Max Haiven is a writer and teacher and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination.
His most recent books are Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (2022), Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (2020) and Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (2018).
His writing has been published widely for both academic and non-academic readers on topics including the imagination, (anti-)capitalism, social movements, art and financialization.
Max has produced several research-driven podcasts about themes including financialization and anxiety (2020-21), conspiracy theories and cultures (2021-22), Amazon and science fiction (2023-4), capitalism and play (2024), and social movements and psychology (2024).
He also makes and thinks about games. He is currently working on a book for MIT Press tentatively titled The Player and the Played: Gamification, Financialization and (anti-)Fascism and a board game, Billionaires and Guillotines, to be published by Pluto Press in 2025..
He led the Worker as Futurist Project, which recently published The World After Amazon: Stories from Amazon Workers (2024) and a podcast, The Workers’ Speculative Society.
Haiven is editor of VAGABONDS, a series of short, radical books from Pluto Press whose latest titles include Nicholas Mirzoeff’s To See In the Dark: Palestine and Visual Activism Since October 7 and Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity by Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars & Tomislav Medak
He teaches in Lakehead University‘s English, Social Justice Studies and Media Studies programs and also directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL). As part of Sense & Solidarity, he offers strategy and communications workshops for social movements, produces podcasts and builds infrastructure for the next generation of transformative public intellectuals.
Max is currently a senior visiting research fellow at University College London’s Institute for Advanced Studies.
Coming in early 2025
Billionaires & Guillotines
In the board game Billionaires & Guillotines, players take on the role of 2-5 rival plutocrats vying to grab the wealth of the world before their actions trigger a revolution where they all lose… a lot more than their assets.
Recently...
Games
Podcasts
- What Do We Want?: A podcast about what brings movements for social, economic, and racial justice together... and drives them apart, produced in cooperation with Sense & Solidarity (2024 - 7 episodes)
- The Exploits of Play: Exploring the movement of games and play from the margins to the centre of ever-weirder capitalism, produced in cooperation with Weird Economies (2024 - 13 episodes))
- The Workers' Speculative Society: A podcast about the future Amazon is building and the workers and writers fighting back (2023 - 15 episodes))
- Conspiracy Games and Countergames: The rise of conspiracism in a gamified world (2021-2022 - 20 episodes)
- The Order of Unmanageable Risks: A Podcast about Capitalism and Its Anxieties (2020-2021 - 11 episodes)
Events
- Presentation, “Escape Velocities: From corporate storytelling to fascist worldbuilding,” Speculating the Future: Fictional Worlds and Financial Realities, Roskilde University (Denmark), 22-23 May 2025.
- Organizer, "The Truth? In This Economy?," symposium, Centre for Capitalism Studies, University College London (UK), 10 April 2025.
- Workshop, “Activist perspectives on the radical imagination,” Vienna University (Austria), 21 March 2025.
- Invited talk, “The uses and abuses of the radical imagination, Vienna University (Austria), 20 March 2025.
- Launch, Billionaires and Guillotines (game), Pelican House, London (UK), 11 March 2025.
- Invited talk, “Convoking the radical imagination: Games, workers’ SF and other participatory tactics for commoning research” Landscape Surgery research series, Royal Holloway University (London, UK) 4 March 2025.
- Invited talk, “Exploring agency and the radical imagination with games,” MSc Urban Studies, University College London (UK), 15 February 2025.
- Workshop, “The Word for Their World is Fortress,” DreamXchange (online), 9 February 2025.
- Keynote performance, “Speculative Methods with and Against Amazon,” Urban Speculations: Cities, Technologies, Futures, Leuphana University (Germany), 4 Feb 2025.
- Workshop, “Gaming theory: A board games making workshop,” Department of Media, Communication and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths University (UK), 22 Jan 2025.
- Invited talk, “Convoking the Radical Imagination: Several Practices,” PhD Advanced Practices, Goldsmiths University (UK), 16 Jan 2025.
