A cleaned-up version of this paper will appear in Finance and Society
Capitalism Cheats: Three Moments of Normalized Swindling
Max Haiven, Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination and Associate professor, Lakehead University, ORCID: 0000-0002-2143-9472
Abstract
In a financialized world where we are all conscripted to be competitive players, the category of cheating take on new political and cultural potency and has become key to reactionary ideology. This speculative essay moves beyond the conventional framing of cheating as the exceptional malfeasance of bad economic actors, and also beyond the claim that capitalism’s drive to profit encourages dishonesty and manipulation (thought that is indeed true). Rather, it proposes we recognize cheating at capitalism’s ideological and operational core, not its periphery. By examining (1) imperialism’s “Great Game,” (2) the links between game theory and neoliberalism, (3) the role of recursive rule-breaking in the history of finance, we can triangulate the normalization of cheating within the dominant economic paradigm. This essay approaches cheating as a discursive formation entangled with financial power. Such an approach can help us recognize some elements of the rise of reactionary, far-right, and fascistic sentiment and politics today. These in many cases revolve around a rhetoric of cheating that misrecognizes the culprits, targeting poor and precarious minorities, rather than those at the commanding heights of the economy.
Introduction
We are, by now, so familiar with the economy being describes as a game that it passes without notice (Cudd 2007; Mooney 2020). Scholars from a wide diversity of disciplines and across the political spectrum have explore the importance of metaphors to the functioning of the economy, both for economists and policymakers and for more humble market actors including consumers, workers, and small investors (McCloskey 1995; Gramm 1996; Young 2001). The metaphor of the game not only affirms that capitalism is competitive and rule-bound, it also frequently implies that it is at least ideally fair. Metaphors of a “level playing field,” for example, were crucial to the neoliberal project that promised that trade liberalization, privatization, and deregulation would lead to a system where hard work and talent were rewarded and where innovation would thrive (Krarup 2021). That ideology never promised equality, and indeed inequality was crucial to the driving motivations of its actors, but it did promise fairness. And yet forty years into the neoliberal revolution and it would be hard to find anyone who believes the game is fair.
This exploratory essay presents three scenes where cheating can be seen to be at the ideological core of the free market project. Its purpose is to contribute to the argument that cheating is not simply, as defenders of neoliberal capitalism and financialization tend to claim, the exceptional and regrettable outcome of individual amorality or regulatory failure (see Jaeggi 2016). Nor is it simply, as many critics of the system contend, a matter of the rich and powerful breaking or bending the rules, as for example in the use of tax havens and other tax avoidance schemes, or lobbying efforts, insider trading, or the gaming of regulations to avoid the inconvenience of human or environmental responsibility (Shaxson 2019). It also goes beyond the Marxist supposition (with which I agree) that capitalism is fundamentally built on the inherent swindle of the wage relation, where workers, deprived of the means of production, are forced to sell their labor power in return for a fraction of its actual value, the rest being pocketed by their boss and reinvested in the expansion of capitalist accumulation (Harvey 2006). Rather, my effort here will be, across three cases, to sketch a pattern where cheating is integrated into the very ideological and operational core of capitalism.
My purpose is not to make a moral critique of free-market capitalism or a structural analysis of financial accumulation, although both might be well-served by my argument. It is, rather, to lay the groundwork for an explanation for the contemporary political salience of the cheat and cheating. Why is it that, today, far-right, fascistic, and reactionary politicians, influencers and personalities so successfully mobilize vitriol against often mythical cheaters? Donald Trump is only the most famous and bombastic in his claims that he must be given profoundly antidemocratic powers to save democracy from cheats: political miscreants who cheated him and his supporters of the 2020 elections; migrants said to be cheating the allegedly fair border regime; racialized grifters cheating the capitalist meritocracy with their cynical claims to oppression and demands for bureaucratic remedies (preferential hiring or university admissions, etc.); more generally “elites” who have cheated the hardworking and entrepreneurial (white) American everyman of his due.
The success of his antics are all the more surprising given that he is, himself, a convicted cheat, and proud of it (Haberman and Feuer 2020). His policies have hamstrung or completely eliminated many government bodies tasked with controlling corporate crime and he has pardoned multiple notorious wealthy cheats (Claypool 2025; Goldstein and Silver-Greenberg 2025). It appears almost certain the he cynically deployed his bellicose threats of tariffs to undertake one of the world’s most staggering acts of insider trading (Faturechi et al. 2025) and that he has deployed a cryptocurrency as a means to essentially sell political influence in plain sight (Chayka 2025).
