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The GameStop saga is not the revenge against finance we deserve

My essay “The GameStop Saga Is Not the Revenge Against Finance We Deserve” has been published by Truthout here: https://truthout.org/audio/the-gamestop-saga-is-not-the-revenge-against-finance-we-deserve/

“There’s a catharsis to actually making money off their pain a little bit,” Justin Speak, a 27-year-old evangelical pastor from California, told The New York Times in reference to his part in the great GameStop caper that saw small-time investors, coordinated on Reddit and other platforms, sabotage a series of Wall Street hedge funds by “revenge buying” the ailing video game retailer’s stock.

Speak himself made a cool $1,700 thanks to the way he and others used online stock-trading platforms like Robinhood to pump up demand for (and therefore the value of) the shares of GameStop, the movie theatre chain AMC, and other well-known brands that have a soft spot in consumers’ hearts but that have been hard-hit by the pandemic. While this “movement” began in online stock advice forums that purport to share tips about how to find “undervalued” companies whose shares can be bought cheap now to be sold dear later (“going long,” as it is called in the industry), it soon found a more political orientation.

By January 28, it had reached such a frenzy that Robinhood began to severely limit users’ powers to prevent what represented a kind of reverse run on the bank. In typical financial panics, spooked consumers seek to withdraw their investments for fear of collapse, triggering banks to slam their literal or metaphorical doors for fear of bankruptcy. In this case, Robinhood and other platforms were pressured by financial and government forces to take measures to discourage consumers from investing because it threatened to upset the financial order.

The enthusiasm of small investors swarming, seemingly out of nowhere, toward otherwise undesirable shares created havoc for several big Wall Street hedge funds. These funds’ strategy had been to “short” these underperformers — to bet against their future rise in value. Hedge funds are essentially pools of very rich people’s money that borrow even more money to make risky bets on the market based on careful research into market niches. They were among the major culprits behind the frenzy of predatory lending that led to the 2008 financial meltdown. Hedge funds bet on both sides of that crisis and many came out ahead. In that calamity’s wake, hedge funds used their connections and acumen to benefit from the bailouts. And during the pandemic, when millions have been thrown out of work and suffer economic precarity and hardship, hedge funds have been enjoying record profit.

So, when it turned out that a rag-tag swarm of investor-trolls with seemingly little coordination could bring one or two financial giants down by weaponizing what former Federal Reserve chair and neoliberal eminence Alan Greenspan once called “irrational exuberance,” it was, for many, sweet revenge. “Eat the rich,” Speak’s wife chimed in, echoing her husband with what has become the slogan of the GameStop “movement.”

But while such revenge can indeed be sweet, those who hunger for social and economic justice should think again. This incident will largely be remembered as a momentary, comical blip on the financial sector’s otherwise untroubled ascent to power and wealth. Moreover, this form of resistance is a reflection of, rather than an opposition to, the financialization of society and the imagination. And it resonates with a growing tendency toward revenge politics that all too often substitute symbolic victories for meaningful social change and the kinds of organization of the oppressed it would take to achieve it. The silver lining here is that, in this mass act of financial disobedience, tens of thousands of people have come to, for a moment, exercise their collective power. What comes next is the question.

Finance’s Revenge?

While the GameStop caper represents a victory in the battle against the hubris of Wall Street, it actually represents a step backward in the war against the power of capitalism’s financial sector. Over the past three decades, financialization has advanced in lockstep with the ideology of neoliberalism, which holds that the best and fairest way to organize society is around the needs of markets. Accordingly, public services have been cut, industries (including finance) have been deregulated, and taxes on the rich and on corporations have been slashed, with the ultimate effect being a world where the rich are getting richer and the poor even poorer as the fabled “trickle-down” principle fails to manifest its bounty for most people. The effects have been highly racialized, with graver impacts on Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) communities.

Over this same period, the financial sector has grown in wealth, power and influence, and used its position to further drive forward both financialization and neoliberalism. The fact that, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis that it caused, the sector escaped any real repercussions, punishment or loss, made it clear that finance, rather than governments, is ultimately in charge of policy. This fact has been rammed home by the fact that, around the world, in both liberal and conservative governments, the finance minister or their senior staff are almost always alumni of large investment banks — which, as we also know, are very generous benefactors of political candidates and parties the world over.

But this economic and political power is also matched by a social and cultural power. As most of us have become poorer and more precarious, and as shared government services (housing, health care, old age and disability insurance and the like) have been slashed, we have been sold the lie that we have been liberated from government paternalism and empowered to embrace our potential as a miniature financier. From education to housing to hobbies to personal relationships, we have been encouraged to reimagine nearly every aspect of our lives as assets to be leveraged in an unforgiving, competitive world. This is financialization: the way the ideas, ideologies and methods of finance begin to seep into every aspect of our lives.

On the one hand, the GameStop caper saw thousands of small-time individual market actors swarm together in a way that, for a brief moment, caught the dominant financial powers off-guard and off-balance. A few hedge funds lost a lot of money. But it relied on individuals that have already adopted the disposition and the tools of the miniature financier: precisely the endgame of financialization.

Indeed, the most intelligent and (for all I disagree with them) freedom-oriented of neoliberal philosophers predicted such things should happen: For them, the unseating of power corporations by upstarts is an essential part of the triumphant progress of markets. For these thinkers, the usurpation and “disruption” of “business as usual” by uninvited guests is evidence that free markets are working, not failing, because it allows for (disruptive) innovation and the ruthless creative destruction of market inefficiencies and abnormalities.

Political Revenge Fantasies

So, while the GameStop caper can feel like revenge, it is not really. In my recent book on the politics of revenge in our moment, I explore how small revenge fantasies can become transformative avenging imaginaries capable of transforming power at its root.

Revenge fantasies are, in our own individual lives, incredibly common: As ugly as they may be, we all have them, especially in a world where so many of us suffer systemic oppression, inequality and exploitation, or where these manifest on the level of everyday life in forms of interpersonal cruelty or violence. In fact, revenge fantasies can be quite important and healthy: They’re often based on and help us remember that what we suffer or have suffered is not our fault, and that we have value and are owed something for harms we have endured. Revenge fantasies can, of course, become dangerous infatuations. But they are often most dangerous not because they lead us to take revenge, but because we satisfy ourselves by endlessly nursing a grudge, neither forgiving and forgetting nor finding the courage to claim the debt. The fantasy becomes our home.

On a collective, political level, revenge fantasies can be opportunities for solidarity when we recognize that we share a common source of pain, that we are owed a collective debt. Sometimes we don’t know how to change the system that caused the injury or pain or oppression, and so the only grounds for our protest and passion is refusal and a common dream of getting back at those who have harmed us. But these sentiments can be easily manipulated, and often by precisely those people who caused the harm in the first place. On one level, U.S. society in the grips of financialization endlessly dreams of revenge in the form of television and film: “Game of Thrones,” the works of Quentin Tarantino, and other popular spectacles offer a kind of cathartic expression for the unnamed vengefulness that many of us feel as we ensure and are made to participate in a financialized society.

But it gets more dangerous still. Financialized capitalism, which transforms us each into a competitive risk-taker in a world of unmanageable risks, necessarily produces profound alienation, a sense of being cheated, a rage at being unable to live as we imagine we ought to be able to live, and these can find horrific political expressions. Throughout the history of the United States, the ruling classes, many of them enriched by finance, have stoked and harnessed the vengefulness of non-elite whites to foment racial violence, lynchings, extrajudicial murder and racial terrorism, of which Donald Trump and his armed legions of reactionaries are only the latest incarnation.

I am not arguing these are the woeful “left behinds” with “legitimate grievances” as some do; they are heinous expressions of the very worst. But their significant popularity draws its energy from the way they embody a revenge fantasy that flourishes in white supremacist financialized society where the sources of social pain and discord are willfully misidentified as migrants, feminists and queer folk, “unruly” Black people and intellectuals, rather than the system of capitalism.

The GameStop caper is a kind of vivified revenge fantasy, a dream of getting back at the powerful come to life, if only for a moment. Such revenge fantasies can be important for the struggle for social and economic justice, but are also very dangerous. On the one hand, the momentary realization of the fantasy can be mistaken for a substantial change in reality, but we would be foolish to presume that the momentary upsetting of financial business-as-usual will result in any real change. And in some ways, this kind of “activism” is what finance has always intended: the recoding of our dreams such that even rebellion takes a financialized form.

On the other hand, this revenge fantasy can easily be harnessed by reactionary forces, and in many ways already has reactionary characteristics. Famously, the Nazis made a central plank of their rise to power the promise to bring to heel the speculative financiers who were, according to their ideology, ruining things for the good, faithful, earnest and honest German workers and small business owners. Then as now, the line between antagonism towards finance and antisemitism is far from sharp, and critiques of parasitical financiers often slides easily into conspiracy theories about the Rothschilds or George Soros. No less dangerously, when “Main Street” is nostalgically presented as the hapless victim of Wall Street’s predation, we neatly forget that Main Street was also the site of many lynchings, race riots and other acts of racist cruelty.

For these reasons, we must be wary of the way challenging finance can serve to perpetuate its power or to elevate reactionary politics. This easily happens when an analysis of finance and financialization is detached from an equally critical approach to the way it works in tandem with capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and other systems of power, and when we mistakenly imagine that all that it will take to achieve social and economic justice is “improving access” to markets.

Avenging Imaginary

What would it mean for the GameStop caper to move from a revenge fantasy to an avenging imaginary?

Revenge fantasies are brewed by individuals and collectives in a moment of powerlessness, hurt and anger and, as a result, often bear the hallmarks of a kind of poetic justice: The same cruelty that was once used against you becomes the form of retribution against your tormentor. After years of being the abject loser, one is now the winner and one exacts on the enemy the same injustice. How does it feel, Wall Street, to have your own tools used against you; to be, for a moment, the victim of the same unfair, manipulative and destructive instruments that you arrogantly wielded for so long? Revenge is sweet.

But what distinguishes an avenging imaginary is an abolitionist and feminist worldview: it does not seek to claim the power of the oppressor for its own, but to annihilate that power so that it can no longer harm anyone. An avenging imaginary is a way of coming together around a dream where revenge means the destruction and replacement of the systems that cause pain, oppression and injustice in the first place.

In the case of the GameStop caper, an avenging imaginary would dream not simply of tweaking the nose of Wall Street, but of abolishing the financial sector as we know it. Maybe that would look like nationalizing the banking sector so it could be used to support investment in a Green New Deal. Maybe that would mean a minimum and a maximum income to redistribute the financial sector’s misbegotten wealth. Maybe it would mean reappropriating that wealth to fund excellent and universal health and social care. Maybe it would mean abolishing household and student debt. Maybe it would mean the much broader goal of abolishing the system of capitalist exploitation as a whole.

An avenging imaginary is a collective leap of the radical imagination that opens new horizons of how we might live and work together beyond the neoliberal, financialized, capitalist model where we each compete with one another until the Earth is destroyed.

The glimmer of possibility in this GameStop caper is that, in a flash, some new “we” came to recognize that “we” indeed have power when we act together. The same neoliberal financialized capitalist system that oppresses, exploits and seduces us has bestowed us with powerful digital tools to coordinate and communicate. How could we use these to rebel, not only as individual investors or for the fun of it, but in the name of collective liberation?

The GameStop caper offered a potentially important moment of shared vindictive laughter as the powerful, for a moment, appeared weak. But if, as has been often said, the best revenge is the laughter of our children, how will we make the most of this moment to create a post-capitalist world where they can enjoy the wealth of human potential and ecological justice?

The post The GameStop saga is not the revenge against finance we deserve appeared first on Max Haiven.

The power, potential and peril of the GameStop affair

ROAR Magazine has published my essay “The power, potential and peril of the GameStop affair”  –> https://roarmag.org/essays/gamestop-affair-financialized-resistance/

 

There is an apocryphal story that, in the ancient mediterranean, slaves being transported to market in the hold of a ship realized that, though otherwise powerless, if they could coordinate their collective movement, hurling themselves from side to side of their crowded cabin their shared momentum would rock the ship to the point of overturning it. Imagine the debate: the most short-sighted might have said “now we, not our captors, are in charge of our fate!” Others urged the immediate use of this suicidal tactic: better to die free, together, and have a last revenge. Still others, counselled negotiations with the ship’s crew with this desperate tactic as a bargaining chip. Some, perhaps all, must have silently thought to themselves: If I betray my fellow slaves to the captain, maybe I will be rewarded.

In our day, the ship is part of the armada of world-destroying digitalized capitalism, currently presided over by the financial sector. The GameStop revolt represents our discovery of a new expression of the power of collective movement, hidden in plain sight. Unfortunately, unlike the movement of the slaves in the story, and contrary to the starry-eyed hype of many of its self-styled prophets, this momentary rebellion has no real potential in itself to sink Wall Street. The capsizing of one or even several ships in a slaving fleet would not overturn the system that put those boats and others to sea. Neither will the decapitation of a few over-leveraged hedge funds lead to the collapse of the financial sector. Yet the questions asked below deck then are the same: having discovered our power, how can we make the most of it?

What happened?

Let’s recap: last week headlines began to run announcing that amateur investors using stock-trading apps that allow nearly anyone to play the stock markets were eagerly buying discounted shares in brand-name companies hard-hit by the pandemic. The bricks-and-mortar video game chain store GameStop was the most popular, but they also bought shares in the ailing cinema giant AMC, the outmaneuvered smartphone maker Blackberry and others. The rush of newbie investors to familiar stocks is nothing new — usually it is orchestrated by Wall Street wolves to make a quick buck.

But last week it turned out that the irrational enthusiasm of the rubes was unintentionally sabotaging the strategy of some major hedge funds who were already “shorting” these companies: essentially betting against their future success. Hedge funds are essentially investment clubs for rich people and corporations that borrow a lot of money to hire allegedly smart people to make risky bets against the market. In this case, they were outsmarted  by the mob and forced to shell out millions to cover their positions (which also drove up the price of the shares in question).

Hearing the “smart money” hedge fund managers cry foul, an interet full of “dumb money” amateurs, egged on by forums on Reddit, Telegram and elsewhere, began to swarm towards their favoured stocks as a kind of lucrative revenge. This created a cascade of market maneuvers and, as the dust settled, billions of dollars had been wiped off the balance books of significant Wall Street firms entangled with the hedge funds (though others appear to have made huge gains) and many amateurs made a tidy return on their usually quite small investments.

