, many of those labeled as trolls or manipulators are often, in reality, working to hold power to account but are easily framed as malevolent.

Philosopher David Coady analyzes the underlying problems with approaches to conspiracism that draw on this simplified dualism. Conspiring, he argues, is a normal part of politics and business and, in turn, conspiratorial suspicions are an important part of the way people try to make sense of how power is working in their society. The deployment of the slur that such sense-making is a “conspiracy theory” is, actually, a kind of rhetorical play by those with power and authority which, ironically, adds fuel to the fire by rendering public opinion more cynical.

The treatment of “emotion” in Harmony Square is a case in point. Among the characters in the game are trolls tasked with manipulating a local election by “putting out large volumes of emotionally charged content” that can trick voters into “acting on emotion.” Yet, by reducing emotions to the “rage bait” of extreme opinions, such rhetoric conceals the fact that emotional appeals are commonplace in politics. After all, Obama’s invocation of “hope” and “change” were just as emotionally charged as Trump’s twisted promise to “Make America Great Again.”

True enough: emotions can cloud sound judgment. But repeating the story that conspiracies proliferate because people don’t care about facts has, in many ways, become its own conspiracy fantasy, one that positions those who espouse it in a self-aggrandizing rational political center, beset on all sides by irrational extremes. But what if the centrist position is, as Tariq Ali suggests, ultimately just an emotionally driven preference for an irrational status quo that amounts to a defense and normalization of an extremist form of neoliberal capitalism?

But there is a broader issue here. The game implicitly rests on the assumption that conspiracists and fake news sympathizers are de facto (cognitively) “convinced” by — and thus emotionally invested in — disinformation narratives. It presumes that they are unable to distinguish fact from fiction. But what if those in the grips of conspiracism and fake news are not the dupes we like to imagine them to be? What if they enter into these communities based on their belief in the same values of skepticism, rationality, and democratic principles the game, itself, promotes?

For instance, since the game’s release, we have seen the arrival of a powerful worldwide anti-vaccination and anti-lockdown movement that organizes itself around its own fervent calls for skepticism toward the narratives of the powerful, distrust of both legacy and online media, and the encouragement of citizens to “do their own research” and “engage in debate.” They don’t believe they are emotionally beguiled dupes of disinformation (though in many cases it is probably true). What, then, can a game do?

A call for countergames

If such approaches, which presume that ill-educated, “emotional” thinking needs to be chased out by rigorous rationalism won’t work, what will? The question has proven vexatious to experts across the political spectrum.

Our sense is that, in an age when games are becoming part of the fabric of daily life, politics, and the capitalist economy, experiments like Harmony Square are vitally important. But they cannot be separated from their context, one where games and “gamification” are conventionally being used to entrench, rather than confront, established forms of power. As games are increasingly designed and used to sell products, “nudge” behaviors, cynically promote political agendas, and hook players for the benefit or profit of others, we should expect that alienation, cynicism, and fatalism will only increase. This is the fertile soil within which conspiracy fantasies grow, not because they prey on “weak” emotional minds but, rather, because they offer a sense of meaning, community, and urgency in a disenchanted world.In interviews with QAnon “players,” for instance, we often hear how participation in the game has given otherwise isolated people a new lease on life and a righteous community of people who actually want to do something about the terrible state of the world. In a capitalist world that is almost completely shaped by the inhuman and banal power of money, the notion that real power is in the hands of a secret cabal of evil warlocks — and even better that one can join a secret resistance against them — is intoxicating. Trapped in a meaningless capitalist game the vast majority of us cannot hope to win, why not choose to play a different game? Why not apply all of the virtues of skepticism, reason, distrust of the powerful, and civic responsibility to this game?

Games will no doubt play an important role in the politics, economics, and culture of the coming decades, for good and for ill. But in order for them to open onto the promise of liberation, peace, and abundance, they will need to do more than inoculate players against fantasy. They will need to offer players the resources for better, more hopeful fantasies of a different socioeconomic system, and give them the tools to create it.

