Hi! Before our regularly scheduled episode of futile self-promotion on a burning/bonkers planet, a bit of personal news: I became a grandfather! WTF? Indeed! I’m very happy.
My son Riley and his partner Louise are not yet sharing photos of Joseph, so I invite you to imagine, instead, a snapshot of a world worthy of all our descendents. I believe we can give them a future of peace, abundance and joy if we struggle together today.
Unfortunately, I will not be eligible to retire or get seniors discounts for at least another 23 years, which I feel is profoundly unfair.
London event on activism, cognitive dissonance and the radical imagination - Feb 23
Join me and co-conspirator Sarah Stein Lubrano have recently launched Sense & Solidarity, a platform where people who want to radically change the world can learn together and build individual and collective capacity.
Building on Sarah's focus on cognitive dissonance and ideology and my focus on social movements and the radical imagination, Sense & Solidarity aims to create bridges between critical theory and activism and organizing.
On Friday February 23 we'll be having a little event in London!
Location: Pelican House (at Bethnal Green)
At 4pm, Max and Sarah will each give a short talk about their recent research on the radical imagination and cognitive dissonance respectively and their relevance for organising and activism in our current moment, followed by a Q and A.
At 5pm, there will then be a drinks and snacks reception and attendees will be encouraged to share stories about their own questions and experiences on the topic.
Finally, at 7pm onward we will play a variety of radical board games developed by Max and others. Come for one or all of the parts of the evening, meet others with similar interests, and help us improve both our praxis and our games!
Berlin launch of “The Exploits of Play” podcast - Feb 26
As dedicated readers may recall, over the past few months I've been working with the Weird Economies to develop a podcast: The Exploits of Play, about the increasingly central role of play and games in a moment of capitalism... that just keeps getting weirder…
We're ready to launch episode one! If you're in Berlin, join us February 26 at 19h30 at diffrakt: centre for the theoretical periphery for a conversation with me and Jay Jordan, one of the podcast's guests and also co-author (wish Isa Fremeaux) of the 2021 VAGABONDS book We Are Nature Defending Itself. Jay, who lives at and cultivates the ZAD (Zone to Defend) near Nante in France, is an OG radical trickster, notorious for his protagonism with Reclaim the Streets, the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army and as a co-wizard behind the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination.
Play has moved from the margin to the centre of global capitalism. It’s not just the multi-billion dollar video game, gambling and sports industries.
This trend also includes the profound influence of “game theory” over finance and government policy and the gamification of everything (romance, learning, health).
From Game of Thrones to Squid Game to The Hunger Games to Fortnite, popular culture reflects the widespread feeling: we’re trapped in a high-stakes unwinnable game. Is it any wonder more and more people are breaking the rules Following the conversation, we’ll bring out the games!
We’ll be playing a beta version of Max’s new card game Billionaires and Guillotines as well as other radical and anti-capitalist and anti-colonial board and card games.
Brazil - late March
I’ll be speaking at the Power Play 2 conference, March 20-22, in João Pessoa, Brazil, hosted by the Laboratório de Pesquisa em Mídia, Entretenimento e Sociedade (LENS) at the Universidade Federal da Paraíba (UFPB).
If you are in Brazil or know folks there, I plan to visit a few cities and would be grateful for recommendations and connections.
On Cuddling Vancouver launch - Feb 15
Phanuel Antwi's startling, insightful, soul-moving On Cuddling: Loved to Death in the Racial Embrace, which was published late last year as part of the VAGABONDS series that I edit for Pluto Press, continues to be warmly received by the world.
You can join us on the evening of February 15 at the Vancouver Public Library's Cenral branch to hear him read from the book and discuss it with Cecily Nicholson and Nadine Attewell.
Aceite de Palma: La Grassa del Imperio
Madrid's venerable publishing house Alianza has just published the Spanish translation of my 2022 Pluto Press book Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire under the title Aceite de Palma: La Grassa del Imperio.
El aceite de palma se puede encontrar prácticamente en cualquier producto de nuestra vida diaria: desde alimentos procesados o medicamentos hasta cosméticos o componentes industriales. Recurso indispensable y culturalmente relevante durante milenios para numerosas poblaciones de África Occidental, el descubrimiento de su utilidad y versatilidad lo convirtió en objeto de codicia para las potencias europeas, propiciando primero, y facilitando después, su empeño colonizador e imperialista. En este libro singular y sugerente, Max Haiven lo toma como pretexto para contarnos una historia que no sigue un orden cronológico ni convencional, sino que entrevera historia, cultura, política y economía en temas, líneas temporales y argumentos que se mezclan e interpenetran, para alumbrar un texto que denuncia la mecánica perversa y nociva del capitalismo global, «un enorme sistema organizado en torno a la práctica indescifrable del sacrificio humano, que permanece oculta a plena vista».
Worker as Futurist
Over the past years I've been working with a fantastic team to support rank-and-file Amazon workers to write short, speculative fiction about The world After Amazon. Later this year we will publish their stories in a book, online and also in audio format as an audiobook and podcast.
Here is a 20minute presentation I gave about the project at least year's Historical Materialism conference in London.
You can also listen to the 13-episode podcast we produced last year, featuring interviews with luminary SF authors, (anti-)Amazon activists and experts on what the company's rise means for the future of capitalism and the struggle against it.
Finance Capital and the Ghosts of Empire
Over the past seven years, I've been working with Clea Bourne, Johnna Montgomerie and Paul Gilbert on a collaborative editorial project that connects the history and present of financialization to empire, colonialism and the making of race and racism.
Last year, Manchester University Press published Entangled Legacies: Race, Finance and Inequality, a book with over 25 chapters with a global view, written in accessible language with students in mind.
And now the Journal of Cultural Economy has published our introduction to a special section we four edited, which explores how notions of ghosts and haunting can be vital in helping us make the links.
This special section also includes "For the refusal of unpayable debts: An artists’ roundtable with Dele Adeyemo, Ahmed Isamaldin, Bahar Noorizadeh, and Gary Zhexi Zhang"