But Trump is the most egregious, telegenic, and bombastic of many such characters. Many similar accusations could be levelled at Brazil’s Bolsonaro (Nunes 2024), South Korea’s Yoon Suk Yeol (Yang 2025), Argentina’s Javier Milei (Callison and Gago 2025), Italy’s Berlusconi (Stille 2007), India’s Modi (Auvray 2024), all of them illiberal democratic autocrats who have wielded accusations of widespread cheating to fuel reactionary politics while, at the same time, overseeing parties or regimes that are significantly built on cheating. The list goes on: far-right political revanchists whose public rhetoric revolves around fostering the anger of manufactured majorities against what I will call “the cheating other,” minorities who are rumored to be defrauding society and refusing the play by the rules. The claim is often that this cheating has either been intentionally allowed by venal political elites or permitted because of the stupidity and gullibility of liberal or left-wing policies, and that matters have become so dire and corrupt that it requires actions that contravene the law, human rights and other inconveniences. Meanwhile, somewhat predictably, actual well-documented cheating continues in plain sight. For example, none of these regimes have done anything meaningful to reign in the use of tax havens and other forms of tax evasion whereby the wealthiest members of society essentially use legal loopholes to cheat the common purse… indeed many of these political actors or their supporters are named in leaked documents such as the Panama Papers or Paradise Papers (“The State of Tax Justice 2024” 2024).
But the purpose of this essay is not to point to the rank hypocrisy of these actors, which is rarely hidden and whose revelation seems to do little good. Nor is it to provide a complete account of how we came to live under what I will, elsewhere, call “the rule of the cheat.” Rather, it is to try and understand a tendency deep at work within financialized neoliberal capitalism that fed the revanchist political sentiments that gave rise to the popularity of these figures (Haiven 2020).
Those sentiments brood within financialized subjects. Forty years into the global neoliberal revolution and its accompanying processes of financialization, we have witnessed profound pressures on the formation of subjectivities as individuals are compelled to conform to an increasingly competitive, austere, and precarious socio-economic environment (Cooper 2017). Yet as many theorists have demonstrated, this is rarely encountered or interpreted as the grim imposition of market domination but, rather, as a set of agentful opportunities to speculate, perform and achieve (Haiven 2020; Lazzarato 2015; Martin 2015). For example, while housing precariousness has increased in many jurisdictions thanks to the financialization of urban real estate, many non-elite subjects have embraced property speculation as an opportunity to profit and improve their life chances (Stein 2019). While work has generally become more precarious, many subjects see increased opportunities to start their own businesses or invest in financial assets (from publicly traded shares to cryptocurrencies) (Lorusso 2019). The affordances of social media and other platform corporations offer opportunities to leverage our personalities and talents in the name of becoming an influencer or streamer (among the top career aspirations for youth today) (Bollmer and Guinness 2024). While these opportunities are the result of the economic forces that generally tend to increase precariousness, inequality, and the domination of society by the market, they feel to many individuals like freedom. This is more than ideological false consciousness in any simplistic sense. Financialized neoliberal capitalism’s unique success has been to not merely subdue but to seduce our agency.
As Wark (2007) and Jagoda (2020) note, this conscription of agency often feels like and is expressed in terms of a game. Even though the “game” of success in capitalism is extremely competitive, each of us is tasked with reimagining ourselves as a “player,” and we convince ourselves that the game is or at least ideally should be meritocratic and fair, if far from equal. And yet most of us will fail while we watch others, whom we imagine to be less talented or hardworking, succeed. We increasingly feel cheated. This feeling is compounded by the fines and fees and costs, including inflation, which have, ironically, increased under neoliberal financialization, despite claims that the system would eliminate the red tape of overprotective government bureaucracy, largely thanks to the deregulation of capital and the privatization of public services (Cooper 2018). It is this figure of the “cheated player,” the financialized subject whose sense of agency and possibility has been betrayed, that is especially susceptible to the siren song of the reactionary political commentators, influencers, and candidates who promise to apprehend and take revenge on people and populations they depict as cheaters.
This essay takes this problematique as its point of departure, but ultimately it’s effort will be to excavate three moments in the genealogy of contemporary financialized neoliberal capitalism where we can observe cheating being at the very centre of its operations, not simply because certain cheating individuals or institutions hold pivotal roles, but because forms of activity that can very well be understood to be cheating are incorporated into the core operations of the system. Such an analysis would not only undermine neoliberal claims that capitalism fulfils the liberal dream of a society built on the Rawlsian principle of procedural justice (i.e. markets do not guarantee equality, but they are fair see (Hunt 2013)); it would also contribute to a complication of Marxist approaches which, in their zeal to understand the abstract laws of capitalist accumulation and the ways these are enabled by a legal superstructure, have tended to downplay the crucial role of cheating, fraud, and criminal activity.