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A sci-fi reading/film group for Amazon workers

I am very pleased to be working with Graeme Webb and Xenia Benivolski on a new project that is piloting a methodology for using science fiction fiction and film as an invitation for Amazon workers to come together to discuss how its transforming their lives and the future. The project draws on approaches to critical pedagogy, workers’ inquiry and the radical imaginations and has just started having its first meetings. In continues some of the techniques of “convoking” that Alex Khasnabish and I developed in The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity (2014).

A short overview of our approach has been published in the online magazine of the Sociological Review in a special section on new methods for understanding society. You can learn more about the pilot project here.

Original: https://thesociologicalreview.org/magazine/november-2021/methods-and-methodology/from-the-belly-of-the-beast/From the Belly of the BeastAmazon workers, sci-fi and the space between utopia and disasterGraeme Webb, Max Haiven and Xenia Benivolski

9th November 2021

“You guys paid for all this,” proclaimed a smirking Jeff Bezos, bedecked in a blue jumpsuit and cowboy hat, speaking at a news conference upon his successful return from the edge of space aboard New Shepard. The world’s second richest man and founder of Amazon took time to thank “every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer” for helping him ascend to the heavens thanks to his pet project: Blue Origin, a company that aims to make humanity (or at least its richest representatives) a star faring species (Hutzler, 2021).

Bezos has a fortune valued at over $200 billion, and workers, society and the environment have certainly paid a steep price for his trip to the stars. The world’s largest retailer and one of the world’s largest private employers, Amazon is ambitiously reshaping the future of capitalism, aggressively disrupting sectors from books, media and logistics, to healthcare and groceries, and from labour procurement to international – indeed, intergalactic – transit.

But in whose interests? And who pays the price? What do the people on whose exploitation Amazon depends have to say? Do they have alternate visions of the future, from within the belly of the beast?

Advanced capitalism is affecting our ability to see and imagine. Our world, and hence our future, has become something not to be created, but to be owned.

It is well known that Amazon’s massive profits and apparently frictionless operations depend on new and dystopian forms of labour exploitation. The Worker as Futurist project – which our research team is about to pilot with a small number of Amazon employees – seeks to establish and facilitate online workers’ reading groups and film clubs to discover what future dreaming might come from those who are caught up in the gears of Amazon’s colonisation of tomorrow.

Beyond simply being a research project aimed at gathering data, the Worker as Futurist initiative aims to catalyse collaborative consciousness-raising and the cultivation of the radical imagination, by creating a space where workers – from warehouse workers and delivery drivers to MTurk micro-taskers and Whole Foods clerks – can theorise and extrapolate on their own individual and collective experience. In particular, the project aims to provide a platform for current and former employees to come together to discuss the limits of existing cognitive horizons, and what radical hope and praxis might be found in science fiction texts.

The Amazon Corporation already contains all the elements of a contemporary sci-fi story: the merciless subordination of humanity to machines, frivolous space travel, an evil-villain-type ruler who seems out of touch with reality, and the growing pressures of an unforgiving world increasingly consumed by class struggles. In sci-fi films and literature, a narrative of rebellion and emancipation follows a tipping point. What narratives could the workers themselves propose? Where is the tipping point for them? How could we break out of this dystopia together?

Necessity demands that we find ways to come together to dream of and propose the most daring utopias. In the prophetic words of Darko Suvin, it is “only by mobilising Paradise or Utopia that Hell or Fascism can be defeated” (p. 185). Beset by a myriad of social, environmental, economic and political crises, it has proven more important than ever to invite alternative visions of the future that might catalyse a desire for radical change.

However, as author, scholar and activist bell hooks (1995) argues, advanced capitalism is affecting our ability to see and imagine. Our world, and hence our future, has become something not to be created, but to be owned. If our “destiny is to take root among stars” (Butler, 1993, p. 77), we must learn to see beyond our cognitive horizons.

While it is common to understand utopia as an end goal and the imagination as a personal possession, following critical theorists like Robin Kelley (2002) and Thomas Moylan (1986), we understand that they are both, first and foremost, a social process. Based on the idea that: “the radical imagination is something we do, and something that we do together,” (Khasnabish and Haiven, 2012, p. 411) Worker as Futurist seeks to convoke Amazon workers by engaging with sci-fi texts in the hope that new, alternative visions emerge.