Many did it for money, others for the delightful joke of it all, still others for revenge. Today’s retail investors who are putting the squeeze to the hedge funds are very far from slaves in the story above and the stakes are relatively low. They are, for all intents and purposes, seeking to use the masters’ tools to dismantle the masters’ house. It is not simply that they are literally using “fin tech” (financial technology) apps like Robinhood that were bankrolled and ultimately benefit hedge funds and other investors. For decades, neoliberal thought-leaders, government agencies and NGOS have been strenuously encouraging us “little guys” to dabble in stock trading, based on an ideology which instructs that capitalist markets are the most perfect of humanity’s inventions and, if only we all had access, they would manage society better, fairer, with greater freedom and prosperity, than any other system.

Revenge against Wall Street, or Wall Street’s Revenge?

Though it has caused some hedge funds to suffer heavy losses and given Wall Street a black eye, the GameStop affair in many ways signals the victory of financialization: it has been so successful at recasting social reality as a series of “investments,” and recasting each of us as an isolated, competitive risk-taker, that even our resistance takes financial form. In fact, far from a neoliberal’s nightmare, this incident in some way fulfills their prediction that markets always bend towards openness, disruption, the ascent of the little-guy and the creative destruction of old forms.

And yet for those of us who, for a decade since the Great Financial Crisis (or more), have dreamed of revenge against Wall Street, this moment is sweet. Especially so as we witness the blatant and naked (even at times absurd) hypocrisy of those who, even weeks ago, championed neoliberal “market participation” as the magical solution to the problems neoliberalism itself had created (rising inequality, racist exclusion, international conflict, etc.) and are now caught trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

But the history of capitalism (or its financial sectors) shows that simply because one of its many contradictions has been revealed for all to see does not mean that anything necessarily changes. The problem with pointing out the threadbare velvet glove that covers the iron fist is that, of course, the fist remains. Ultimately, the GameStop episode will be remembered as merely a momentary blip on markets, a strange and funny abnormality when a swarm of ill-informed market newbies, meant to be a light lunch for professional and institutional investors, crashed headlong into some overleveraged hedge funds, causing a momentary confusion.

It is like a cat walking onto a street and causing a traffic jam as cars swerve to avoid it: for all the cat might arrogantly think he caused the world to turn upside down, the chaos and damage was due to reckless speeds of the rush-hour traffic it momentarily interrupted.

Remembering our collective powers

For all of that, there is that vengeful frisson, the chill up the spine: we can do this, we can make them pay, we are more powerful than they, or we, ever imagined. As anyone who has ever watched riot cops run in retreat, or has watched a regime topple from the streets knows, that feeling is as profound as it is haunting. For a moment one holds in one’s hand a long-stolen inheritance: the power to be free together. Beyond the particular ideology or tactics that led to the moment of revolt it is that irreducible kernel of collective potential from which we are all made — the radical imagination — that sparks in the darkness. Afterwards, you can never see the world in the same old light.

Any system of power cannot tolerate the persistence of that flame because it is a constant reminder that the ruling order we have made is arbitrary, temporary and can be changed. Systems of domination not only work to stuff it out through direct violence but also through subversion, cooptation and divide-and-conquer tactics. In the moments following its flare, it is crucial that we mobilize the radical imagination to fan the flames of transformation.

In the case of the GameStop affair, there is indeed profound potential: a collective power to disrupt and destabilize capitalism has emerged from within that system’s own contradictions. Its insistence that we all become miniature capitalists and play the market casino has opened a small and limited space for tactics of refusal. But of what broader strategy will those tactics be a part? And how will that strategy be oriented by an imagination that reframes this world and allows us to envision worlds yet to come?

Think tanks of the insurgent common

We desperately need a proliferation of and cooperation between think tanks of the insurgent commons that could analyze these contradictions and potentials and discover ways to leverage them in solidarity with other anti-capitalist movements. These might look like gatherings of activists, artists, scholars and hackers that would assemble to create opportunities for creative rebellion and reinvention. The GameStop affair was a happy accident and was animated by no unified strategic vision. What would it mean to leverage the power it revealed towards other ends?

There are precedents. Anti-debt activists in the US and UK have found ways to use the same mechanisms subprime debt buyers use and have crowdfunded to buy people out of debt. In the US, the Debt Collective is trying to mobilize millions of financial subjects into a movement of collective refusal and organizing debt-repayment strikes and other forms of solidarity to leverage policy change and build mutual aid and solidarity.

At this point there are more questions than answers. How could the same techniques used to put the squeeze on hedge funds be used to accelerate the defunding and abolition of police and prisons? How might it allow us to take revenge on corporations building mines and pipelines on sacred lands, or against climate criminals? What if tens of thousands of mortgage holders refused to pay en masse until their conditions were met? What if everyone withdrew their money from a bank on a specific day? What if we researched how the hedge funds responsible for environmental destruction were placing their bets and sabotaged them not at random (as essentially happened with GameStop) but intentionally?

I am decidedly not calling for more shareholder activism, boycotts or “voting with one’s wallet.” Rather, I am calling for thinking that will sharpen, aim and popularize these tactics as part of larger movements, not just juvenile gestures. I want revenge too, but revenge in the service of a greater abolitionist avenging where not only this or that fund crashes but cracks open in the system such that real change is possible.

Key to this will be forming new narratives of the insurgent “we.” Today, the “we” that mobilized around Gamestop was an ideologically confused online swarm, some seeking to make money, others in it for the lulz, others seeking vengeance. All of them had, to some extent, been drawn in by technologies and platforms that have, at their base, the financialized idea that, to paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, “there is no such thing as society,” simply competitive individuals or households managing risk and investment in an unforgiving world. Thus, the overriding narrative in the wake of the GameStop affair has been a celebration of the “little guys” finally being able to break-in to the casino and play with the high-rollers. But the casino, and its necessary corruption and violence, is unchanged.

It is vital to recognize that capitalism survives and adapts by constantly cycling through new capitalists drawn from the ranks of the oppressed. That some newcomers got rich from an unexpected loophole is not evidence capitalism is failing but that it is working as planned. Capitalism is singularly and terrifyingly adept at using its own contradictions and crises to drive its mutation because it encourages each and every person to orient their ingenuity, creativity and even, to a certain extent, their sense of justice, fairness and charity to the task of finding new ways to survive and compete within the system.

What other “we” is hiding in plain sight? How else might we tell the story of our strange collectives that are assembling and evaporating online? Most importantly, how can we link the aspirations and dreams of these collectives to those of other people in struggle around the world? Much hinges on if we can imagine how the drives that animate the GameStop protagonists connect to the struggles of the Zapatistas, the revolution in Rojava, to the Movement for Black Lives, to struggles for decolonization and popular autonomy and to humanity’s battle against capitalism’s climate and ecological terrorism. If we fail to develop such narratives and make them irresistible, we will lose this potential to the far right, who have never been shy of criticizing the “parasitism” of finance and stroking the egos of the mob, and to the revanchist centrists who will connive to return us to the deadly normal.

New forms of cooperation

Finally, what the GameStop affair reveals is that ubiquitous, networked digital technologies give us profound new methods for cooperating. Even though, today, these potentials are everywhere foreclosed by corporate paywalls, proprietary code, surveillance capitalism and the get-rich-quick slogans of false prophets, they nonetheless hold the promise to allow us to coordinate the cooperation of seven billion people in ways that go beyond the chaos of global capitalist markets and the failed model of the nation state. If thousands, perhaps millions of people can move like a swarm to take swift and decisive cooperative action using these tools, what else are we capable of?

Capitalism is a system of coerced human cooperation (including cooperation with non-humans like animals, plants and minerals). It uses money and other forms of violence as a lure and a whip to harness our labor and time, to place us in a now increasingly global network of relations that produce the goods and services we need, or have learned to need. It is unequal, exploitative, unsustainable and brutal, but underneath that it is a self-replicating pattern of cooperation. To defend and extend its inequalities and exploitation it has generated new digital tools of communication and coordination. But capitalism’s one and only goal in organizing this cooperative potential is its own limitless reproduction expansion.

Today, there are a proliferation of profoundly interesting experiments in how to use new digital tools to not only organize our movements but to begin to coordinate our cooperative production and distribution of goods and services, of creative and of care, in ways that do not rely on markets or an overarching coercive state apparatus. The power exists to reassemble social cooperation fairly, sustainably and democratically beyond capitalism.

Already it is happening in a million places: mutual aid networks are reinventing care and material provisioning in the austerity pandemic; queer and trans communities are reinventing the meaning of family and solidarity; Indigenous militants are reclaiming modes of kinship not only between people but also with non-humans as well; the movement of Black liberation is dreaming of and creating new futures beyond the white-supremacist worldview; workers of the digital economy are organizing in new ways that exceed and refuse any nostalgia for the capitalism of the past; and everywhere we are using the new digital tools, in spite of their corporate enclosures, to play together, to create together, to love and to learn together in profound new ways.

The GameStop frenzy does not, in and of itself, have the power to disrupt or challenge the financial order or the system of capitalism of which that order is a part. But it has opened millions of eyes to the fragilities of that order and the possibilities for resistance and reinvention within our grasp.

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Our Wrecks of the Medusa: A Dialogue

Phanuel Antwi and I prepared this dialogue for publication by Ramallah’s AM Qattan Foundation in their ebook Isolation, Separation and Quarantine: More than a Pandemic, published in December 2020 in Arabic and English (PDF here).

The following dialogue, staged in Vancouver in early October of 2020, takes as its point of departure Théodore Géricault’s monumental painting The Raft of the Medusa, which today hangs in the Louvre. First exhibited in 1819 the painting was the result of many months of the artist’s fanatical work, during which time he painstakingly researched and interviewed survivors of a notorious shipwreck of 1816, just following the Napoleonic Wars. In that historical event, the restored Bourbon monarchy sent a convoy of ships to Senegal in the hopes of reestablishing France’s role in the transatlantic slave trade. Due to the incompetence of the captain (an aristocratic appointee) the flagship was stranded off the coast of the Sahara and, while the captain and other elites made off with the longboat and supplies, 150 working-class seamen and soldiers (a multi-ethnic mix) were set adrift on a hastily constructed raft. By the time they were rescued 13 days later only 15 remained alive, having been forced to throw the sick and wounded overboard, having survived mutiny and fighting, and having resorted to cannibalism. Like many critics in the past, in this conversation Antwi and Haiven re-read The Raft of the Medusa as an allegory for our own troubled times, when systems of oppression and exploitation seek to turn us against ourselves and to reduce humanity to its very worst.  And yet we resist.

Masculinities

Phanuel: In The Raft of the Medusa, we see an image of men, all of them workers, labourers of different sorts, on top of each other, touching and in touch with one another. In this pandemic moment, one being identified and being lived as a crisis, we are also experiencing a crisis in gender, specifically a crisis in masculinity. One place this crisis cannot be avoided is on the home front. A crisis is emerging there because men are losing their jobs; men who would otherwise dispense bottled-up energies through their work now find themselves stuck at home, often without a release valve. Many of them are now having to also do service work on the homefront. They are not used to doing reproductive labour. That’s where my brain is, right now, looking at Géricault’s Raft, thinking about masculinity and its economies within this moment of lockdown entanglement.

Max: On that note I was thinking about this painting and the stories of the raft on which it was based, stories in which the refugees began to drink salt water, bake in the sun and become delusional, leading to lethal fights, to cannibalism. I’m thinking about the ways that, in patriarchies, idled masculinity becomes even more dangerous. Patriarchal worlds keep men busy in some way and, when that busywork ends, dangerous things happen. I don’t think this is  based on some “natural” kind of masculinity but on the way that we have socially constructed masculinity. Like the delusions of the idled sailors of the raft, today idled hegemonic masculinities often turn to delusions: conspiracy theories, narcissistic paranoias. These are means, I think, by which men seek to re-empower themselves as somehow “masters of reality.” But they are proving extremely dangerous. This is amplified and weaponized in online spaces that harness alienation and a sense of futility for reactionary causes.

Phanuel: There is a disturbance, a circuit break in the intimacy assembly-line of the homefront, that’s producing a crisis — if one wants to call the surfacing of an already there disturbance a crisis. I think there is (especially if we don’t overlook the surfacing of inequity is a non happening) and it’s happening on multiple fronts — not just in the (heteronomative) household, that market-mediated sphere of caring for children.

Generational shift

Max: I think in a way, this crisis of masculinity comes amidst a generational shift. We’re seeing the youngest generation to enter adulthood articulate an increasing scepticism towards the need to obey the expected norms of gender expression and sexuality. On Turtle Island (North America) we are seeing a lot more young people identify with fluid forms of gender, identify as trans, non-binary. And I think around the world there is like a huge movement of liberation from the structures of gender, and this emerges from and contributes to the broader crisis of masculinity, which can no longer successfully reproduce itself; It can’t get as many adherents because it is failing to make life precious and livable. Yet this crisis also generates its own reaction and backlash, its dangerous nostalgia for the way we imagine things once were (allegedly.

I want to go back to the painting and look at the figure of the old man, the only figure in the image who is facing backwards, away from the distant ship that might rescue the refugees. Instead, he is looking backwards, towards the mysterious source of light in the image, with a far-away, melancholic look in his eyes…

Phanuel: The older gentleman that you call attention to: One way of reading this image is to say, yes, he’s looking backwards, and from his clothing you might place him in a different civilization. But he is also holding on to and supporting the figure of a young man who may be dead or dying. I think there’s something here about the old seeing the young dying, or burying the young. I am trying to think about how communication and miscommunication (intimacy) is a way of learning that’s happening between the generations. The unexhausted possibilities of learning happening today is inverse to what we assume because now the older generation is learning from the younger generation.

