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188 pages

English

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Capitalism is in a profound state of crisis. Beyond the mere dispassionate cruelty of 'ordinary' structural violence, it appears today as a global system bent on reckless economic revenge; its expression found in mass incarceration, climate chaos, unpayable debt, pharmaceutical violence and the relentless degradation of common life.

In Revenge Capitalism, Max Haiven argues that this economic vengeance helps us explain the culture and politics of revenge we see in society more broadly. Moving from the history of colonialism and its continuing effects today, he examines the opioid crisis in the US, the growth of 'surplus populations' worldwide and unpacks the central paradigm of unpayable debts - both as reparations owed, and as a methodology of oppression.

Revenge Capitalism offers no easy answers, but is a powerful call to the radical imagination.

List of figures

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction: we want revenge

1. Toward a materialist theory of revenge

Interlude: Shylock’s vindication, or Venice’s bonds?

2. The work of art in an age of unpayable debts: social reproduction, geopolitics, and settler colonialism

Interlude: Ahab’s coin, or Moby Dick’s currencies?

3. Money as a medium of vengeance: colonial accumulation and proletarian practices

Interlude: Khloé Kardashian’s revenge body, or the Zapatisa nobody?

4. Our Opium Wars: pain, race, and the ghosts of empire

Interlude: V's vendetta, or Joker's retribution?

5. The dead zone: financialized nihilism, toxic wealth, and vindictive technologies

Conclusion: revenge fantasy or avenging imaginary?