The theoretical and political gambit of this project is that Amazon workers, by virtue of the fact that their bodies and minds have been made into a part of that corporation’s dystopian machinations, might have unique insights into the world Amazon is building. And, by the same token, from their cooperative theorisation and imaginative extrapolations, there might emerge the seeds of another, better vision of a more hopeful future.

From Amazon workers’ cooperative theorisation and imaginative extrapolations, there might emerge the seeds of a vision of a more hopeful future.

In the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, renowned sci-fi author Ursula K. Le Guin states: “The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words” (p. xviii). Sci-fi literature uses metaphorical situations that exercise the imagination and create parallel spaces for critical reflection (Suvin, 1982; Syms, 2013). The genre is best understood as a literature of cognitive estrangement – it makes the unfamiliar, familiar. It is this tension that the Worker as Futurist seeks to put to work as those that take part in the project are empowered to consider the world as it is and the world as it could be.

This form of cognitive estrangement, or making strange, has been especially successful when used among equity-seeking groups including LGBTQ2+ people, indigenous people and Black people (e.g. Harjo, 2019; and the Writers 4 Utopia Collective). This has particularly proven to be the case when individuals are not only invited to read, watch and discuss sci-fi media, but also encouraged to write or otherwise share their own visions and stories, as has been explored in the pathbreaking collection Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, edited by Walidah Imarisha and Adrienne Maree Brown (2015).

Could this genre be a platform for critique for those caught up in Amazon’s dark sci-fi world?

There is an ongoing need to develop an adequate critique of the totalising mechanisms of capital. However, we suggest that today – after nearly two years of living in a pandemic and as forest fires ravage our slowly dying world – people know full well the dire straits that we collectively face. While science fiction allows us to critique the world, it also allows us to productively imagine alternatives to the status quo (Webb, 2020). Drawing on the work of Ernst Bloch, an ideological critique is most productive when it is “not merely an unmasking (Entlarvung) but is also uncovering and discovery: revelations of unrealised dreams, lost possibilities, abortive hopes that can be resurrected, enlivened, and realised in our current situation. Bloch’s cultural criticism thus accentuates positive utopian-emancipatory possibilities, the testimony to hope for a better world” (Kellner, 1997, p. 84).

Given this understanding, in addition to undertaking facilitated discussions of sci-fi texts, the Worker as Futurist research team will design a series of weekly creative activities to help catalyse conversation and foster a radical and hopeful imagination. Such activities might include asking participants to write or narrate an alternative ending to a film, to compose a short story about themselves as a character in its world, or design a board game based on their reflections – collectively or individually. The theorist and artist Simon O’Sullivan suggests that the process of fictioning is both a “world-building – and world-breaking – technology” (2014, p. 9). By mobilising science fiction in this way, we look to move past the nihilism of the present moment and to labour together to challenge the status quo and to discover and imagine the world(s) of the future.

At this juncture, the purpose of the Worker as Futurist project’s research is not to gather data, but rather to experiment with a hybrid methodology and create opportunities for Amazon workers to do their own cooperative research and theorising. In placing an emphasis on methodology, we aim to better inform and refine research on the Worker as Futurist for future iterations. After all, in the space between utopia and disaster is the reality that “the alternative to a habitable planet is not only the present creeping death of the mind and values, but sweeping and totally non-metaphoric death” (Suvin, 1998, p. 185). In other words, necessity demands that we reimagine capitalism’s future. And what better place to start then here and with those workers who labour in Amazon’s frightful shadow?

More information about The Worker as Futurist project can be found on their website: Amazon Workers’ Science Fiction Film Club

References

Bendor, R. et al. (2015). Sustainability in an imaginary world. Interactions, 22(5), 54-57. https://doi.org/10.1145/2801039

Brophy, E. (2011). Language put to Work: Cognitive Capitalism, Call Center Labor, and Worker Inquiry. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 35(4), 410–416. https://doi.org/10.1177/0196859911417437

Butler, O E. (1993). Parable of the Sower. New York: Four Walls, Eight Windows.