We can also note this in the current global pandemic, in the West, where we tend to offload onto marginalized Black and Brown people the labour of reproduction and care. We send the elderly, older adults into long-term care facilities. Because these facilities are often understaffed and crowded many are now vulnerable to spreading infections to the point that some people are identifying them as “death pits.” Despite this, I am comforted to hear one of my students, early in the pandemic, request an extension for an assignment, because he is “currently in line at Costco [a major North American discount grocery store] with a community group getting supplies for folks who can’t go themselves.” These younger people, many on the frontline, are doing work, supporting people more susceptible to infections or at risk of dying; I find it very promising, this collective care work, this intergenerational activism of showing solidarity by coming together, rather than staying apart.

Max: I think, on some level, the globally dominant model of masculinity today is that of Homo Economicus, the model of the impenetrable, self-contained, competitive, independent actor. And I think about the work of Sylvia Wynter who helps us think about how this dominant paradigm of man emerged from European imperialism and global capitalism, lioniing the allegedly this naturally competitive supreme animal. But the myth of homo oeconomics’s self-sufficiency and independence was a charade. His possibility was always based on the invisibilized reproductive labour of others, based on all of those on unsung and  unseen people who did the labour around them. Homo oeconomicus rode on the shoulders of so many others, yet denied it.

I think, then, about the figure on the shoulders of the others in this painting, lifted up by his fellow refugees to wave to the passing ship that might rescue them. They are one another’s only hope: it is not simply a brutal struggle for scarce resources that ends in cannibalism. This pyramid of collaborating figures gives us a view of what masculinity and humanity could be like if we recognised our shared vulnerability to one another and our shared vulnerability to not only the contagion of disease, but also the contagion of fortune, the contagion of identity, subjectivity, interreliance.

Phanuel:  If we are thinking about talking about the hegemonic, competitive nature of masculinity, as it operates within the system of patriarchy, I can’t help but think about queer masculinity in this particular moment. I note that, today, Trump and others are seeking to identify Covid-19 as “the Chinese virus.” Previously, the HIV virus, when it was spoken about at all, was understood as “the gay virus.” How do we think about the refraction of the misnaming of these two viral crises through a patriarchal lens and, particularly, through a global north patriarchal lens?

Temporalities

Max:  I think what’s becoming clear about the present moment is that capitalism functions in part by keeping us all so busy we can’t think or feel. And in this pandemic moment we’ve been faced with a break in the capitalist temporality.  My hope, earlier on in the pandemic was that this would lead to space and time for reconsideration.  But, oddly, I think that there has been a level of exhaustion and alienation such that many people have not had the opportunity to think about the kind of life they would actually like to live. Many people desire a return to a normal they hitherto hated, simply to escape the kind of  boredom or monotony of the pandemic. It reminds me of a lesson I learned when studying the radical imagination: we don’t think individually, we think collectively. We think collaboratively and we think through doing things together. And in this moment when we are doing less, or when our “doing” is reduced to routine, and when we are forced into isolation, the imagination atrophies. It is an unprecedented moment, but something militates against our ability to seize this strange pause in the status-quo and mobilize the radical imagination.

Phanuel: I’m thinking about Black Lives Matter movement and the collapse of time and place for those living in the wake of a twin pandemic: that of the virus that you’ve been talking about and also that of the police brutality towards Black lives. While these movements were being spurred on by the death of Black folks in the US, there seems to be a global pick-up, a global response, of some sort. In terms of temporality, there seems to be both the exhaustion that you speak of and an equal exhaustion towards the state repression or state racial violence. People are  tired of that being normal and are refusing to be conscripted into the time of the state. The devaluation of the lives of the elderly that I spoke about (ageism), and the devaluation of Black lives (anti-Black racism) that I am talking about, now, make a lie out of these phrases: “physical distancing,” “flattening the curve,” and “self-quarantine”: Black people are on the streets protesting because we know being six feet apart doesn’t immune us from going six feet under.

In a place like Vancouver, where I live and work and love, the BLM movement here is aware its work on Coast Salish territories is being done on the traditional, ancestral and unceded land of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations and so commits itself to systemic forms of racial violence, articulates issues affecting Indigenous people on these lands, not simply because in this particular location the “ratio” of state and racial violence is destructive to many forms of Indigenous life. It is not only that. What I am trying to get at is this: while Black activists and leaders advocate for all life forms Black, our advocacy, primarily imagined and led by Black women, queer and trans folks, is not a single-issue. And yet, as much as it is not a single issue platform, it is also not a postracial project; for those who like to see this movement as multiracial, it will do us good to see Blackness as multiraciality and as a site of multiraciality, one that emerges from and with a Black queer feminist trans differently abled poor radical tradition perspective.

Rebellions against racialization

Max: In the same way that I think we were speaking a moment ago about a kind of rebellion against gender I think this is also rebellion against racialization, led ideologically and often practically by those Black people upon whose backs the pyramids of racialial value were built. I think that in the same way that I feel like those most marginalized and most targeted by systems of gender terrorism–which is to say non-binary people, trans people, people who have been denied a space within the gendered system–are in some ways, opening a door for us to all be liberated from the gender system. So too, in a strange way, in this moment, I think the fact that globally, Blackness has been positioned at the bottom of the pyramidization of race is one important reason why that movement has, though it began in the United States, has resonated around the world, even among people and in places where Black people are not numerically predominant.

Phanuel: I read this moment in the United States alongside other global Black movements, particularly the way the call from students to decolonize education across South Africa in the #RhodesMustFall and the #FeesMustFall movements in 2015 spurred on students across the globe to refuse the epistemic architecture of colonial education. That this radical student movement focuses on decolonizing the university by confronting questions relating to institutional racism, redesigning the Eurocentric university curriculum, and increasing Black peoples access to education reminds me of the relationship between colonization and racialization. Too often in North America, there is a tendency to separate racialization from colonization and colonization from racialization. The logic to this false separation finds justification through the language of historiography, one where critics committed to this separation map a historical trajectory, identifying the 19th century as the moment of racialization’s arrival; they argue colonialism predates racialization. And yet, as we learn from the #RhodesMustFall movement, Black alienation and disempowerment is tied to the colonial and civilizing project, hence questions of racialization must engage questions of colonization. By no means am I collapsing the differences between each project; however, as projects of coercion and domination, they are part and parcel in organising our lives. And I find this difference quite interesting to highlight.

Max: How so?

Phanuel: Jodie Byrd’s groundbreaking work comes to mind, which offers the necessary critique of disciplines like ethnic studies, postcolonial studies and policies like multiculturalism and liberalism that participate in the assimilation, inclusion project of settler colonialism. She does so by foregrounding colonization, its ongoing projects, and the ongoing and exploitive treatments of Indigenous nations and people within the US imperial culture. This, as in through the figure of the American “Indian,” she works to underline how the US maintains its power structures. She particularly shows how, in the US, “Indianness” is rendered as the racial other, and, as a result, figured as the transit; through this creation or figuration, the nation can make up stories about the American “Indian” that enact dispossession while at the same time professing/promising equality. She connects the violences and genocides of colonization, the land stolen from Indigenous people, so we can hear the historical traumas that the racializing project of multiculturalism redirects our attention away from.  To do this, she distinguishes racialization from colonialism.

I think this formulation allowed her to do a specific and necessary project of insisting not only on how foundational Indigeneity is to the formation of the US but also on the intellectual genealogies that articulate this formation; how the foundational violence of remaking Indigneous lands into domestic spaces (for colonial interests) continue to require the US imagination to continue to situate Indianness to the past. This necessary project constrained folks from thinking about racialization in relation to indigeneity, or in relation to colonialism as well as realizing how colonization gives force and justification to racialization. Rather, colonialism is the frame for which we think about indigeneity and racialization is the frame for thinking about non-Indigeous folks. And I think we are in a moment where that logic, while it was necessary for bringing attention to the on-going colonialism on Indigenous land, it does not help us do the work of cohabitating on these land and figuring out how to be accountable for each other and to bear witnesses to what’s happening to each other. And so these movements are actually insistent that we reimagine what it means to be here now with legacies of conquest, diasporas, displacement, dispossession, invasion, racialized alienation and exploitation, and be accountable for the lands that we live on. So, yes, we are in a different moment. And, as I said, there is something about living within the twin pandemics, right now, in North America anyways, in a year of bearing witness to two viruses attacking Black folks and many of us refusing not to attend to this anti-Black racial violence.

Max:  It reminds me of a compelling argument made a few years ago by Justin Leroy. He begins his essay by indicating the quite fractious debates between Black studies and Indigenous studies in the West around to what extent we should see anti-Black racism or Settler colonialism as a “primary mover” of this system of global oppression. He wants to put that question aside: it’s a Gordian Knot that can’t be cut. Instead, he looks at how both Indigenous people and Black movements have understood themselves through solidarity with the Palestinian cause. The Palestinian figure–at least for those outside of Palestine seeking solidarity with Palestinians– is both  a colonized Indigenous figure and a racialized figure. They are both the colonized other and the racialized other within the global systems of racial capitalism of which the project of Israel is an important and demonstrative part.

I take from this the importance of dwelling in such difficult contradictions, as for instance between racial and colonial projects, and looking elsewhere for the way they are reconciled not in theory but in practice.

Within, against and beyond premature death

Phanuel: The disciplinary borders within academic knowledge productions risk becoming the borders of our imaginations. I, at times, worry about how intellectual capitalism in academic work, with its appetite for newness, quickly translates academic thinking into actionable policies, which then impact how we think, organize, and live our lives. So, while separating colonialism from racialization produces a border (mnemonic) that corrects how the above fields produce academic work, this theory does not erase the experience of coloniality that Black people and many racialized people live with. My friend and colleague, Denise Ferreira da Silva, imagines sociality as an ethics of coexistence in her short essay, “On Difference Without Separability.” I find myself returning to it again and again in my classrooms to remind myself and my students that difference need not be about separability — this opening up to difference is actually quite a difficult practice to live by. And yet, if we remember that separability is a principle of scientific knowledge that devalues and orders Black life and death and if we remember that scientific knowledge has been instrumental in creating the conditions for the killing of Black people, we might all learn how to knit.

Max: I have increasingly been attracted to the language of Ruth Wilson Gilmore around premature death. She defines racism as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” I think this helps explain something about how we can be living in the same time but seemingly at different speeds. It can also explain to us that the systems we are living under kill us all, though they kill us all at vastly different rates and with dramatically different consequences.

I think about this in terms of my own activism in Thunder Bay, which is infamous for being a kind of synecdoche for the colonial violence of the Canadian settler colonial project, with incredible rates of premature death suffered by Indigenous people. This premature deaths stem not only from police and settler violence but also from lack of medical care, lack of access to proper food, lack of access to clean water, lack of access to mental health services, the list goes on. It is a kind of conspiracy that is visible to those who suffer it, but invisible or invisibilized to those who perpetuate it and benefit from it. This seems to be the global model, too: a global distribution of premature death that is hidden in plain sight…

Phanuel:  …becoming public memories, in the very lands and in the very geographies through which we walk. The way you describe Thunder Bay, and here I’m thinking about the legislated forms of social architectures of the city and how the “lacks” you describe coalesce to dispossess Indigenous lives, also describes a typical Canadian settler colonial geography, structured by a pervasive anti-Indigenous racism. And yet, because Black geographers teach me that space is perceived and produced differently, and because Indigenous scholars and feminists such as Audra Simpson and Dory Nason teach me the liberational politics in refusal, I also want to believe that signs of Indigenous resistance and survivance lie within the Thunder Bay landscape. There is an essay by Michelle Daigle and Margaret Marietta Ramairez, “Decolonial Geographies,”where they ask us to work towards “the spatial weavings of decolonial geographies on Indigenous lands and waters” (83)  and, for me, part of that work is working to see how a place like where you describe also contains decolonial futures within its everyday quotidian life and work to protect these futures.

The imagination

Max: This makes me think about coming back to the Raft of the Medusa. The raft is space of Incredible cruelty and violence, but also a space where new relationships need to be forged. What’s so interesting, as we’ve discussed, is that Gericault is so crafty at making almost every moment of touch in this image ambiguous. We don’t know if the figure in the pinkish, flowing head headpiece in the very middle of the image is supporting the man in front of him or pulling that man down. We don’t know if the old man, the father figure, who is staring off into the distance on the left side of the image, is clutching a young man’s dead body to him or rescuing that body from drowning. We don’t know if, in the bottom right of the image, the Black body we see draped, face-down, across a white, red-headed body is alive or dead, if the Black body pins the white down or if they are in some sort of more loving embrace. None of the relationships in this image are clear to us. And so we can, and we must, read the painting as two things at once: on the one hand, an image of the complete degradation of humanity, the war of all against all, the origin and destiny of homo oeconomicus; on the other, a portrait of the power of humanity to forge new relationships, new possibilities and new solidarities in the midst of want and terror and fear.

Phanuel: Particularly, the freedom of imagination dramatized at the heart of this image, which renders the image so Dee. Lish. Shus. for me is the possible erotic manifestation of monstrous masculinities — of these men being shipwrecked and being delirious for thirteen days and drinking salt water, eating leather, consuming those that are dead — cannibalism’s love crime; how in the midst of want and terror and fear these men cross a taboo, they eat one another. And possibly, as viewers, we are all invited into the throes of an orgy of some kind. However this queer orgy (aren’t all orgies somewhat queer?) is not solely the orgy of sexual exploration and exhaustion. It’s a different order of orgy, an orgy of not knowing how to not be what the image is; we cannot stand outside this ironic self-aware image and proclaim not to be what it is; we don’t know the end, right now — we cannot know the end, now — and so we are forced to account for our shifting times and its possibilities. And so, of this image, let me see in its continuous flow of bodies in relation to each other, being beside themselves, doing things that both harm and give pleasure, an image asking viewers living in this historical moment to rethink the borders between pleasure and erotics and violence and intimacy and vulnerability and death. Afterall, we see that in the time of the image, the racial hierarchies that justified the ship’s journey seem to break down, invert even: we have the figuration of a Black body, a non-white body, lifted up, looking into the future, remembering forward, or, in some sense, rewriting the course of that ship’s journey. There is that possibility as well in this image.

Alhadeff, Albert. The Raft of the Medusa. Munich, London and New York: Prestel, 2002.

Wynter, Sylvia, and Katherine McKittrick. “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations.” In Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, edited by Katherine McKittrick, 9–89. Durham NC and London: Duke University Press, 2015.

Haiven, Max, and Alex Khasnabish. The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity. London and New York: Zed Books, 2014.