Coda: 11 theses on revenge capitalism

Postscript: after the pandemic – against the vindictive normal

Notes

Index

Sujets

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Publié par	Pluto Press
Date de parution	20 mai 2020
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781786806185
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0748€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Revenge Capitalism
Revenge Capitalism
The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts
Max Haiven
First published 2020 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright Max Haiven 2020
The right of Max Haiven to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material in this book. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions in this respect and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 4055 5 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 4056 2 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 7868 0616 1 PDF eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0618 5 Kindle eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0617 8 EPUB eBook
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
Typeset by Swales Willis, Exeter
Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
Contents
List of figures
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: we want revenge
1 Toward a materialist theory of revenge
Interlude: Shylock s vindication, or Venice s bonds?
2 The work of art in an age of unpayable debts: social reproduction, geopolitics, and settler colonialism
Interlude: Ahab s coin, or Moby Dick s currencies?
3 Money as a medium of vengeance: colonial accumulation and proletarian practices
Interlude: Khlo Kardashian s revenge body, or the Zapatisa nobody?
4 Our Opium Wars: pain, race, and the ghosts of empire
Interlude: V s vendetta, or Joker's retribution?
5 The dead zone: financialized nihilism, toxic wealth, and vindictive technologies
Conclusion: revenge fantasy or avenging imaginary?
Coda: 11 theses on revenge capitalism
Postscript: after the pandemic - against the vindictive normal
Notes
Index
Figures
1. A Venetian ducat minted between 1400 and 1413.
2. Darren Cullen, Pocket Money Loans , 2014-2017.
3. Rebecca Belmore, Gone Indian (2009), performance in NIGHTSENSE.
4. Ecuadorian eight Escudos doubloon, minted between 1837 and 1843.
5. George Cruikshanks s Bank Restriction Note , 1819.
6. An early convict love token carved by or for a Thomas Tilley
7. American Buffalo Nickel, minted between 1913 and 1938.
8. George Washington Bo Hughes, The Dicer Hobo Nickel, 1939.
9. Kahn and Selesnick, Eisbergfreistadt (exhibition view), 2008.
10. Kahn and Selesnick, Eisbergfreistadt (Notgeld), 2008.
11. Joseph DeLappe, In Drones We Trust , 2014; Hands Up Don t Shoot! , 2014-2015; and Sea Level Rising , 2015.
Acknowledgments
This book is dedicated to all those who, daily, tame revenge in the name of a greater avenging, all those who endure oppression and indignity and, rather than unleashing their justified but apocalyptic fury, bide their time, build solidarity, and organize for a world where the source of their agony is abolished, not only for themselves and their kin, but for everyone. Every one of us only exists because of the wisdom of our ancestors, who chose the longer work of realizing a transformative avenging imaginary over the momentary satisfaction of fulfilling a revenge fantasy. We must carry on their work.
My thanks to: Phanuel Antwi, Richard Appignanesi, Franco Berardi, Francesca Coin, Mark Featherstone, Nick Fox-Gieg, Marc Garrett, Inte Gloerich, Hugh Goldring, Judy Haiven, Larry Haiven, Omri Haiven, Oliver Lerone Schultz, Charles Levkoe, Siddhartha Lokanandi, Geert Lovink, Frances Negr n-Muntaner, Georgios Papadopoulos, David Peerla, Amanda Priebe, Jerome Roos, CS Soong, Rob Stewart, Magdelena Taube, Rachel Warburton, Meagan Williams, and Krystian Woznicki. Thanks too to all the participants in the ReImagining Value Action Lab s Summer 2019 retreat who offered feedback, as well as to all those whose names I do not know who offered critiques and suggestions at various academic conferences and public presentations where these ideas were presented over the past few years. Candida Hadley, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Leigh Claire La Berge, Eli Meyerhoff, Christian Nagler, Scott Stoneman, Cassie Thornton, and Ezra Winton were kind enough to read parts of this manuscript and offer incisive feedback, which I mostly failed to heed. Many thanks to David Shulman and all at Pluto for their faith in and work on this book. I would like to also thank the Canadian people for their continued support of the Canada Research Chairs program of which I am the beneficiary, and my colleagues at Lakehead University for this opportunity. My greatest thanks go to Cassie Thornton, avenger.
Parts of Chapter 2 originally appeared in The Art of Unpayable Debts In The Sociology of Debt , edited by Mark Featherstone (London: Policy, 2019). Part of Chapter 3 originally appeared in Currencies of the Undercommons: The Hidden Ledger of Proletarian Money Sabotage in State Machines: Reflections and Actions at the Edge of Digital Citizenship, Finance, and Art , edited by Yiannis Colakides, Marc Garrett, and Inte Gloerich (Amsterdam: Institute for Network Cultures, 2019). Part of Chapter 4 originally appeared in Our Opium Wars: The Ghosts of Empire in the Prescription Opioid Nightmare in Third Text 32 (2018).
Preface
The genesis of this book is a story my father told me when I was still quite young about his own father, who died before I was born and after whom I am named. It s about the first real fight they had.
My grandfather was a survivor of Auschwitz and the Nazi Holocaust. Like many of his generation he rarely spoke of it to his children. For such survivors, struggling to thrive in a new country, dark things were better left behind.
Still, my father knew some stories of the camps. These were stories not so much of the monumental, almost clinical horror of industrialized murder, but of the sadistic and vindictive acts of individual guards, their swaggering impunity, the sick joy of power, the mockery, the humiliation: small stories of injustice and indignity that seem almost quaint in contrast to the scale of the atrocity.
As the Red Army approached the death camp in January of 1945, my Grandfather was among the 60,000 inmates evacuated by the Nazis and forced on a brutal march towards Germany. He recalled to my father the horrors he witnessed on that march and in the wake of war: the once-great city of Dresden reduced to something like the surface of the moon; the starving German women and children in tattered clothing; and, after the Red Army liberated the inmates, the vindictive brutality of the Russians toward any Nazi they found, soldier or civilian. How, my father asked, could you feel sorry for these people after what they did to you? His father would shrug.
I think this preternatural sympathy for the Germans was, in a deep but complex way, formative for my father, and he passed on to me a complex set of feelings about revenge. I m fascinated by revenge, but don t have the heart for it. I m too quick to forgive and to empathetically justify the disappointing or hurtful actions of others, even if they probably don t deserve it. As a child, my father was confused, angry even, at his own father s lack of apparent vengefulness. His father, a baker, worked with a German woman who had migrated to Canada after the war and steadfastly denied she or her compatriots knew anything of the camps, a (false) claim that my grandfather greeted with steadfast courtesy. It was a different time, he explained to my father.
George Orwell toured continental Europe immediately after the war and reported a story from South Germany. 1 There, he visited a hangar that had been transformed into a detention camp and was led to a special holding area, little more than a concrete floor, for suspected SS officers, likely those in charge of the concentration and death camps. Orwell s guide, a young Jewish man whose whole family had been killed in the camps, delighted in showing his guests the debased Nazis, once so powerful, now a pathetic mass of filthy, sick waste. I wondered whether the Jew was getting any real kick out of this new-found power that he was exercising writes Orwell.

I concluded that he wasn t really enjoying it, and that he was merely - like a man in a brothel, or a boy smoking his first cigar, or a tourist traipsing round a picture gallery - telling himself that he was enjoying it, and behaving as he had planned to behave in the days he was helpless.
Orwell continues, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.
But Orwell, for all his insight, missed something.
The break came in June of 1967, around dinner time. My father was returning home from his classes at the University of Toronto where he was dutifully studying to be a doctor to fulfill his working-class immigrant family s dream. He found his father gleefully cheering on Israeli tanks and planes as they pursued fleeing Egyptian soldiers in what would come to be known as the Six-Day War, which would result in the (still ongoing) occupation of Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. My grandfather, to that point, had generally had little time for Zionism, whose adherents he mocked as zealots, nor any particular attachment to the fortunes of the State of Israel. Yet in that moment my father saw in his father a terrifying vindictiveness, a passion for retribution.
What did these Arabs ever do to you to make you delight in their suffering?, he demanded. The two fought. My father, in his own clumsy way (he was on