Flanagan, M. (2009). Critical Play: Radical game design. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Harjo, L. (2019). Spiral to the Stars: Mvskoke Tools of Futurity. United States of America: University of Arizona Press.

hooks, b. (1995). An Aesthetic of Blackness: Strange and Oppositional. Lenox Avenue, 1(1), 65-72.

Hutzler, A. (2021, July 20). Jeff Bezos thanks Amazon workers, customers after space trip: “You guys paid for all this”. MSN Newsweek. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/jeff-bezos-thanks-amazon-workers-customers-after-space-trip-you-guys-paid-for-all-this/ar-AAMmZ0e

Imarisha, W., Brown, A., & Thomas, S. (2015). Octavia’s brood : Science fiction stories from social justice movements. Oakland, California ; Edinburgh, [Scotland]: AK Press : Institute for Anarchist Studies.

Kelley, R. (2002). Freedom Dreams: The Black radical imaginary. Boston, MA: Beacon.

Kellner, D. (1997). Ernst Bloch, Utopia, and Ideology Critique. In Daniel, J. & Moylan, T. [ed]. Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch. New York: Verso.

Khasnabish, A., & Haiven, M. (2012). Convoking the Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research, Dialogic Methodologies, and Scholarly Vocations. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, 12(5), 408–421. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708612453126

Le Guin, U. . (2010). The Left Hand of Darkness. United States of America: The Berkley Publishing Group.

Moylan, T. (1986). Demand the Impossible: Science fiction and the utopia imagination. New York: Methuen.

O’Neill, M., Giddens, S., Breatnach, P., Bagley, C., Bourne, D., & Judge, T. (2002). Renewed Methodologies for Social Research: Ethno-Mimesis as Performative Praxis. The Sociological Review, 50(1), 69–88. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-954X.00355

O’Sullivan, S. (2014). Art Practice as Fictioning (or, Myth-Science). In: Arts of Existence: Artistic Practices, Aesthetics and Techniques Seminar. Unit of Play, Goldsmiths, United Kingdom. [Conference or Workshop Item]

O’Sullivan, S. (2016). Myth-science and the fictioning of reality. Paragrana, 25(2), 80-93. https://doi.org/10.1515/para-2016-0030

Suvin, D. (1982). Narrative Logic, Ideological Domination, and the Range of Science Fiction: A Hypothesis with a Historical Test. Science-fiction Studies, 9(1), 1-25. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08179-0_5

Suvin, D. (1998). Utopianism from Orientation to Agency: What Are We Intellectuals Under Post-Fordism To Do? Utopian Studies, 9(2), 162-190.

Syms, M. (2013, December 17). The mundane Afrofuturist manifesto. Rhizome. https://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/dec/17/mundane-afrofuturist-manifesto/

Webb, G. (2020). Science Fiction(ing): The Imagination, Crisis, and Hope. [Doctoral thesis]. Summit.

About the authorsGraeme Webb

Graeme Webb is an instructor in the School of Engineering at the University of British Columbia. He recently completed his dissertation, Science Fiction(ing): The Imagination, Crisis, and Hope (2020), which focuses on discourses of technology and social change.

Max Haiven

Max Haiven is Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice at Lakehead University and author, most recently, of the book Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (2020).

Xenia Benivolski

Xenia Benivolski is an organiser, researcher and art writer based in Toronto. Her writing appears in e-flux journal, Scapegoat Journal and C magazine.

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Should Artists ‘Take the Money and Run’?

The following is a preliminary version of the text published on October 6, 2021 in ArtReview: https://artreview.com/should-artists-take-the-money-and-run-jens-haaning/

The mainstream news cycle is forever doomed to be graced by sensational stories of art and money. Earlier this year it was the rapid rise of NFTs and the speculative frenzy they encouraged, leading some overeager commentators to pronounce a revolution in the art market. In 2018, there was widespread delight when, at auction, a Banksy piece, Girl with Balloon (2006), self-destructed after selling for $1.4m (the shredded artwork is up for resale on 14 October, now valued at six times the original price). The previous year, there was the scandal around the sale of Salvator Mundi, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, for $450m to a shady network of collectors and institutions aligned with Saudi Arabia’s notorious crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman (he, of bone saw fame), who allegedly secreted it away on his yacht.

