Palm Oil is out; Revenge dossier; Berlin events and more...
Somehow, everything seems to happen all at once...
Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire now out
My short book, Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire, is now out, part of the the VAGABONDS series that I edit for Pluto Press.
The book has received really gratifying endorsements!
Silvia Federici: “Powerfully demonstrates how, by following the history of a key commodity, we can reconstruct the logic of imperial capitalism: its destruction of land and bodies, its drive to constantly reduce the means of our reproduction, its relentless production of oppressive regimes. The story it narrates is crucial for our understanding of the terrains of struggle and the material conditions of solidarity between different social justice movements.”
Andrew Ross: “Jampacked with insights that will surprise and haunt readers, Haiven's arguments about the centrality of palm oil to colonial history and modern life are compelling, persuasive, and far-reaching.”
Raj Patel: “Whether you're reading this on a screen or a printed page, you're implicated in the global palm oil trade. In this lovely book, Max Haiven takes us on a whirlwind tour of how that came to be, guiding us through the workings of the global engines that have long been lubricated by the ‘grease of empire’”
Pluto has shared a short excerpt from the book.
From the introduction:
We find ourselves in a system of racial capitalism that appears as a vast, globe-spanning system of mystified human sacrifice, hidden in plain sight. The stories I tell in Palm Oil trace this system’s contours and seek answers in its past. These are stories of how one largely invisible thing emerged from the nexus of capitalism, colonialism, and empire to define the cruelties of our world. Secreted within it is a story of our collective power to transform the world for the better. The story of palm oil is our story. This almost magical and ubiquitous substance is part of the way our bodies reproduce themselves and the way our material world is reproduced. It is a key element in the vortex of labor, commodities, meaning-making, and social relationships that make up the world in which we live…
This book’s conclusion meditates on what it might mean to move beyond the framework of consumer activism and, instead, recognize in palm oil our own reflection. We are a species uniquely capable of transforming ourselves as we trans- form the world. The transformation of the palm oil industry will be led by those most affected by it, but it will be part of a worldwide rebellion against the cosmology of the market and its confinement of our imaginations. This necessarily implies we reimagine what it means to cooperate and become plurally human.
You can:
Order the book from Pluto
Request a review copy (or email jamesk [at] plutobooks.com)
Talk to us about organizing an event (email events [at] maxhaiven.com)
May 8 Berlin launch
Stay tuned for more information, but for now, please join us on May 8 at Moosdorfstr. 7-9 from 15-18h when we’ll launch not only Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire but also Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics by Drew Pendergrass & Troy Vettese.
Stay tuned for more events in London and elsewhere.
Revenge Politics, Revenge Economy, Revenge Culture dossier in Social Text Periscope
Social Text, the venerable journal of critical theory, has published a dossier of short pieces on revenge in their online annex, Periscope. The pieces either respond to or depart from themes raised in my 2018 book Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts.
The dossier includes:
Introduction: Revenge Politics, Revenge Economy, Revenge Culture
Theses on Revenge Capitalism by Max Haiven
And the Last Shall be First: On the (Im)possibility of Revenge by Bedour Alagraa
Climate, Literature, Revenge by S. L. Lim
Figurations of Naziism as a Foil for (Violent) Revenge Fantasies: Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and the Making of a “New White Man” Post-9/11 by Anna-Esther Younes
A Work Fatality: Parasite and Class Antagonism by Eunsong Kim
The Vengeance of Unpayable Debts: Art, Activism, and Agitation in Puerto Rico and the United States a conversation with Hannah Appel and Frances Negrón-Muntaner
From the introduction:
To dwell with revenge as a category of critical thought is not to advocate for it as a political strategy. As Fanon warns, “‘a legitimate desire for revenge’ cannot sustain a war of liberation.” Rather, I take all the contributions to this dossier to be inviting us to recognize that the age of revenge politics is already upon us, and has been with us for some time, in spite of claims that ours is (or was) a world of the “capitalist peace” at the proverbial “end of history.” These contributions indicate that revenge is not simply an atavistic politics of reaction existing in the borderlands of global racial capitalism’s empire but, rather, they are at work at the system’s center. These texts challenge us to grapple with the idea that the rise of revenge politics today, where reactionary forces seem to promise no brighter future but only more and better vengeance, might be a dialectic expression of an underlying revenge economy. They show how we might best glimpse the broad shape and manifold complexities of this revenge economy through cultural works which rehearse its dreams and its nightmares.
Notes towards a theory of risk management as human sacrifice (and vice versa)
My essay “Notes towards a theory of risk management as human sacrifice (and vice versa)” has appeared in the online almanac of Schemas of Uncertainty, a series of talks at Amsterdam’s Sandberg Institute. I first presented these ideas in an online lecture in November 2021 and the paper unpacks some of the themes that informed Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire.
In this world order some are destined to be sacrificed, burdened with lives of unmanageable risk, yet who will be blamed for their failure to manage risk and thereby thrive. The sacrificial victim appears to have chosen their fate and, in so doing, consented to it.
Recasting the future with Amazon workers
Graeme Webb and Xenia Benivolski and I have been working on a project where we host science/speculative fiction reading and film clubs for Amazon workers to help cultivate the radical imagination of those forced to work to build someone else’s corporate dystopian future. We have a piece forthcoming in the forthcoming Routledge International Handbook for Creative Futures, edited by Alfonso Montuori and Gabrielle Donnelly and you can read a prepub draft.
Rank and file Amazon workers themselves may have the most important insights about how to challenge the company’s future-making machine. The wager of our project is that, by creating welcoming, convivial, and creative spaces we can work with Amazon workers to awaken their secret insight into the future-making (or future-killing) power of their exploiter. By using the genre of SF, so pivotal to Amazon’s foundation and operations, we might be able to labour together to envision a near-future world beyond Amazon’s grasp, where the potential to co-create a future is shared democratically, rather than hoarded by a corporate oligarchy.
Things in Berlin
I’m in Berlin until September, doing a number of things.
I am a resident at a new residency centre at Moos, an urban village and experimental placemaking hub near Treptower Park.
Actually, we’re having an open studio on Friday and Saturday (April 22-23) from 19h-22h and you can drop by. I’ll be presenting my books and also some experimental board games I’m working on.
I’m also working with Cassie Thornton and Phanuel Antwi on a project about radical dreaming over at transmediale’s new studio space in Wedding. You can listen to a podcast they produced about our project. Expect more info soon!
I’ll be at the Miss Read bookfair April 29-May 1 presenting VAGABONDS at an event and a table alongside my comrade Marc Herbst, who will be sharing the wonderful Journal of Aesthetics and Protest.
As you might recall, Leigh Claire la Berge and I are organizing a writing workshop this summer (July 11-15) in Berlin. Applications just closed and we were overwhelmed by the enthusiastic response!
Switched to Substack and Telegram
Dedicated readers will note that I’ve switched from Tinyletter to Substack. I’ve also started a Telegram channel to share news and views, which can be accessed here: https://t.me/maxhaivennews.