Byrd, Jodi A. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

Leroy, Justin. “Black History in Occupied Territory: On the Entanglements of Slavery and Settler Colonialism.” Theory and Event 19, no. 4 (2016).

da Silva, Denise Ferreira. “On Difference Without Separability.” In Dear History, We Don’t Need Another Hero, edited by Gabi Ngcobo, 57–65. Berlin: Berlin Biennale, 2018.

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Haiven, Max. “The Colonial Secrets of Canada’s Most Racist City.” ROAR Magazine, February 13, 2019.

Simpson, Audra. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014; Nason, Dory. “Carceral Power and Indeignous Feminist Resurgence in D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded and Janet Campbell Hale’s ‘Claire’. American Indian Culture & Research Journal. Vol. 40, no.1 (2016).

Michelle Daigle and Margaret Marietta Ramirez. “Decolonial Geographies.” Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode @ 50. Ed by Antipode Editorial Collective. New Jersey: Wiley Blackwell, 2019. 78-84.

The post Our Wrecks of the Medusa: A Dialogue appeared first on Max Haiven.

Revenge Film Club (for the holidays)

A weekly club to discuss films about revenge, in conjunction with the release of Max Haiven’s book Revenge Capitalism. Noon Pacific, 3pm Eastern, 8pm London on Tuesdays, Dec 15-Jan 12.Watch the films when you like, where you like. Join Max and special guests for a 90-minute informal conversation on Zoom. Participants who wish to make a more semi-formal presentation are welcome.Registration free, open to all, and is limited to ensure a convivial atmosphere. Preference given to those who can attend all five sessions.

Join RiVAL: ReImagining Value Action Lab this December and January for a special online film club focusing on screening and discussing the politics and poetics of revenge, co-sponsored by Pluto Press.

The film club is free and open to people around the world. It will take place at 3pm Eastern Time (noon Pacific, 8pm London, 9pm Central Europe, 7am Sydney).

The schedule of films is as follows:

December 15 – Parasite (2019) – Special guest: Eunsong KimDecember 22 – Inglorious Basterds (2009) Special guest: Anna-Esther YounesDecember 29 – Bacurau (2019) Special guest: Phanuel AntwiJanuary 5 – Nine to Five (1980) Special guest: Kate Doyle GriffithsJanuary 12 – V for Vendetta (2005) Special guest: Joshua Clover

The club is hosted by Max Haiven (Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice) and celebrates the release of his book Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts earlier this year (available for a 50% discount until December 9th).

The club will meet on Tuesdays from December 15 through January 12, each week featuring special guests, presentations and conversation.

In most episodes club members will be joined by a special guest to discuss the film in question and its relationship to the radical struggles of our present day against capitalism, colonialism, racism, patriarchy etc. There will be a facilitated conversation and perhaps breakout groups.

Anyone can participate. Registration is limited and the club will take place on the Zoom platform. Our aim is to build a temporary community of insight, enjoyment and radical imagination. Participants will be responsible for screening each film before the meeting and have the option of contributing a short (15-min) structured presentation, if they so choose.

Registration is required through this form. Preference will be given to those who can commit to attending all five meetings: https://forms.gle/pTp9Sk6m8n9qT9pT6

Registration for Holiday Revenge Film Club

If interest is strong, the film club may persist into the future beyond the five initial instances.

For more information, please email info.rival [at] lakeheadu [dot] ca

The post Revenge Film Club (for the holidays) appeared first on Max Haiven.

Unraveling capitalism’s revenge: An interview

The following interview, conducted by Liam Hough, appeared in ROAR 0n 26 November 2020: https://roarmag.org/essays/max-haiven-revenge-capitalism-interview/

In his new book, Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts, Max Haiven focuses on the question of our collective imagination today. While the neoliberal era has seen the idea of radical social change become in many ways a more alien, elusive goal, the book does not simply provide a catalogue of more options for despair. It is filled with overlapping ideas and schemes and stories of resistance across disparate struggles that span from the present back over the last few centuries.

Contemporary accounts of debt, addiction, urbanization and abolition, among many others, are woven in with insights gleaned from earlier periods of capitalist and colonial expansion and the struggles against them. Through the specifics of these struggles, Haiven draws out the parallels and proximities between our own times and multiple earlier moments — glimpses of radical hope and brutal suppression. These are interspersed with various takes on films, novels, TV shows and other artworks, drawing out the ways revenge and revenge fantasies play out across the cultural spectrum.

The book explores how the history of capitalism up until the present looks when we consider it to be systemically vengeful. With its narratives of economic rationality and order, capitalism continuously takes its pre-emptive revenge from above. Capitalism at the same time has always set the terms for what we understand to be vengeful — projecting this image onto the exploited and oppressed.

This book pushes us to imagine our own counter-narratives, exploring the question of what it might mean to avenge from below the ongoing crimes of this system. It is an ambitious effort at bringing together the voices of so many already embedded in this work; it is more humble in terms of not prescribing a refined theory of next steps forward. In all, it is a work that is packed with visions of struggle and necessary insights that should jolt and inspire further inquiry, discussion and action.

In June, Liam Hough spoke with Max Haiven about the book and why revenge offers a useful lens for thinking about capitalism and the struggle against it, made all the more clear in the time of COVID-19 and the uprisings in the US following the murder of George Floyd.

Liam Hough: What brought you to study revenge at this moment in time?

Max Haiven: I think every book, whether the author admits it or not, comes from personal experience and feelings. I have, like I think many of us, found my blood boiling over the last few years at the kind of injustices we’re seeing around the globe and the impunity of those who perpetuate those injustices.

Specifically, the impunity of a system of capitalism that gets away with horrendous injustices: environmental destruction, the complete disposability of whole groups of human beings, the kind of merciless destruction of society that goes under the name of economic necessity. So I wanted to give a name to the feeling of a kind of vengefulness, and also to name what appeared to me to be the kind of needless, reckless and sort of sadistic quality of capitalist expansion.

Although vengeance might be generally thought of as an exclusively subjective, human phenomenon, I wanted to see what would happen if we attributed it to capitalism. Of course, capitalism as a system has no overarching goal of revenge. It is a system whose ultimate and catastrophic effects nobody has to explicitly intend. It has neither an imagination nor a will-power. It has tendencies that are driven by internal contradictions. But might it make sense, nevertheless, to describe the overall effect of those contradictions as a kind of vengeance against people, against nature?

On one level, the history of capitalism is a series of vengeful campaigns: the suppression of working class struggles, the advance and defense of colonialism and empire. At the same time, capitalism has managed to project vengefulness onto those who have challenged it from below, castigating its opponents as nihilistically, bestially vindictive and celebrating its advocates as champions of peace and law.

In other words, capitalism has seen us tell a one-sided story about revenge, where that system is the conquest of this dark human passion. Capitalism itself defines revenge so as to misdirect our attention from its own vengeful operations.

So in Revenge Capitalism I set out to assemble different stories about that system’s past and present to challenge its own account of itself. I do so because of a faith that the imagination is crucial to how capitalism reproduces itself, and crucial to our ability to mobilize a struggle against it. This includes a struggle over the very meaning and scope of ideas like revenge.

Could you give an overview of the ideas of revenge and avenging and the distinctions between them?

The line between avenging and revenge for me is purposefully vague because I think that there’s an overlap between them. In many circumstances we can’t necessarily tell the difference. But, in general, revenge is the idea of seeking restitution for a harm or repayment of a debt in the same way it was issued. This is the poetic nature of revenge, the kind of neat symmetry or arithmetic of it: they who harmed or robbed you are, themselves, subjected to either that harm or robbery or one that will hurt them in an equally exquisite way.

But most of the time, revenge remains a fantasy: we obsess over an imagined future in which revenge arrives. People actually rarely take revenge, and indeed often the dream of revenge locks us in a kind of stasis where we never take action. In a sense, revenge leaves us locked in the paradigm of the powerful, dreaming of the impossible moment where we have in our hands the very power that hurt or robbed us.

What I call an avenging imaginary, on the other hand, tries to transform the feelings of vindictiveness or vengefulness into a profoundly transformative force. A true avenging of the crime and cruelty that was exacted upon us is to abolish the form of power that allowed that harm to be done in the first place.

A very basic example of this: working people who are treated terribly by their bosses not only dream of revenge against their boss but are encouraged to dream of a day when they will be the boss, where they might be in some position where they can treat others as badly as they’ve been treated.

Alternatively, one might imagine that, were one so empowered, one’s revenge would be to be the proverbial “good boss,” of course leaving the structure of capitalism and bosses intact. Or maybe they will get rich or they will somehow escape their position and then the people that mistreated them will feel bad, because the person that they once mocked is now in a much higher position. Often dreams of revenge are nursed in the cradle to powerlessness and reflect the broader systems of domination.

An avenging imaginary on the other hand says: what if we abolished the kind of hierarchies and the kind of exploitation and oppression that we’re enduring now, rather than trying to seize that kind of power for ourselves? This would mean a real transformation of the way that power works, rather than simply changing the owners or beneficiaries of that power.

This dominant revenge fantasy you describe of becoming a boss — generally we have the waged worker in mind here, right? What about those who have historically at times been excluded or sidelined from this sphere? How do you see feminist perspectives in relation to the dynamics of revenge and avenging in terms of the domestic sphere and wider social relations?

Before looping back to the question of working class women’s politics of avenging, I want to preface it by saying two things. The first is that I think any honest assessment of actually-existing revenge politics right now needs to take as its starting point the fact that we continue to live through an epidemic of masculine revenge against women and trans and non-binary people. Statistically, the vast majority of acts of vengeance which take place on earth are men taking extrajudicial, violent revenge against women, usually family-members, or against non-binary people, usually for refusing to obey the gender or sexual expectations of  patriarchy. This has been the case for a very long time.

The second point is that this patriarchal vengeance has long been accompanied by patriarchal cultural orders that have, ironically though tragically, ascribed irrational and socially destructive vengefulness onto women. This is not to deny that women — like all humans — do take revenge, sometimes justified, sometimes not. It is, however, to look at the myth-making around it.

Both patriarchal revenge and the myth-making about women’s revenge play a material role: patriarchal revenge — usually but not always exacted by men, usually but not exclusively on women — is a mechanism of the enforcement of gendered roles that are calibrated to sustain the exploitation of women in the household and formal economy on which capitalism depends.

The threat of queer and trans people to patriarchy is not only cultural; patriarchal revenge against these bodies aims to destroy the living threat they represent to these systems: that lives can be lived outside of what is taken to be the natural order of sex and gender, that other bodies and relationships and social forms are possible. Yet in spite of this, women and trans and non-binary people rarely actually take individualized revenge, despite the incredible injustices and unfairness inflicted upon them, and in spite of reactionary myths to the contrary.

Maybe this brings us to the qualities of feminist and queer organizing against systems of revenge like capitalism or cis/hetero-patriarchy. I think what you see consistently, throughout the history of many strands of feminist and queer struggle, is a refusal to simply appropriate the techniques and methods of capitalist and patriarchal power; such struggles are, as Angela Davis makes clear, interested in abolishing that form of power.

It’s not a real feminist demand to, for instance, simply seize state power, or to have more female CEOs, though recently so-called liberal feminism does indeed make such claims. The more radical feminist demand has been to transform the way in which society and human cooperation is organized and reproduced, beyond the vengeful forms of coercive power characteristic of capitalism and patriarchy and the freelance vengeance required for their reproduction.

I take a lot from these feminist traditions, which I would classify as avenging, although for various reasons not a lot of feminist theorists or organizers have necessarily embraced the language of revenge, perhaps because of the kind of opprobrium women’s revenge has come under over the centuries.

I think something very similar might be said about queer struggles as well: obviously queer revenge is not simply instituting a kind of vengeful homonormativity backed by violence. It is a much more capacious avenging through a liberation of our concepts and practices of love, community, social bonding and affective expression that abolishes the cis/hetero-patriarchal system which takes its explicit and subtle revenges against queer people every day.

You’ve stressed that we don’t have lots of examples of individual revenge against patriarchal violence, and that feminists have been very direct about the need to abolish, not reform, oppressive structures. This resonates with a CLR James quote you use in an early chapter: “The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression… When history is written the way it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity.”

That quote comes from James’s The Black Jacobins, a history of the Haitian Revolution and its importance to world thought and politics. James makes the point throughout the book that, in the dominant white European and American dominant imaginaries of the day, the Haitian Revolution was seen — even until the publication of his book — as a kind of bestial, inchoate and wrathful revenge.

Again, to be clear about the context, in the early 1800s enslaved Black people in the French colony of Saint-Domingue — which would be renamed Haiti after the revolution — as well as the mixed-race Mulatto class, rose up against French colonial rule. Inspired in some ways by rumors of the French Revolution, the uprising would go on to abolish slavery and ending the racial hierarchies that had been imposed within Haiti as part of the colonial order.

The revolution was extremely bloody and led to the establishment of the first nation-state created out of a successful uprising of the enslaved. The Haitian Revolution was seen by Europeans and white Americans as this kind of brutal, bestial form of revenge, largely because, in their racist imaginations, Black people could not be responsible political subjects with complex yearnings for things like liberté, égalité, fraternité. 

James’ quotation alerts us to two things. In the first instance, the European imaginary of the Haitian Revolution as a kind of meaningless festival of blood masked the fact that the everyday, normalized sadism of slavery and racial ordering that had existed on Saint-Domingue until the revolution was much, much worse. The absolute lowest depths of human depravity were mined by the slave-owning class; what they did sears the imagination with images that one can’t unsee, a daily, grinding, sadistic, needless cruelty. The violence and revenge of the revolutionary moment then, needs to be contextualized within what had, at that point, been 300 years of normalized, institutionalized revenge and torture on the island. James is very careful to catalogue these horrors that were exacted by the slave-owners precisely to make his point.

The cruelty and sadism of the French slave regime on Saint-Domingue, and other slave regimes in Jamaica and in other colonies in the Caribbean and elsewhere, was justified in part because of the idea, propounded among the slave-owners and their supporters, that Black people were inherently and pathologically vengeful. If they, the slavers, let the boot up from their neck for a moment, revenge would be swift. And so pre-emptive, pre-eventive revenge was normalized as necessary.