This past week, the headlines have focused on a gag by Danish conceptual artist Jens Haaning who, in return for a fee of roughly $84,000, supplied two empty frames to the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in the city of Aalborg, Denmark, and titled it Take the Money and Run (2021). The museum had originally commissioned Haaning to recreate two of his artworks for a show about the future of work: An Average Danish Annual Income (2010) and An Average Austrian Annual Income (2007). In both pieces, the artist arranges the titular sum in large denomination bills of local currency, displayed in a grid on a framed blank canvas. Two days before the exhibition was due to open, Haaning informed the museum that, in contravention of the contract, he was instead providing them with a new work in which the frames appeared empty. The banknotes were nowhere to be seen.

“The work is that I have taken their money,” Haaning informed Danish radio. “It’s not theft. It is breach of contract, and breach of contract is part of the work.” The museum seems to feel otherwise, and has suggested it may pursue legal action; it had paid him around $3,900, alongside fronting the money to be displayed. Perhaps reflecting on the imbalance of what Marx called dead labour (the money) over living labour (the artist), Haaning issued a stirring call to arms: “I encourage other people who have working conditions as miserable as mine to do the same. If they’re sitting in some shitty job and not getting paid, and are actually being asked to pay money to go to work, then grab what you can and beat it.”

I entirely agree with Haaning: workers should expropriate their expropriators, preferably en masse (this has been the intention of trade unions and worker-led socialist parties for the past century and a half). Haaning’s work arrives 40 years into a neoliberal revolution so transformative that, indeed, today many precarious workers (especially young or from migrant backgrounds) are either working for free (internships) or essentially paying to work in the treadmill of the ‘gig economy.’ This is especially so for labour in the arts, which, as Gregory Sholette argues, depends on a vast, unseen, unpaid “dark matter” within which only a few stars are allowed to shine (and get paid).

Haaning’s stunt begs deeper questions, and they go well beyond the cynical retort that perhaps he and the museum cooked up the scheme as a way to attract publicity or even pump up the value of the work (something the latter denies). It forces us to ask whether artists are indeed workers under capitalism and what the political consequences might be either way. This is a subject explored in a wave of recent books by Dave Beech, Marina Vishmidt and Leigh Claire La Berge, as well as in my own Art After Money, Money After Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (2018). All agree that, over the last 20 years, the theme of the artists’ labour and their relationship to public and private institutions and markets has become a key concern for many critical artists, generating a large body of work that helps us puzzle out the transformations of capitalism in our age. But can an artwork that reflects on the relationship between art and capitalism actually have any meaningful political impact in the world beyond the gallery?

I would argue that our perennial fascination with artworks about money stems from the way these two social constructs – art and money – are only sustained by the myth of their mutual opposition. In a disenchanted, alienating capitalist world, we project onto art the qualities of transcendental and spiritual truth and autonomy. And, conversely, our beliefs about money as a hard-and-fast, profane and logical thing in some way depend on art being held up as its foil. In short: art is art because it’s not money, and vice versa.

But as Pierre Bourdieu among others has shown, ‘art’ as we know it (as distinct from craft, sacred imagery, costume and ornament) only really comes into being under capitalism in the 17th and 18th centuries, as the moneyed classes begin to create a demand for unique objects to own as a store of not only economic capital but also social and cultural capital. And money has, in spite of the ideology of mainstream economics, never been a pure and true medium of commerce: it is, as anthropologist David Graeber’s work has demonstrated, a dense field of power relations, meaning-making and cultural exchange.

The last 40 years have seen artists seek to unpack these relations. The ‘conceptual turn’ in the 1970s and several other ‘turns’ afterwards have been motivated by attempts to allow art to escape money’s grasp by refusing to create objects that can be commodified. But at the same time, money, too, has become more conceptual, with new forms of immaterial financial assets (familiar from the 2008 meltdown) coming to rule and with neoliberalism infiltrating nearly all social institutions and forms of life in some way.