In the first case, I take up the imperialist “great game” on which modern capitalism was founded: the operations of imperialist states and their corporations and companies. Here, the “great game” was one that promised to bring freedom, “fair play,” and free trade to colonized people, but in fact established a rigged game. European powers imposed punitive and exploitative trade relations on their protectorates while also insisting that they submit to their exploitative tutelage.
In the second case, I take up the paradigm of game theory, which has become a pivotal element in neoliberal financialized capitalism, both as a powerful weapon in its ideological arsenal as well as a crucial mechanism in financial decision-making, geopolitical strategy, public policy, and the development of digital technology. Within that paradigm, cheating has a specific meaning: defection from a previous agreement. But it is also anticipated and incorporated into game theory’s fundamental assumptions – it is rational and expected that players will “cheat.”
In the final case, I look much more broadly to what I would frame as the normalization of cheating in financial history, which we can trace in the work of acclaimed and highly influential financial reporter Michael Lewis, whose books have tended to focus on the rule-bending or -breaking mavericks whose cheating of the conventional norms (and sometimes laws) that govern finance quickly comes to be common practice and around which a new set of rules and norms quickly form.
In each of these cases, I am not seeking to make a categorical historical argument. Rather, my effort is to paint, in broad strokes an overarching pattern.
By way of conclusion, I take up Johann Huizinga’s distinction between the cheat and the spoilsport: the former may be unethical, but is often accepted and sometimes admired because they bend but do not break the rules, allowing the game to continue; the latter is loathsome because, in their (often justified) refusal to play a game they think is stupid, rigged, or fruitless, they call into question the wisdom, morality, or agency of their fellow players. This has significant consequences for our consideration of strategies against fascistic politics and for collective liberation.
What is cheating?
In legal philosopher and expert on corporate criminality Stuart P. Green’s (2004, 137) rigorous definition, cheating
entails two elements: the cheater must violate a prescriptive (rather than descriptive), mandatory (rather than optional), regulative (rather than practice-defining), and conduct-governing (as opposed to decision-governing) rule. Second, the rule must be fair and enforced even-handedly, and must be violated with an intent to obtain an advantage over some party with whom the rule-breaker is in a cooperative, rule-governed relationship.
It’s worth breaking this robust definition down. A prescriptive rule is one that is intentionally put in place by humans to govern their behaviour (as opposed to a description of the rules that we observe governing the world. It is a descriptive rule of nature that what comes up must come down; it is a prescriptive rule that, in Snakes and Ladders a player must descend when they encounter a snake). Mandatory refers to what one must do, rather than what one simply ought to do: it’s a hard rule, presumably with consequences, rather than a normative suggestion, and yet it is not quite a law. Whereas practice-defining rules outline the general process (“in tag, one player is ‘it’ and must try and touch other players, who subsequently become ‘it’”) without which there can be no game, regulative rules are those that stipulate limits on behavior within a process (“in this game of tag, players cannot leave the confines of the park”) so that the process might be considered fair enough that people will agree to participate. And here conduct-governing refers to rules that inform how a person chooses to behave, rather than decision-governing rules that inform some authority (a referee, for example) what should happen in case of a violation (in soccer, the conduct-governing rule is that a player may not touch the ball with her hands. The decision-governing rule is the definition of a hand or the penalty for doing violating the rule).
This definition helps us understand the nuanced nature of cheating: it is located in the murky and potent territory between unfair and legitimate strategy, between law and norm, between discipline and governance. Most of what we call cheating occurs in the realm of unwritten rules, in the violation of law-like norms.
The second part of this definition adds further nuance. The cheating must be intentional (even if done semi-consciously) and have the objective of gaining some advantage. But importantly, for Green and other liberal theorists of cheating, it is a violation of a “rule [that] must be fair and enforced even-handedly” where all the proverbial players are in a “cooperative, rule-governed relationship.”
This more abstract view is complicated by empirical research in the study of games. In analyzing online gaming communities, Mia Consalvo argues that accusations of cheating (and their repudiation) reveal the friction between different orders of value. Stephanie Bolk and Patrick Lemieux likewise include cheating in their theory of metagaming: the kind of playful worldbuilding that
Here we must part ways with Green and company to explore the more political questions of cheating.