The slave-owning class was able to hide their own vengefulness by projecting it onto their Other. I return to this pattern multiple times in my book, though it’s not altogether an original point, having been made in a different way by Fanon with regards to questions of violence.

Revenge Capitalism was published a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic and includes some of your thoughts on this and the “new normal” we might be facing. Added to this we have the huge uprisings in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. How does the current moment look in terms of capitalism’s vengefulness and a potential politics of avenging?

I think what both the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd and others have done is to once again reveal the naked vengefulness of racial capitalism for all to see. In the case of the pandemic, the rates of suffering and mortality from the disease, and the rates of economic precarity it has exacerbated, track very closely to the often-unspoken value hierarchies of life within the merciless form of capitalism that we endure today. In the United Kingdom or the United States, Black and racialized people are suffering at much higher rates. Proletarians, working paycheck to paycheck, are being hit hardest.

Once again, this so-called natural disaster is anything but “natural.” It is a disaster that emerges from revenge capitalism and it reaffirms and re-entrenches revenge capitalism. Again, here the vengeance is the systemic outcome, not the explicit intent, though of course we have the old Malthusians creeping into public discourse, arguing in various ways that death, poverty and pain are somehow all for the best.

I think the context of the pandemic and the systemic revenge it reveals helps explain why the murder of George Floyd has kicked off huge demonstrations not only in the United States but all around the world. First and foremost they are demonstrations for the value of Black lives, but in a way they stand in for, and demand, a kind of re-evaluation of the value of life beyond the hierarchies and metric of global racial capitalism. And that’s why I think so many people identify with them, even if they’re not Black or from the United States.

The police murder of George Floyd revealed that the United States is not finished with taking revenge on Black people for being Black. It has been the modus operandi of the United States since the British colonial period, which was built on slavery and on recruiting elements of the non-Black working class population into a fidelity to American capitalism in part through anti-Black racism.

In a strange way, completely unwarranted and often sadistic, spectacularized revenge against Black people has been the means by which certain forms of class compromise have been secured, which has allowed the United States to turn into the world’s pre-eminent superpower. So systemic anti-Black revenge is in a sense a global question.

That revenge continues apace. It’s a revenge that is sometimes systemic and structural in the forms of poverty, ill-health and environmental racism that Black people in the United States are made to endure, as well as worse access to health services, social services, educational services and the like. But it’s also a systemic revenge that often rears its head as vigilante or freelance violence by police, by military, and everyday white people, who entitle themselves to enact forms of anti-Black violence, for a whole variety of trumped-up reasons.

When we zoom out far enough we can recognize this pattern of anti-Black revenge at the core of the United States national economy, from housing to labor to the military to health. And it has to be admitted that this is not just a kind of cultural pathology of the United States. It has been integral to the formation and the sustenance of the United States capitalist economy and, via that, the world economy, which today continues to pivot around the United States, though perhaps that’s shifting.

That’s to say nothing of the way that other colonial powers historically have benefited from the enslavement of Black people and from regimes of exploitation and extraction based on racialized violence. We could also point to, for instance, the British exploitation of the subcontinent of India, or of North-American Indigenous people and on and on and on and on. The myth of the vengeful Other has been used in all these cases to justify the normalized, banalized and acceptable vengeance of regimes of racial oppression and exploitation.

You say in the preface that much of what you see where you live in the city of Thunder Bay embodies this systemic revenge. You’re involved there with a community platform, Wiindo Debwe Mosewin.  Could you talk about that work a bit and how this has influenced your perspective?

Thunder Bay is a small, remote Canadian city that, to cut a long story short, vies to be the nation’s “capital” of racism, murder and violence. Recent independent government reports have found widespread systemic racism in the city’s police and other bodies.

Wiindo Debwe Mosewin is an all-volunteer feminist, abolitionist street patrol. It’s run by both Indigenous Anishinaabe people and non-Indigenous people (like me) here in the city. And its work is generally to patrol the streets, through a variety of means: we drive around in cars or trucks or on bikes or in kayaks. We simply try and keep people safe in a number of different ways. Sometimes we hand out food and water to people. We ask after people. We carry naloxone (narcan) kits in case people are having overdoses because opioids are a huge problem here. We’re trained in nonviolent de-escalation tactics and we do a variety of other activities simply to, as we put it, produce safety in our community.

We’re inspired, on the one hand, by the long legacy of abolitionist ideas that come largely out of the Black radical tradition, mostly in the US, which encourage us to begin the work now to produce the alternative forms of community safety and care that are going to replace police and prisons. But the other major influence is Indigenous governance systems. The terminology here gets a little bit difficult in English because the language is obsessed with very clear distinctions between realms of politics, spirituality, science and art. Within Anishinaabe thought, as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson makes clear, those lines are not in any way drawn in the same way and there is an awareness of fluidity.

So Indigenous governance as we practice it in Wiindo Debwe Mosewin, for instance, instructs us that we work with a millennia-old clan system that the Anishinaabe have developed in order to orchestrate a kind of division of social labor to reproduce society based on values of care, peace, autonomy and reciprocity. We work with various forms of traditional healing — both in terms of the use of plant medicines but also in terms of ceremonies that help people overcome trauma and pain. We are trying to practice “two-eyed seeing”: merging non-Indigenous theories and ways with radical Indigenous world-views and practices. We practice a kind of “sous-veillance,” a careful watching of power “from below.”

There are a number of ways in which this work has influenced Revenge Capitalism. One is that I’m living in a place where colonialism is still being waged in all of its naked violence. In the last few weeks we just had another Indigenous person die in custody at the jail here, and nobody asks any questions. The rates of overdose from opioids are staggering. We just had another report — and we get reports all the time — of Indigenous people being beaten up by the police, or just by white people driving around, beaten up for sport.

This occurs in a context where the Canadian nation state, in spite of claims to a kind of neoliberal “reconciliation” with Indigenous people and an official policy of gentle multiculturalism, depends on this violence in order to continue to enact the kinds of resource extractive regimes that are the bedrock of its capitalist political economy: mining, pipelines, building new highways, new railways.

This has always been the political economy of Canada, and it is, as Patrick Wolfe observed, dependent on the elimination of Indigenous people as land-based, sovereign peoples. So I have a horrifying front-row seat to observe precisely how vengeful capitalism can be at its colonial frontiers.

Second, in being directly involved with a group like this, which has as one of its tasks to observe and catalogue police violence especially against Indigenous people, I see how an apparatus that commits itself to law and order can actually act vengefully, though no one necessarily intends that vengeance or would admit it. Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and other abolitionist thinkers in the United States have already alerted us to the fact that prisons and their associated carceral apparatus are — profitable — mechanisms of retribution rather than civil protection, let alone healing and reform.

In a similar way, the kinds of revenge politics that I talk about throughout the book operate largely anonymously and silently, through systems and structures. And on the flipside, the police in Thunder Bay, like everywhere, advertize themselves as necessary to prevent revenge. The great lie of the state-form and its police is that without them, society would descend into “barbarism,” which is silently defined as the unmitigated and constant eruption of revenge.

Finally, here in Thunder Bay, and through Wiindo Debwe Mosewin, I’ve been exposed to some of the ways in which Indigenous cultures have, for millennia, created frameworks for healing, for conflict resolution, and for thinking about caring for each other and caring for society that don’t rely on top-down oppressive forms of power, and are not vengeful.

These methods are, in fact, about curing and overcoming vengefulness in order to create the greater good. It’s a very different model of thinking about law and thinking about justice and thinking about solidarity. I want to stress, however, that I have only glimpsed such frameworks and practices by proximity and would certainly not claim to in any way comprehend them, except by contrast to what is today the colonial norm.

Your whole framework is very much informed by abolitionist thought, stemming mostly from the Black radical tradition in North America as I understand it. One aspect of this is the call for treason to whiteness; could you give an historical or contemporary example of how this looks in practice? There’s a risk this call can be reduced to simply another slogan or can seem just vague or overly abstract.

The example I would take from my own context is that just before the pandemic Canada was in a massive national uprising against oil and gas — including fracked gas — pipelines, which had become extremely charismatic and successful in shutting down large swathes of the country in protest. It was centered around the struggle of a particular Indigenous nation, the Wet’suwet’en, in the Westernmost province of British Columbia, but it had broadened out to massive movements throughout the nation-state.

Indigenous people and, importantly, many non-Indigenous people were blockading highways and railways and occupying government offices and the private property of corporations. This massive and historical uprising was, in fact, threatening to unseat the reigning government. Sadly, given the ecology of global news media, this uprising received little attention, but was much more threatening to power in many ways than the more widely-covered — and also very important — Standing Rock protests south of the border in 2016.

First and foremost, this was an expression of a new generation of Indigenous struggle that is profoundly well-organized, militant and strategic. But I think it’s also a great example of non-Indigenous people in Canada putting their bodies on the line and breaking ranks with the kind of racial capitalist and colonial order of the country.

We are, in a sense, saying that, in fact, our futures depend on Indigenous rights — not simply rights under the Canadian constitution within liberal capitalist democracy, but rights derived from Indigenous sovereignty and which are based on a completely different relationship to land and community beyond the liberal capitalist norm.

That, to me, is a kind of treason against whiteness, and it is important to stress that much of the leadership among non-Indigenous people in these movements do not benefit from whiteness. When I speak of treason to whiteness, a term I take up from a longer history of abolitionist thought in the United States, I am speaking of treason towards the structuring ideal of whiteness, the horizon of whiteness.

Canada as a project — even before it was officially an independent nation — was founded on settler colonialism: the elimination of Indigenous people to make way for white settlement and resource extraction. Today, that settler colonialism has been predicated on a kind of state-sponsored multiculturalism, where so long as Canadians from a whole variety of different backgrounds are willing to accept that their future is playing a role in a system of capitalism based on resource exploitation and the exploitation of labor, then everybody has a place.

Of course, it is a forked-tongued promise, because non-white Canadians still suffer profound racism in all sorts of different ways, and there is profound racism in the immigration system which permits certain bodies to even become “Canadian” in the first place. But the myth in Canada is that as long as you come here and you work hard and you contribute to the kind of mainstream capitalist society that is based on the seizure of Indigenous land and the exploitation of Indigenous territories, then you are welcome. This is the horizon of whiteness I am speaking of, of which my family, for instance, are the beneficiaries — today having “become white,” though once they would not have been accepted as such.

What we saw in those uprisings was a mass treason to that mythology, to the mythology of white-led multiculturalism that has been the mainstay of Canadian politics for the last 50 years, and is certainly central to the brand of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Importantly, it’s not centered on a bunch of people who benefit from whiteness getting up and saying “we’re no longer white” or even “we’re so sorry for our white privilege,” but rather non-Indigenous people standing together with Indigenous people and saying “we demand a different future beyond racial capitalism, beyond the colonial project.” We do not know what that will look like, we are inventing it.

One concept I encountered for the first time in the book was reconcilophilia, which definitely gives a name to a very familiar process. You use it in relation to the palatable images of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, and a general top-down push to gloss over deep social conflicts as fully resolved in our times, no longer up for discussion.

Yes, I identify this tendency towards reconcilophilia with the representations of Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. But I want to begin by saying that the reconcilophilia I’m identifying and critiquing is not about those revolutionaries themselves. I’m identifying the way that their legacies have been taken up. Each of those figures was a very complex, problematic historical figure in his own right, each with a sophisticated, contextual and historically specific political philosophy within which peace, reconciliation and forgiveness had a strategic place.

My critique of reconcilophilia is of a discourse, common on the left too, in which this complexity and history is erased in favor of the decontextualized fetishization of abstract ideals of forgiveness and non-violence. Such manoeuvres, which I think are actually the narcissism of the privileged, participate in a violent erasure of all of the other radicals in the milieu of these three revolutionaries who were presenting other strategies and whose activities were part of the context of these thinkers’ victories.

Who does the fetishization of these figures serve? My argument in the book is that, ultimately, it serves those who want to maintain and defend the status quo. It maintains the idea that true social change can’t happen through violence or anger, which is patently false, and, further, that those who are dissatisfied should satisfy themselves with using the established channels for social change, for instance electoral democracy.

The fetishization of these three figures is used as a kind of bludgeon to castigate and demonize anyone who says that these mainstream methods of creating change are not enough. Were those three revolutionary figures still alive, they would likely be horrified at the way in which their legacy has been manipulated to attack the very people that they would have stood in solidarity with, and in the hands of the very people who would have condemned them.

We’ve seen the way that the spirit of Dr Martin Luther King gets invoked by the most heinous racists in the United States in order to try and restore order, claiming he would have condemned the riots and uprisings. We’ve seen the way in which the legacy of Nelson Mandela, all his complexity reduced to a kind of liberal sloganeering, gets wielded in order to defend neocolonial regimes and belittle those who are standing up to them around the world.

There is a way that the love of the abstract ideal of reconciliation operates as a kind of vindictive tool in the hands of those who want to defend and maintain the status quo. This is a key point in Glen Coulthard’s excellent book Red Skin, White Masks in which he catalogues all the way Canadian settler colonialism is advanced through compelling Indigenous people to reconcile themselves with it, and the importance of resentment and refusal for opening new — or restoring old — methods of thinking and feeling together in revolutionary ways.

One theme of your book is the parallels today with the rise of Nazism and fascism in Europe in the 20th Century. You frame the working class up to that period as having had a kind of conscious drive to avenge. Could you discuss your reading of Walter Benjamin and his take on the complicity of the German Social Democrats of the time in paving the way for Nazism?

Walter Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher and critic active in the 1920s and 30s who died while fleeing the Nazis in the early 1940s. He worked on his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” throughout the last years of his life and the text, in a way, acts as a summary of his final thoughts. It is a brilliant and quite moving essay that I’ve returned to many times.

The particular thing I draw on in this book is the following strange passage:

Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed [proletarian] class itself is the depository of historical knowledge. In Marx it appears as the last enslaved class, as the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden. This conviction, which had a brief resurgence in the Spartacist group, has always been objectionable to Social Democrats. Within three decades they managed virtually to erase the name of Blanqui [the formidable “professional” French revolutionary of the 19th century], though it had been the rallying sound that had reverberated through the preceding century. Social Democracy thought fit to assign to the working class the role of the redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.

