A Conversation with Max Haiven on Revenge Capitalism, October 9, 2021

Join Rachel Yarashus Patten and Lena Durkin in a conversation with Max Haiven about his recent book, Revenge Capitalism. Max is a writer, teacher, and the Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice at Lakehead University, where he co-directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL). His books include Revenge Capitalism (2020), Art after Money, Money after Art (2018), Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power (2014), and The Radical Imagination (2014). Haiven is also the editor of VAGABONDS, a series of short, radical books from Pluto Press.

From Pluto Press:

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.