I promise I did a lot in 2024, I just haven't found time to update this...
- Community talk, "The Player and the Played: Power and Resistance in Gamified Capitalism," Sofia, Bulgaria, November 2023.
- Invited talk, “Worker as Futurist,” Glasgow University Innovative Research Methodologies for a Digital Society, Glasgow (online), 1 December 2023.
- Workshop, "States of Pay and Play: Gamification and Capitalism,"American University in Bulgaria, Blagoevgrad, 27 November 2023.
- Invited talk, "Capitalism and the Radical Imagination: A Dialogue," American University in Bulgaria, Blagoevgrad, 27 November 2023.
- Invited talk, "The Player and the Played: Power and Resistance in Gamified Capitalism" at the PLATFORM visiting lecture series, Abertay University, Dundee, 22 November 2023.
- Workshop, "Writing After Their Future: A Sci-fi Fictioning Workshop with Max Haiven" at SALT. CLAY. ROCK. (on nuclear pasts and radiant futures) research assembly, NGBK, Berlin, November 18 2023.
- Paper, "Worker as Futurist: Speculative Fiction Writing as Workers Inquiry" at Historical Materialism 2023, London, November 2023.
- Play/panel, GameChangers board game, Panke Gallery, Berlin, 28 Septermber 2023.
- Discussion, "Working Writers and Writing Workers," Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus, Berlin, September 2023.
- Launch event, "Entangled Legacies of Empire: Race, Finance and Inequality," online, June 2023.
- Presentation, "Worker-as-Futurist: Writing speculative fiction with Amazon workers." The Marxist Literary Group’s Institute on Culture and Society, Boston, June 2023
- Invited talk, "Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire." Drugo More cultural centre, Rijeka, Croatia, April 2023.
- Invited talk (with Cassie Thornton), "How to organise peer-to-peer healthcare support? / how to build the world after Amazon?" MaMa Multimedia Institute, Zagreb, Croatia, April 2023.
- Invited talk, “Palm oil and the capitalist mode of human sacrifice.” Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten, Den Haag, Netherlands, April 2023.
- Invited talk, “Four Ventures of the Radical Imagination: Experimental Projects about the Changing Faces of Capitalism,” Art Laboratory, Department of the Arts (DAR), Universita’ di Bologna, Italy, April 2023.
- Book launch, “The Entangled Legacies of Empire,” Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London, UK, March 2023.
- Workshop, “Board game design for social awareness,” Media and Journalism MA program, Macromedia Hochschule Berlin, Germany, March 2023.
- Workshop, “Board games for planetary pedagogy,” Performance Studies, University of Giessen, Germany, February 2023.
- Invited talk, “Palm oil and the empire of sacrifice,” Aesthetics of Empire Research Cluster annual lecture, Linnaeus University, Sweden, December 2022.
- Invited talk “Palm oil’s ghosts and money’s art,” School of Fine Art and Music Annual Lecture Series, University of Guelph, November 2022.
- Online lecture, “Palm oil and sacrificial capitalism,” Marxist Education Project, October 2022.
- Book event, Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire, Lakehead University, October 2022.
- Conference track facilitation, “Disarming Resource Wars,” After Extractivism conference, Berliner Gazette, October 2022.
- Panel discussion, “Empire and Ecology,” After Extractivism conference, Berliner Gazette, October 2022.
- Online lecture, “Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire,” Connected Sociologies Curriculum Project: The Environment and Climate Change, June 2022.
- Workshop, “Clue-Anon: Exploring conspiracy thinking through game design in a moment of gamified capitalism” Games, Inc. conference organized by ephemera journal, June 2022.
- Invited panel talk, NFTs as Revenge Capitalism, Y-Lab of the National Gallery of Singapore (online), May 2022.
- Invited talk, “Capitalist Sacrifice” At the No Linear Fucking Time workshop, BAK (Basis voor Actuele Kunst), Utrecht, May 2022.