To recap, the Social Democrats were the dominant workers’ political party in Germany. In the context of the First World War, there were splits within that party between a radical communist flank led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg called the Sparticists and a reformist, conservative flank led by Friedrich Ebert and others. As the First World War ground to a halt, there was a revolution in Germany that ousted the aristocracy and a section of the bourgeoisie, and the Social Democrats took power. But in order to take and maintain power, Ebert and the other leading Social Democrats essentially ordered the execution of Luxemburg and Liebknecht to prevent them from leading a full-scale communist revolution.

Now, one can never propose counterfactual histories conclusively, but it’s very likely that, had the Sparticists actually successfully had their revolution, the whole history of the world would have been very different. Had both Germany and Russia manifested communist governments, the Soviet Union might not have been led to take its fateful turn towards authoritarianism and militarism, and many other countries might have also had communist revolutions in that period, thanks to the support of these two nations. The 20th century might have been completely different.

In any case, 20 years after the murder of the Sparticist leadership, when Benjamin is writing the “Theses on the Philosophy of History” under the cloud of Nazi rule, he returns to this moment, arguing that not only did the Social Democrats quench the revolutionary moment, they also did something that would eventually lead to the rise of the Nazis: they momentarily placated the working class by insisting that, essentially, the movement towards their liberation would come through reformist progress and the march of technology.

But, as Benjamin writes, “this cuts the sinews of its greatest strength,” a resentment and spirit of sacrifice that have always animated working class struggle in some way. He goes on to say that the revolutionary dream of the working class is not only of liberated grandchildren but of avenged ancestors: Capitalism and systems of domination need to be made to pay for all of the generations upon generations of struggle that have been quashed and destroyed, for the accumulation of misery they represent. I’ve always found this passage extremely enigmatic and really promising and I think it speaks to at least two things.

On the one hand, I think what Benjamin is saying is that, when the Social Democrats refused to take up this proletarian spirit of vengeance and sacrifice and mobilize them towards collective liberation, these spirits or affects became resources for the authoritarian imagination. Vengeance, of course, was perhaps the key affect of Nazism even if, like today, fascists and racists then wrapped themselves in the flag of “love” of the nation and the race.

But what is that avenging of the ancestors that Benjamin is speaking of? We can interpret it in a very direct sense as the actual avenging of the lives of parents and grandparents or children or other loved-ones who literally starved in the late-teens and early twenties of the 20th century because of various capitalist cruelties, domestic or foreign. And we can talk about the “legitimate desire for revenge” — to quote Fanon — that working people might have towards their bosses and other people who constantly fuck them over. But I think Benjamin is not just talking about the particular targets or acts of revenge; he is also talking about avenging as a kind of revolutionary overturning of society so that the kind of violence and cruelty that has been exacted upon you, as an oppressed or exploited person, can never be enacted on anyone else ever again.

The deepest form of revenge against capitalism isn’t just to line a bunch of capitalists up against a wall and shoot them, because, of course, those same guns will soon be used upon you or your comrades. Rather, a true avenging it is to abolish the source of capitalism and of capitalists to begin with, to radically transform the nature of power

Finally, staying with the topic of anger, and the pressures to deny, contain, or manage excesses of anger — could you touch on how you look at this towards the end of the book? You engage with the question of the anger of the marginalized, the oppressed, particularly from abolitionist and feminist perspectives, but also that of certain increasingly precarious and outright reactionary white populations.

In the book I try to draw a line between revenge and anger. They’re obviously connected, but it’s useful to hold them apart for critical and political reasons. In the book’s conclusion I engage with the Black feminist tradition, of thinking through the “uses of anger,” to paraphrase Audre Lorde, and the importance of dwelling with anger and learning from anger, which she and bell hooks propose.

What I think both of them suggest is that there’s a strong tendency to try and quash anger and to sweep anger under the rug because we think it looks bad in movements. But the question is, to whom does it look bad, and — to go back to Benjamin’s question — what is risked when we insist that anger be banished? Neither of them speak about revenge explicitly that I could find, but I think both speak more generally to the histories of feminist thought about how to respond to power and domination.

As we discussed, there is a long history of white supremacist cis/hetero-patriarchal capitalism weilding the accusation of revenge against its Others as a way to disguise and normalize its of banal and unceasing revenge, and for perhaps this reason these thinkers rarely engage the term directly. But I take from their work inspiration for my own attempt to separate out this notion of avenging in contrast to revenge.

Avenging is not about seizing power and exacting harm on those who created or benefited from systems of oppression. Rather, it strives to abolish the source of harm and oppression in the first place. I think both hooks and Lorde are suggesting that we need to develop structures and capacities for anger that allow us to move towards this kind of avenging.

At the same time, I think we are called to engage also with the rage of the entitled, the so-called “privileged,” and those who are the beneficiaries of systems of power. The success of right-wing politicians of late has been, in part, their ability to whip up and harness that anger. It is, of course, misdirected, but ultimately it emerges from a circumstance of pain, alienation and uncertainty.

One of the examples I use in the book is the opioid crisis in the United States, which has so far claimed the lives of at least half a million people in that country, and claims dozens of lives every year in Thunder Bay. It has affected Americans from all backgrounds, but for various reasons it has been presented as almost exclusively affecting poor white people, part of the staggering and sorrowful rise of so-called “deaths from despair” that has seen life expectancy drop among middle and working class white people in many US jurisdictions.

One of the things I argue in the book is that we need to recognize that the epidemic of prescription opioid use in the US thrived in contexts where white people felt alienated, or where they’ve been rendered surplussed by capitalism, for instance in Appalachia or the Rust Belt.  Deindustrialization has essentially left many people without a meaningful means to contribute to their society and they are increasingly dependent on various forms of government aid. These are white people who imagined that they were entitled to a kind of belonging and security within the racial capitalist state, that a promise is now being betrayed. In the absence of structural analysis of capitalism it is very easily whipped into a kind of racist lather of political anger by the likes of Donald Trump, and the kind of media properties like Fox News, on which he depends and in which his fate is entangled.

I think what we need to reckon with is the fact that on the one hand, yes, the sources of the anger are real: the existential experience of being basically forgotten and abandoned by society is a real experience for those people. So, too, is the real experience of people who are even not so economically precarious but simply are alienated, deeply alienated, even by their success within the racial capitalist order. For instance, those who are increasingly addicted to prescription opioids in exurbs of major cities or in the suburbs, who actually are not doing that badly relative to other Americans, and yet who still feel that their life is meaningless and boring and has nothing to offer.

We need to somehow, on the one hand, be able to acknowledge and even to a degree sympathize with that pain, at the very same time that we’re able to hold in our minds the reality that the reason why many racialized people, and especially Black people, in the United States are not feeling alienated and betrayed by the American Dream is because they never were allowed to enjoy it in the first place. And that in fact the American Dream that is now being denied to so many white people, if it ever existed, was based on its denial to so many others. And, indeed, that revenge for the failure of the American Dream has historically often been exacted against non-white people not only in the realm of reactionary politics but also sickening freelance violence.

So there’s a sense that we need to be able to hold these multiple contradictory things together if we’re going to understand the complexity of the currents of racism and capitalism in our moment. It’s like complex climatic systems: even those with access to the best models and the most amazing super-computers have a difficult time modelling the effects of climate change because there’s so many factors, there’s so much going on.

There is a kind of constant work of trying to read the data, interpret the data, theorize the data, and come up with a conclusive picture. And yet, just in the same way that climate scientists don’t deny the effects of anthropogenic climate change just because they can’t create a perfect model, in the same way we can not deny the existence or the importance of the entanglement of racism, capitalism and patriarchy, simply because it’s too complex to theorize in one model. We need to somehow find ways of dwelling with that complexity, and sharing that complexity, and educating ourselves about it. And of course, acting.

The post Unraveling capitalism’s revenge: An interview appeared first on Max Haiven.

Unraveling capitalism’s revenge: An interview with Max Haiven in ROAR

The following interview, conducted by Liam Hough, appeared in ROAR 0n 26 November 2020: https://roarmag.org/essays/max-haiven-revenge-capitalism-interview/

In his new book, Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts, Max Haiven focuses on the question of our collective imagination today. While the neoliberal era has seen the idea of radical social change become in many ways a more alien, elusive goal, the book does not simply provide a catalogue of more options for despair. It is filled with overlapping ideas and schemes and stories of resistance across disparate struggles that span from the present back over the last few centuries.

Contemporary accounts of debt, addiction, urbanization and abolition, among many others, are woven in with insights gleaned from earlier periods of capitalist and colonial expansion and the struggles against them. Through the specifics of these struggles, Haiven draws out the parallels and proximities between our own times and multiple earlier moments — glimpses of radical hope and brutal suppression. These are interspersed with various takes on films, novels, TV shows and other artworks, drawing out the ways revenge and revenge fantasies play out across the cultural spectrum.

The book explores how the history of capitalism up until the present looks when we consider it to be systemically vengeful. With its narratives of economic rationality and order, capitalism continuously takes its pre-emptive revenge from above. Capitalism at the same time has always set the terms for what we understand to be vengeful — projecting this image onto the exploited and oppressed.

This book pushes us to imagine our own counter-narratives, exploring the question of what it might mean to avenge from below the ongoing crimes of this system. It is an ambitious effort at bringing together the voices of so many already embedded in this work; it is more humble in terms of not prescribing a refined theory of next steps forward. In all, it is a work that is packed with visions of struggle and necessary insights that should jolt and inspire further inquiry, discussion and action.

In June, Liam Hough spoke with Max Haiven about the book and why revenge offers a useful lens for thinking about capitalism and the struggle against it, made all the more clear in the time of COVID-19 and the uprisings in the US following the murder of George Floyd.

Liam Hough: What brought you to study revenge at this moment in time?

Max Haiven: I think every book, whether the author admits it or not, comes from personal experience and feelings. I have, like I think many of us, found my blood boiling over the last few years at the kind of injustices we’re seeing around the globe and the impunity of those who perpetuate those injustices.

Specifically, the impunity of a system of capitalism that gets away with horrendous injustices: environmental destruction, the complete disposability of whole groups of human beings, the kind of merciless destruction of society that goes under the name of economic necessity. So I wanted to give a name to the feeling of a kind of vengefulness, and also to name what appeared to me to be the kind of needless, reckless and sort of sadistic quality of capitalist expansion.

Although vengeance might be generally thought of as an exclusively subjective, human phenomenon, I wanted to see what would happen if we attributed it to capitalism. Of course, capitalism as a system has no overarching goal of revenge. It is a system whose ultimate and catastrophic effects nobody has to explicitly intend. It has neither an imagination nor a will-power. It has tendencies that are driven by internal contradictions. But might it make sense, nevertheless, to describe the overall effect of those contradictions as a kind of vengeance against people, against nature?

On one level, the history of capitalism is a series of vengeful campaigns: the suppression of working class struggles, the advance and defense of colonialism and empire. At the same time, capitalism has managed to project vengefulness onto those who have challenged it from below, castigating its opponents as nihilistically, bestially vindictive and celebrating its advocates as champions of peace and law.

In other words, capitalism has seen us tell a one-sided story about revenge, where that system is the conquest of this dark human passion. Capitalism itself defines revenge so as to misdirect our attention from its own vengeful operations.

So in Revenge Capitalism I set out to assemble different stories about that system’s past and present to challenge its own account of itself. I do so because of a faith that the imagination is crucial to how capitalism reproduces itself, and crucial to our ability to mobilize a struggle against it. This includes a struggle over the very meaning and scope of ideas like revenge.

Could you give an overview of the ideas of revenge and avenging and the distinctions between them?

The line between avenging and revenge for me is purposefully vague because I think that there’s an overlap between them. In many circumstances we can’t necessarily tell the difference. But, in general, revenge is the idea of seeking restitution for a harm or repayment of a debt in the same way it was issued. This is the poetic nature of revenge, the kind of neat symmetry or arithmetic of it: they who harmed or robbed you are, themselves, subjected to either that harm or robbery or one that will hurt them in an equally exquisite way.

But most of the time, revenge remains a fantasy: we obsess over an imagined future in which revenge arrives. People actually rarely take revenge, and indeed often the dream of revenge locks us in a kind of stasis where we never take action. In a sense, revenge leaves us locked in the paradigm of the powerful, dreaming of the impossible moment where we have in our hands the very power that hurt or robbed us.

What I call an avenging imaginary, on the other hand, tries to transform the feelings of vindictiveness or vengefulness into a profoundly transformative force. A true avenging of the crime and cruelty that was exacted upon us is to abolish the form of power that allowed that harm to be done in the first place.

A very basic example of this: working people who are treated terribly by their bosses not only dream of revenge against their boss but are encouraged to dream of a day when they will be the boss, where they might be in some position where they can treat others as badly as they’ve been treated.

Alternatively, one might imagine that, were one so empowered, one’s revenge would be to be the proverbial “good boss,” of course leaving the structure of capitalism and bosses intact. Or maybe they will get rich or they will somehow escape their position and then the people that mistreated them will feel bad, because the person that they once mocked is now in a much higher position. Often dreams of revenge are nursed in the cradle to powerlessness and reflect the broader systems of domination.

An avenging imaginary on the other hand says: what if we abolished the kind of hierarchies and the kind of exploitation and oppression that we’re enduring now, rather than trying to seize that kind of power for ourselves? This would mean a real transformation of the way that power works, rather than simply changing the owners or beneficiaries of that power.

This dominant revenge fantasy you describe of becoming a boss — generally we have the waged worker in mind here, right? What about those who have historically at times been excluded or sidelined from this sphere? How do you see feminist perspectives in relation to the dynamics of revenge and avenging in terms of the domestic sphere and wider social relations?

Before looping back to the question of working class women’s politics of avenging, I want to preface it by saying two things. The first is that I think any honest assessment of actually-existing revenge politics right now needs to take as its starting point the fact that we continue to live through an epidemic of masculine revenge against women and trans and non-binary people. Statistically, the vast majority of acts of vengeance which take place on earth are men taking extrajudicial, violent revenge against women, usually family-members, or against non-binary people, usually for refusing to obey the gender or sexual expectations of  patriarchy. This has been the case for a very long time.