The fabricated tension between art and money still gives us that frisson every few months when a work like Haaning’s makes headlines. And yet more is at stake than the titillation of seeing art and money in scandalous proximity.

We love to see the art market – the back-slapping playground of the super-rich – get it comeuppance. That said, it’s unclear how Haaning’s ripping off of a small museum seeking to create a critical exhibition about the future of work strikes back against the world’s financial oligarchy. The implicit association of the evils of the capitalist system and its chronic exploitation of artists and other workers with a nebulous ‘artworld’ risks contributing to a by-now widespread ‘anti-elitist’ sentiment, that swings both left and right, but increasingly right. Here, a pompous and effete ‘cultural elite’ stands in for an economic ruling class, a target of misdirected if completely justified anger. With increasing regularity, rightwing politicians mobilize antipathy to ‘cultural elites’ precisely to attack those elements of arts institutions that have become (for better and for worse) platforms for anti-racism, anti-colonialism and experiments in new ways to organize politically.

As a work of institutional critique, Haaning’s Take the Money and Run feels of another time, more of a piece late-20th century manoeuvres of Chris Burden, the KLF or the notorious money trickster and artworld outsider J.S.G. Boggs. Today, most radical artists concerned with the intersection of art and money have opted for decidedly more aggressive and activist tactics. Consider the theatrical and direct actions of Liberate Tate in London or Decolonize This Place, Occupy Museums or StrikeMoMA in New York who, in different ways, have taken aim at the financial and corporate sponsors of major arts institutions – not only to make a critique of the relationship between art and money but also build solidarity and alliances among artists, workers and campaigners around the world.

I am not one to argue that all political or critical art must become activism, and I have a great admiration for the power of spectacle, which Haaning has mobilized with great flair and some daring. But I am curious how his intervention moves us any closer towards a society where the exploitation of labour ( of which he implies he is a victim) is somehow lessened. Like Michael Marcovici’s 2009 limited edition artist book How I used Your Credit Card to Pay for this Book Online (where he did just that and sent the victim/beneficiary a copy) and Paolo Cirio’s 2020 Derivatives (in which he appropriated art images from auction houses’s websites and resold them as original works of art), Haaning here is working with artistic theft as a means to critique capitalist property relations. Such artists attempt to do so from within the cryptic space of ‘art’ that stands both outside but also, at the same time, very much within the economic and legal order of capitalism.

There is another mode of artmaking that provides a counterpoint to Haaning’s one-liner. In recent years, some artists have turned towards a tendency most influentially expressed in the now-classic anti-capitalist text The Undercommons (2013), where Fred Moten and Stefano Harney recommend a relationship of criminality towards capitalist cultural institutions that are, themselves, the beneficiaries of stolen cultural labour. In such artworks, which are typically carried out without fanfare, artists leverage their positionality to appropriate and redirect resources towards social movements and aligned groups, often with the complicity of curators and the museums themselves who are eager to help misappropriate funds from the state or from private donors. While much of this work, for obvious reasons, is reluctant to announce itself publicly we might point to the work of Núria Güell (who among other things had used artist grants to create tax havens for anarchist movements), Constantina Zavitsanos (who has used galleries as a way to give away money as a kind of bottom-up social assistance) and collectives like The Hologram, which takes arts commissions to redistribute in a network of care and mutual aid.

 

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Test blog

Despite loud pronouncements by the ruling Liberal Party in Ottawa, and despite the earnest good intentions of many Canadians who desperately want to right the genocidal wrongs that the nation has done to Indigenous people, Indigenous people have no partner for reconciliation. By this I mean that the political bodies and organizations that offer to reconcile on behalf of the nation’s settlers are incapable of truly offering a just resolution and charting a new direction. Today, those settler institutions are primarily the nation-state of Canada and its devolved governments (provincial, municipal) and, secondarily, either public institutions (universities, libraries, school boards) or private firms. The problem is that the entire orientation and existence of all these institutions is founded in the structures of settler colonialism that make it impossible for any of them, even despite the goodwill and earnestness of their managers, to truly offer a form of reconciliation that is not, at the same time, an attempt to assimilate Indigenous people, institutions and

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