- Invited talk and workshop, “Should we play games with conspiracies?” Athens School of Fine Arts, March 2022.
- Invited talk, “Financialization’s culture of revenge” Volatility Cultures series, Goldsmiths University London, February 2022.
- Panel facilitator, “Debt, money and compromise” transmediale: for refusal symposium, January 2022.
- Invited talk, “Revenge Capitalism” The Marxist Education Project, November 2021.
- Invited talk, “Risk management as human sacrifice and vice-versa” Schemas of Uncertainty series, Sandberg Institute (Amsterdam) (online), November 2021.
- Invited talk, "The ghosts of Occupy: Notes on a haunted decade, in the spirit of David Graeber?" Art of Assembly, Volksbühne Theatre (Berlin), September 2021.
- Invited talk, “Revenge capitalism and money's utopia" at &Utopia. University of Copenhagen and California Institute of the Arts (online), September 2021.
- Invited talk, “Art, opium and anaesthetics now” at Opium Wars – Opium Cultures workshop, online. Universität Bielefeld (Germany), June 2021.
- Panel talk, Debt After Graeber, Red May, Seattle (online), May 2021.
- Panel talk, The Vengeance of Unpayable Debts, RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab (online), April 2021.
- Invited talk, "The struggle for the post-pandemic imagination," part of the Third Age Learning Lakehead speaker series Pivot(al): Possibilities for a Post-pandemic World (online: Thunder Bay, Canada), March 2021.
- Invited panel talk, Radical Imagination: Storytelling and Ways of Connection, part of University of British Columbia's Communities of Care Speakers' Series (online: Vancouver, Canada), March 2021.
- Invited talk, "From the radical imagination to revenge capitalism (and back)" hosted by the Royal Institute of Art's Post-Masters Collective Practice Research Course (online: Stockholm, Sweden), March 2021.
- Invited panel talk, "Economic disobedience and the avenging imaginary in the age of never-ending culture wars" hosted by Contemporary Art and Social Transformation and the School of Art at RMIT University (online: Melbourne, Australia), October 2020.
- Panel talk, "What is revenge capitalism?" at Revenge Capitalism and Revenge Communism, hosted by Common Notions, Pluto Press and RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab (online), October 2020.
- Public talk, "Revenge capitalism." Hosted by Anitcapitalist Resistance (online: London, UK). October 2020.
- Invited talk, “Money=social magic” at Moneylab 8 conference (Ljubljana, Slovenia), June 2020
- Invited talk, "Art, debt, capitalism and revenge" at the Slade School of Fine Art (London), May 2020.
- Invited talk, “Is ours an age of revenge capitalism?” at the University College of London Institute for Advanced Study Talking Points Seminar, online, May 2020.
- Invited talk, “‘Revenge is a human dream” at Radical May online bookfair, online , May 2020.
- Keynote, “Revenge cultures and dead zones” at Economies of Dispossession conference, OCAD University (Toronto, Canada), March 2020.
- Invited talk, “The Radical Imagination” at Al-Quds Bard College (East Jerusalem, Palestine), February 2020.
- Invited talk, “Art after money, money after art” at the Al Qattan Foundation (Ramallah, Palestine), February 2020.
Editing

007 – PIRATE CARE: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity by Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars & Tomislav Medak – 2025
006 – TO SEE IN THE DARK: Palestine and Visual Activism Since October 7 by Nicholas Mirzoeff – 2025
005 – ON CUDDLING: Loved to Death in the Racial Embrace by Phanuel Antwi – 2023
004 – PALM OIL: The Grease of Empire by Max Haiven – 2022
003 – WE ARE ‘NATURE’ DEFENDING ITSELF: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones by Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan – 2021
002 – THE HOLOGRAM: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future by Cassie Thornton – 2020
001 – PANDEMONIUM: Proliferating Borders of Capital and the Pandemic Swerve by Angela Mitropoulos – 2020