The second point is that this patriarchal vengeance has long been accompanied by patriarchal cultural orders that have, ironically though tragically, ascribed irrational and socially destructive vengefulness onto women. This is not to deny that women — like all humans — do take revenge, sometimes justified, sometimes not. It is, however, to look at the myth-making around it.

Both patriarchal revenge and the myth-making about women’s revenge play a material role: patriarchal revenge — usually but not always exacted by men, usually but not exclusively on women — is a mechanism of the enforcement of gendered roles that are calibrated to sustain the exploitation of women in the household and formal economy on which capitalism depends.

The threat of queer and trans people to patriarchy is not only cultural; patriarchal revenge against these bodies aims to destroy the living threat they represent to these systems: that lives can be lived outside of what is taken to be the natural order of sex and gender, that other bodies and relationships and social forms are possible. Yet in spite of this, women and trans and non-binary people rarely actually take individualized revenge, despite the incredible injustices and unfairness inflicted upon them, and in spite of reactionary myths to the contrary.

Maybe this brings us to the qualities of feminist and queer organizing against systems of revenge like capitalism or cis/hetero-patriarchy. I think what you see consistently, throughout the history of many strands of feminist and queer struggle, is a refusal to simply appropriate the techniques and methods of capitalist and patriarchal power; such struggles are, as Angela Davis makes clear, interested in abolishing that form of power.

It’s not a real feminist demand to, for instance, simply seize state power, or to have more female CEOs, though recently so-called liberal feminism does indeed make such claims. The more radical feminist demand has been to transform the way in which society and human cooperation is organized and reproduced, beyond the vengeful forms of coercive power characteristic of capitalism and patriarchy and the freelance vengeance required for their reproduction.

I take a lot from these feminist traditions, which I would classify as avenging, although for various reasons not a lot of feminist theorists or organizers have necessarily embraced the language of revenge, perhaps because of the kind of opprobrium women’s revenge has come under over the centuries.

I think something very similar might be said about queer struggles as well: obviously queer revenge is not simply instituting a kind of vengeful homonormativity backed by violence. It is a much more capacious avenging through a liberation of our concepts and practices of love, community, social bonding and affective expression that abolishes the cis/hetero-patriarchal system which takes its explicit and subtle revenges against queer people every day.

You’ve stressed that we don’t have lots of examples of individual revenge against patriarchal violence, and that feminists have been very direct about the need to abolish, not reform, oppressive structures. This resonates with a CLR James quote you use in an early chapter: “The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression… When history is written the way it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity.”

That quote comes from James’s The Black Jacobins, a history of the Haitian Revolution and its importance to world thought and politics. James makes the point throughout the book that, in the dominant white European and American dominant imaginaries of the day, the Haitian Revolution was seen — even until the publication of his book — as a kind of bestial, inchoate and wrathful revenge.

Again, to be clear about the context, in the early 1800s enslaved Black people in the French colony of Saint-Domingue — which would be renamed Haiti after the revolution — as well as the mixed-race Mulatto class, rose up against French colonial rule. Inspired in some ways by rumors of the French Revolution, the uprising would go on to abolish slavery and ending the racial hierarchies that had been imposed within Haiti as part of the colonial order.

The revolution was extremely bloody and led to the establishment of the first nation-state created out of a successful uprising of the enslaved. The Haitian Revolution was seen by Europeans and white Americans as this kind of brutal, bestial form of revenge, largely because, in their racist imaginations, Black people could not be responsible political subjects with complex yearnings for things like liberté, égalité, fraternité. 

James’ quotation alerts us to two things. In the first instance, the European imaginary of the Haitian Revolution as a kind of meaningless festival of blood masked the fact that the everyday, normalized sadism of slavery and racial ordering that had existed on Saint-Domingue until the revolution was much, much worse. The absolute lowest depths of human depravity were mined by the slave-owning class; what they did sears the imagination with images that one can’t unsee, a daily, grinding, sadistic, needless cruelty. The violence and revenge of the revolutionary moment then, needs to be contextualized within what had, at that point, been 300 years of normalized, institutionalized revenge and torture on the island. James is very careful to catalogue these horrors that were exacted by the slave-owners precisely to make his point.

The cruelty and sadism of the French slave regime on Saint-Domingue, and other slave regimes in Jamaica and in other colonies in the Caribbean and elsewhere, was justified in part because of the idea, propounded among the slave-owners and their supporters, that Black people were inherently and pathologically vengeful. If they, the slavers, let the boot up from their neck for a moment, revenge would be swift. And so pre-emptive, pre-eventive revenge was normalized as necessary.

The slave-owning class was able to hide their own vengefulness by projecting it onto their Other. I return to this pattern multiple times in my book, though it’s not altogether an original point, having been made in a different way by Fanon with regards to questions of violence.

Revenge Capitalism was published a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic and includes some of your thoughts on this and the “new normal” we might be facing. Added to this we have the huge uprisings in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. How does the current moment look in terms of capitalism’s vengefulness and a potential politics of avenging?

I think what both the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd and others have done is to once again reveal the naked vengefulness of racial capitalism for all to see. In the case of the pandemic, the rates of suffering and mortality from the disease, and the rates of economic precarity it has exacerbated, track very closely to the often-unspoken value hierarchies of life within the merciless form of capitalism that we endure today. In the United Kingdom or the United States, Black and racialized people are suffering at much higher rates. Proletarians, working paycheck to paycheck, are being hit hardest.

Once again, this so-called natural disaster is anything but “natural.” It is a disaster that emerges from revenge capitalism and it reaffirms and re-entrenches revenge capitalism. Again, here the vengeance is the systemic outcome, not the explicit intent, though of course we have the old Malthusians creeping into public discourse, arguing in various ways that death, poverty and pain are somehow all for the best.

I think the context of the pandemic and the systemic revenge it reveals helps explain why the murder of George Floyd has kicked off huge demonstrations not only in the United States but all around the world. First and foremost they are demonstrations for the value of Black lives, but in a way they stand in for, and demand, a kind of re-evaluation of the value of life beyond the hierarchies and metric of global racial capitalism. And that’s why I think so many people identify with them, even if they’re not Black or from the United States.

The police murder of George Floyd revealed that the United States is not finished with taking revenge on Black people for being Black. It has been the modus operandi of the United States since the British colonial period, which was built on slavery and on recruiting elements of the non-Black working class population into a fidelity to American capitalism in part through anti-Black racism.

In a strange way, completely unwarranted and often sadistic, spectacularized revenge against Black people has been the means by which certain forms of class compromise have been secured, which has allowed the United States to turn into the world’s pre-eminent superpower. So systemic anti-Black revenge is in a sense a global question.

That revenge continues apace. It’s a revenge that is sometimes systemic and structural in the forms of poverty, ill-health and environmental racism that Black people in the United States are made to endure, as well as worse access to health services, social services, educational services and the like. But it’s also a systemic revenge that often rears its head as vigilante or freelance violence by police, by military, and everyday white people, who entitle themselves to enact forms of anti-Black violence, for a whole variety of trumped-up reasons.

When we zoom out far enough we can recognize this pattern of anti-Black revenge at the core of the United States national economy, from housing to labor to the military to health. And it has to be admitted that this is not just a kind of cultural pathology of the United States. It has been integral to the formation and the sustenance of the United States capitalist economy and, via that, the world economy, which today continues to pivot around the United States, though perhaps that’s shifting.

That’s to say nothing of the way that other colonial powers historically have benefited from the enslavement of Black people and from regimes of exploitation and extraction based on racialized violence. We could also point to, for instance, the British exploitation of the subcontinent of India, or of North-American Indigenous people and on and on and on and on. The myth of the vengeful Other has been used in all these cases to justify the normalized, banalized and acceptable vengeance of regimes of racial oppression and exploitation.

You say in the preface that much of what you see where you live in the city of Thunder Bay embodies this systemic revenge. You’re involved there with a community platform, Wiindo Debwe Mosewin.  Could you talk about that work a bit and how this has influenced your perspective?

Thunder Bay is a small, remote Canadian city that, to cut a long story short, vies to be the nation’s “capital” of racism, murder and violence. Recent independent government reports have found widespread systemic racism in the city’s police and other bodies.

Wiindo Debwe Mosewin is an all-volunteer feminist, abolitionist street patrol. It’s run by both Indigenous Anishinaabe people and non-Indigenous people (like me) here in the city. And its work is generally to patrol the streets, through a variety of means: we drive around in cars or trucks or on bikes or in kayaks. We simply try and keep people safe in a number of different ways. Sometimes we hand out food and water to people. We ask after people. We carry naloxone (narcan) kits in case people are having overdoses because opioids are a huge problem here. We’re trained in nonviolent de-escalation tactics and we do a variety of other activities simply to, as we put it, produce safety in our community.

We’re inspired, on the one hand, by the long legacy of abolitionist ideas that come largely out of the Black radical tradition, mostly in the US, which encourage us to begin the work now to produce the alternative forms of community safety and care that are going to replace police and prisons. But the other major influence is Indigenous governance systems. The terminology here gets a little bit difficult in English because the language is obsessed with very clear distinctions between realms of politics, spirituality, science and art. Within Anishinaabe thought, as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson makes clear, those lines are not in any way drawn in the same way and there is an awareness of fluidity.

So Indigenous governance as we practice it in Wiindo Debwe Mosewin, for instance, instructs us that we work with a millennia-old clan system that the Anishinaabe have developed in order to orchestrate a kind of division of social labor to reproduce society based on values of care, peace, autonomy and reciprocity. We work with various forms of traditional healing — both in terms of the use of plant medicines but also in terms of ceremonies that help people overcome trauma and pain. We are trying to practice “two-eyed seeing”: merging non-Indigenous theories and ways with radical Indigenous world-views and practices. We practice a kind of “sous-veillance,” a careful watching of power “from below.”

There are a number of ways in which this work has influenced Revenge Capitalism. One is that I’m living in a place where colonialism is still being waged in all of its naked violence. In the last few weeks we just had another Indigenous person die in custody at the jail here, and nobody asks any questions. The rates of overdose from opioids are staggering. We just had another report — and we get reports all the time — of Indigenous people being beaten up by the police, or just by white people driving around, beaten up for sport.

This occurs in a context where the Canadian nation state, in spite of claims to a kind of neoliberal “reconciliation” with Indigenous people and an official policy of gentle multiculturalism, depends on this violence in order to continue to enact the kinds of resource extractive regimes that are the bedrock of its capitalist political economy: mining, pipelines, building new highways, new railways.

This has always been the political economy of Canada, and it is, as Patrick Wolfe observed, dependent on the elimination of Indigenous people as land-based, sovereign peoples. So I have a horrifying front-row seat to observe precisely how vengeful capitalism can be at its colonial frontiers.

Second, in being directly involved with a group like this, which has as one of its tasks to observe and catalogue police violence especially against Indigenous people, I see how an apparatus that commits itself to law and order can actually act vengefully, though no one necessarily intends that vengeance or would admit it. Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and other abolitionist thinkers in the United States have already alerted us to the fact that prisons and their associated carceral apparatus are — profitable — mechanisms of retribution rather than civil protection, let alone healing and reform.

In a similar way, the kinds of revenge politics that I talk about throughout the book operate largely anonymously and silently, through systems and structures. And on the flipside, the police in Thunder Bay, like everywhere, advertize themselves as necessary to prevent revenge. The great lie of the state-form and its police is that without them, society would descend into “barbarism,” which is silently defined as the unmitigated and constant eruption of revenge.

Finally, here in Thunder Bay, and through Wiindo Debwe Mosewin, I’ve been exposed to some of the ways in which Indigenous cultures have, for millennia, created frameworks for healing, for conflict resolution, and for thinking about caring for each other and caring for society that don’t rely on top-down oppressive forms of power, and are not vengeful.

These methods are, in fact, about curing and overcoming vengefulness in order to create the greater good. It’s a very different model of thinking about law and thinking about justice and thinking about solidarity. I want to stress, however, that I have only glimpsed such frameworks and practices by proximity and would certainly not claim to in any way comprehend them, except by contrast to what is today the colonial norm.

Your whole framework is very much informed by abolitionist thought, stemming mostly from the Black radical tradition in North America as I understand it. One aspect of this is the call for treason to whiteness; could you give an historical or contemporary example of how this looks in practice? There’s a risk this call can be reduced to simply another slogan or can seem just vague or overly abstract.

The example I would take from my own context is that just before the pandemic Canada was in a massive national uprising against oil and gas — including fracked gas — pipelines, which had become extremely charismatic and successful in shutting down large swathes of the country in protest. It was centered around the struggle of a particular Indigenous nation, the Wet’suwet’en, in the Westernmost province of British Columbia, but it had broadened out to massive movements throughout the nation-state.

Indigenous people and, importantly, many non-Indigenous people were blockading highways and railways and occupying government offices and the private property of corporations. This massive and historical uprising was, in fact, threatening to unseat the reigning government. Sadly, given the ecology of global news media, this uprising received little attention, but was much more threatening to power in many ways than the more widely-covered — and also very important — Standing Rock protests south of the border in 2016.

First and foremost, this was an expression of a new generation of Indigenous struggle that is profoundly well-organized, militant and strategic. But I think it’s also a great example of non-Indigenous people in Canada putting their bodies on the line and breaking ranks with the kind of racial capitalist and colonial order of the country.

We are, in a sense, saying that, in fact, our futures depend on Indigenous rights — not simply rights under the Canadian constitution within liberal capitalist democracy, but rights derived from Indigenous sovereignty and which are based on a completely different relationship to land and community beyond the liberal capitalist norm.

That, to me, is a kind of treason against whiteness, and it is important to stress that much of the leadership among non-Indigenous people in these movements do not benefit from whiteness. When I speak of treason to whiteness, a term I take up from a longer history of abolitionist thought in the United States, I am speaking of treason towards the structuring ideal of whiteness, the horizon of whiteness.

Canada as a project — even before it was officially an independent nation — was founded on settler colonialism: the elimination of Indigenous people to make way for white settlement and resource extraction. Today, that settler colonialism has been predicated on a kind of state-sponsored multiculturalism, where so long as Canadians from a whole variety of different backgrounds are willing to accept that their future is playing a role in a system of capitalism based on resource exploitation and the exploitation of labor, then everybody has a place.

Of course, it is a forked-tongued promise, because non-white Canadians still suffer profound racism in all sorts of different ways, and there is profound racism in the immigration system which permits certain bodies to even become “Canadian” in the first place. But the myth in Canada is that as long as you come here and you work hard and you contribute to the kind of mainstream capitalist society that is based on the seizure of Indigenous land and the exploitation of Indigenous territories, then you are welcome. This is the horizon of whiteness I am speaking of, of which my family, for instance, are the beneficiaries — today having “become white,” though once they would not have been accepted as such.

What we saw in those uprisings was a mass treason to that mythology, to the mythology of white-led multiculturalism that has been the mainstay of Canadian politics for the last 50 years, and is certainly central to the brand of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Importantly, it’s not centered on a bunch of people who benefit from whiteness getting up and saying “we’re no longer white” or even “we’re so sorry for our white privilege,” but rather non-Indigenous people standing together with Indigenous people and saying “we demand a different future beyond racial capitalism, beyond the colonial project.” We do not know what that will look like, we are inventing it.

One concept I encountered for the first time in the book was reconcilophilia, which definitely gives a name to a very familiar process. You use it in relation to the palatable images of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, and a general top-down push to gloss over deep social conflicts as fully resolved in our times, no longer up for discussion.

Yes, I identify this tendency towards reconcilophilia with the representations of Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. But I want to begin by saying that the reconcilophilia I’m identifying and critiquing is not about those revolutionaries themselves. I’m identifying the way that their legacies have been taken up. Each of those figures was a very complex, problematic historical figure in his own right, each with a sophisticated, contextual and historically specific political philosophy within which peace, reconciliation and forgiveness had a strategic place.

My critique of reconcilophilia is of a discourse, common on the left too, in which this complexity and history is erased in favor of the decontextualized fetishization of abstract ideals of forgiveness and non-violence. Such manoeuvres, which I think are actually the narcissism of the privileged, participate in a violent erasure of all of the other radicals in the milieu of these three revolutionaries who were presenting other strategies and whose activities were part of the context of these thinkers’ victories.

Who does the fetishization of these figures serve? My argument in the book is that, ultimately, it serves those who want to maintain and defend the status quo. It maintains the idea that true social change can’t happen through violence or anger, which is patently false, and, further, that those who are dissatisfied should satisfy themselves with using the established channels for social change, for instance electoral democracy.

The fetishization of these three figures is used as a kind of bludgeon to castigate and demonize anyone who says that these mainstream methods of creating change are not enough. Were those three revolutionary figures still alive, they would likely be horrified at the way in which their legacy has been manipulated to attack the very people that they would have stood in solidarity with, and in the hands of the very people who would have condemned them.

We’ve seen the way that the spirit of Dr Martin Luther King gets invoked by the most heinous racists in the United States in order to try and restore order, claiming he would have condemned the riots and uprisings. We’ve seen the way in which the legacy of Nelson Mandela, all his complexity reduced to a kind of liberal sloganeering, gets wielded in order to defend neocolonial regimes and belittle those who are standing up to them around the world.

There is a way that the love of the abstract ideal of reconciliation operates as a kind of vindictive tool in the hands of those who want to defend and maintain the status quo. This is a key point in Glen Coulthard’s excellent book Red Skin, White Masks in which he catalogues all the way Canadian settler colonialism is advanced through compelling Indigenous people to reconcile themselves with it, and the importance of resentment and refusal for opening new — or restoring old — methods of thinking and feeling together in revolutionary ways.

One theme of your book is the parallels today with the rise of Nazism and fascism in Europe in the 20th Century. You frame the working class up to that period as having had a kind of conscious drive to avenge. Could you discuss your reading of Walter Benjamin and his take on the complicity of the German Social Democrats of the time in paving the way for Nazism?

Walter Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher and critic active in the 1920s and 30s who died while fleeing the Nazis in the early 1940s. He worked on his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” throughout the last years of his life and the text, in a way, acts as a summary of his final thoughts. It is a brilliant and quite moving essay that I’ve returned to many times.

The particular thing I draw on in this book is the following strange passage:

Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed [proletarian] class itself is the depository of historical knowledge. In Marx it appears as the last enslaved class, as the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden. This conviction, which had a brief resurgence in the Spartacist group, has always been objectionable to Social Democrats. Within three decades they managed virtually to erase the name of Blanqui [the formidable “professional” French revolutionary of the 19th century], though it had been the rallying sound that had reverberated through the preceding century. Social Democracy thought fit to assign to the working class the role of the redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.

To recap, the Social Democrats were the dominant workers’ political party in Germany. In the context of the First World War, there were splits within that party between a radical communist flank led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg called the Sparticists and a reformist, conservative flank led by Friedrich Ebert and others. As the First World War ground to a halt, there was a revolution in Germany that ousted the aristocracy and a section of the bourgeoisie, and the Social Democrats took power. But in order to take and maintain power, Ebert and the other leading Social Democrats essentially ordered the execution of Luxemburg and Liebknecht to prevent them from leading a full-scale communist revolution.

Now, one can never propose counterfactual histories conclusively, but it’s very likely that, had the Sparticists actually successfully had their revolution, the whole history of the world would have been very different. Had both Germany and Russia manifested communist governments, the Soviet Union might not have been led to take its fateful turn towards authoritarianism and militarism, and many other countries might have also had communist revolutions in that period, thanks to the support of these two nations. The 20th century might have been completely different.

In any case, 20 years after the murder of the Sparticist leadership, when Benjamin is writing the “Theses on the Philosophy of History” under the cloud of Nazi rule, he returns to this moment, arguing that not only did the Social Democrats quench the revolutionary moment, they also did something that would eventually lead to the rise of the Nazis: they momentarily placated the working class by insisting that, essentially, the movement towards their liberation would come through reformist progress and the march of technology.

But, as Benjamin writes, “this cuts the sinews of its greatest strength,” a resentment and spirit of sacrifice that have always animated working class struggle in some way. He goes on to say that the revolutionary dream of the working class is not only of liberated grandchildren but of avenged ancestors: Capitalism and systems of domination need to be made to pay for all of the generations upon generations of struggle that have been quashed and destroyed, for the accumulation of misery they represent. I’ve always found this passage extremely enigmatic and really promising and I think it speaks to at least two things.

On the one hand, I think what Benjamin is saying is that, when the Social Democrats refused to take up this proletarian spirit of vengeance and sacrifice and mobilize them towards collective liberation, these spirits or affects became resources for the authoritarian imagination. Vengeance, of course, was perhaps the key affect of Nazism even if, like today, fascists and racists then wrapped themselves in the flag of “love” of the nation and the race.

But what is that avenging of the ancestors that Benjamin is speaking of? We can interpret it in a very direct sense as the actual avenging of the lives of parents and grandparents or children or other loved-ones who literally starved in the late-teens and early twenties of the 20th century because of various capitalist cruelties, domestic or foreign. And we can talk about the “legitimate desire for revenge” — to quote Fanon — that working people might have towards their bosses and other people who constantly fuck them over. But I think Benjamin is not just talking about the particular targets or acts of revenge; he is also talking about avenging as a kind of revolutionary overturning of society so that the kind of violence and cruelty that has been exacted upon you, as an oppressed or exploited person, can never be enacted on anyone else ever again.

The deepest form of revenge against capitalism isn’t just to line a bunch of capitalists up against a wall and shoot them, because, of course, those same guns will soon be used upon you or your comrades. Rather, a true avenging it is to abolish the source of capitalism and of capitalists to begin with, to radically transform the nature of power

Finally, staying with the topic of anger, and the pressures to deny, contain, or manage excesses of anger — could you touch on how you look at this towards the end of the book? You engage with the question of the anger of the marginalized, the oppressed, particularly from abolitionist and feminist perspectives, but also that of certain increasingly precarious and outright reactionary white populations.

In the book I try to draw a line between revenge and anger. They’re obviously connected, but it’s useful to hold them apart for critical and political reasons. In the book’s conclusion I engage with the Black feminist tradition, of thinking through the “uses of anger,” to paraphrase Audre Lorde, and the importance of dwelling with anger and learning from anger, which she and bell hooks propose.

What I think both of them suggest is that there’s a strong tendency to try and quash anger and to sweep anger under the rug because we think it looks bad in movements. But the question is, to whom does it look bad, and — to go back to Benjamin’s question — what is risked when we insist that anger be banished? Neither of them speak about revenge explicitly that I could find, but I think both speak more generally to the histories of feminist thought about how to respond to power and domination.

As we discussed, there is a long history of white supremacist cis/hetero-patriarchal capitalism weilding the accusation of revenge against its Others as a way to disguise and normalize its of banal and unceasing revenge, and for perhaps this reason these thinkers rarely engage the term directly. But I take from their work inspiration for my own attempt to separate out this notion of avenging in contrast to revenge.

Avenging is not about seizing power and exacting harm on those who created or benefited from systems of oppression. Rather, it strives to abolish the source of harm and oppression in the first place. I think both hooks and Lorde are suggesting that we need to develop structures and capacities for anger that allow us to move towards this kind of avenging.

At the same time, I think we are called to engage also with the rage of the entitled, the so-called “privileged,” and those who are the beneficiaries of systems of power. The success of right-wing politicians of late has been, in part, their ability to whip up and harness that anger. It is, of course, misdirected, but ultimately it emerges from a circumstance of pain, alienation and uncertainty.

One of the examples I use in the book is the opioid crisis in the United States, which has so far claimed the lives of at least half a million people in that country, and claims dozens of lives every year in Thunder Bay. It has affected Americans from all backgrounds, but for various reasons it has been presented as almost exclusively affecting poor white people, part of the staggering and sorrowful rise of so-called “deaths from despair” that has seen life expectancy drop among middle and working class white people in many US jurisdictions.

One of the things I argue in the book is that we need to recognize that the epidemic of prescription opioid use in the US thrived in contexts where white people felt alienated, or where they’ve been rendered surplussed by capitalism, for instance in Appalachia or the Rust Belt.  Deindustrialization has essentially left many people without a meaningful means to contribute to their society and they are increasingly dependent on various forms of government aid. These are white people who imagined that they were entitled to a kind of belonging and security within the racial capitalist state, that a promise is now being betrayed. In the absence of structural analysis of capitalism it is very easily whipped into a kind of racist lather of political anger by the likes of Donald Trump, and the kind of media properties like Fox News, on which he depends and in which his fate is entangled.

I think what we need to reckon with is the fact that on the one hand, yes, the sources of the anger are real: the existential experience of being basically forgotten and abandoned by society is a real experience for those people. So, too, is the real experience of people who are even not so economically precarious but simply are alienated, deeply alienated, even by their success within the racial capitalist order. For instance, those who are increasingly addicted to prescription opioids in exurbs of major cities or in the suburbs, who actually are not doing that badly relative to other Americans, and yet who still feel that their life is meaningless and boring and has nothing to offer.

We need to somehow, on the one hand, be able to acknowledge and even to a degree sympathize with that pain, at the very same time that we’re able to hold in our minds the reality that the reason why many racialized people, and especially Black people, in the United States are not feeling alienated and betrayed by the American Dream is because they never were allowed to enjoy it in the first place. And that in fact the American Dream that is now being denied to so many white people, if it ever existed, was based on its denial to so many others. And, indeed, that revenge for the failure of the American Dream has historically often been exacted against non-white people not only in the realm of reactionary politics but also sickening freelance violence.

So there’s a sense that we need to be able to hold these multiple contradictory things together if we’re going to understand the complexity of the currents of racism and capitalism in our moment. It’s like complex climatic systems: even those with access to the best models and the most amazing super-computers have a difficult time modelling the effects of climate change because there’s so many factors, there’s so much going on.

There is a kind of constant work of trying to read the data, interpret the data, theorize the data, and come up with a conclusive picture. And yet, just in the same way that climate scientists don’t deny the effects of anthropogenic climate change just because they can’t create a perfect model, in the same way we can not deny the existence or the importance of the entanglement of racism, capitalism and patriarchy, simply because it’s too complex to theorize in one model. We need to somehow find ways of dwelling with that complexity, and sharing that complexity, and educating ourselves about it. And of course, acting.

The post Unraveling capitalism’s revenge: An interview with Max Haiven in ROAR appeared first on Max Haiven.

Empires of Pain: A Story of Racism, Opioids and Revenge (graphic novel)

It is my great pleasure to present “Empires of Pain: A story of Racism, Opioids and Revenge,” a short 15-page web-comic I produced along with Hugh Goldring of Petroglyph/AdAstra Comix and beautifully illustrated by Pia Alizé Hazarika. –> empiresofpain.com

The comic is an adaptation of chapter 4 of my recently published book Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts titled “Our opium wars: pain, race, and the ghosts of empire.”  The book is available worldwide in print and ebook formats from Pluto and can be purchased at a 30% discount in using the code REVENGE30 at checkout.
The whole comic can be read, downloaded and shared at empiresofpain.com
The comic also includes a short essay introducing the web-comic in light of last week’s $8 billion court settlement that will see Purdue Pharma, the firm with so much blood on its hands for the crisis, go bankrupt and dissolve. It also includes an audio interview about the topic with me from CS Soong of KPFA’s program Against the Grain .

For those of you who are teachers, it is my hope that this web-comic might serve as a useful classroom tool to get students talking a bout the entanglements of racist, capitalism, policy, history, society and movements. Please do let me know what they think!

The post Empires of Pain: A Story of Racism, Opioids and Revenge (graphic novel) appeared first on Max Haiven.

Orcas are not taking nature’s revenge, but we should

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

Here is also an audio version:

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

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

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

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

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

The enduring appeal of the “revenge of nature”

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

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

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

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

It is capitalism, not humans

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

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

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

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

“Nature” does not exist

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

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

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

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

Human narcissism

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

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

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

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

Big nature as conspiracy theory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Avenging nature?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is also an audio version:

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

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

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

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

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

The enduring appeal of the “revenge of nature”

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

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

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

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

It is capitalism, not humans

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

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

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

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

“Nature” does not exist

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

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

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

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

Human narcissism

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

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

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

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

Big nature as conspiracy theory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Avenging nature?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thirteen Theses Toward a Materialist Theory of Revenge Capitalism

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

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

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