Mia Consalvo (2007) frames her pathbreaking ethnographic and pariticipatory-observational work on cheating in videogames as concerned with the negotiation of what she, following Bourdieu, calls Gaming Capital: the way that players produce, share, and contend the co-production of esteem, respect, and status. These social values are negotiated in tension and dialogue with the industries that produce the game commodities or that provide the platforms but are not, in the final instance, completely prescribed by those powerful actors. Indeed, the value that gamers produce within those frameworks, which in turn help these companies generate economic value, is a complex negotiation. Cheating, for Consalvo, has no strict definition in gaming worlds but, rather, is a term that reveals frictions between different orders of value and evaluation. For example, some player communities contend that status, esteem and praise should be reserved for players who only rely on skill to win, while others admire the daring “exploit” of the rules.
Stephanie Boluk and Patrick Lemieux (2017) go further in locating cheating as one among many methods of metagaming, which is to say playing games with games. Proposing that videogames are instruments or pieces with which many games are played, they reframe cheating as a means by which players take back the ludic, playful, transgressive impulse that has been enclosed by the gaming industry in coded games. Breaking, bending, and exploiting the rules becomes a game that exceeds the confines of the game itself, but that, paradoxically, makes the game worth playing. Like the social contexts of play, online debates about games, modification of games and so many other practices, it is the semi-autonomous co-creation of metagame spaces (physical, virtual, discursive) that has always given games their value.
We ought to also take inspiration from Aaron Trammel’s (2023) important corrective to games studies. The history of the oppressed (in Trammel’s study, of the legacies of transatlantic and chattel slavery) demonstrate to us that, frequently, games are unfair, exploitative, non-consensual and torturous from the beginning. Indeed, what if their power is such that they even get to define what is and isn’t a game (see Pearce 2024), and what is and isn’t fair?
Critics might charge that I risk unfairly stretching the definition of cheating, but I would respond that cheating is always already a somewhat arbitrary phenomenon whose definition depends much more on the prevailing relations of power in a society than it does on strict categories. As we will see, the grey area that separates acceptable cunning from dubious cheating from possibly illegal activity is never quite clear. And it is precisely this lack of clarity that makes cheating so lucrative for so many people and such a vexing and seductive political category.
The Great Game
The history of colonialism is inseparable from the history of capitalism, and it is often in the excesses of empire that we witness the rule, rather than the exception, of accumulation (Byrd et al. 2022). In the final quarter of her classic The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt (2004) traces the murderous dehumanization of fascism back to its origins in European colonialism and imperialism. Particularly, she takes up the metaphor of The Great Game, widely used in Britain and beyond in the 19th century to refer to the way empires played out their rivalries on a world made into a giant chessboard, drawing on that term’s most famous (and cynical) exponent, Rudyard Kipling. In Kim, Kipling (1901) means many things by “The Great Game.” On the most transparent level, it is the jockeying for position between the British, French, Turkish, and other empires in Central Asia, executed occasionally through open warfare but more commonly through manipulative diplomacy, the bribing and counter-bribing of local officials, and the use of secret agents to sew distrust, whip up rebellions, and stir ethnic and religious antagonisms (Hopkirk 1994). These were done not simply in the interests of imperial rule, but also to secure profitable opportunities for the extraction of resources and the exploitation of labor by corporate and business interests.
The Great Game is one “whose rules permitted and even dictated the consideration of whole nations as stepping-stones, or as pawns… for the riches and the rule over a third country, which in tum became a mere stepping-stone in the unending process of power expansion and accumulation.” (Arendt 2004, xviii)
Arendt takes up the writing and projects of several quite different British imperialists to make the point about the spectrum of players of the Great Game: the earnest “dragon slayers,” the obtuse bureaucrats and the megalomaniacal worldbuilders. In the first case, the “dragon-slayers” often genuinely believed they are bringing and maintaining a fair set of rules to territories and people whom they imagine were previously ruled by despotic potentates. As Edward Said (1979) makes clear in Orientalism, European imperial rule hallucinated the cruel and tyrannical regimes that they imagined preceded them. They come as saviours, as so many British and other imperialists explicitly announced, to bring the values of “fair play” and robust free market competition, to impose the “rule of law” wherein all subjects have formal legal equality.
Of course, this was a lie (even if many imperialists were delusional enough to believe it). The game was rigged. It was a sine qua non of early European imperialism to impose preferential or exclusive trading treaties or relations on the territories they dominated and also to insist that Europeans be immune to the laws that governed local populations. For example, Lisa Lowe (2015) has explored how the liberal rhetoric and ideals of “free trade” and economic “fair play” were mobilized by British philosophers, politicians, and imperialists during the conquest of China through the two Opium Wars. (This is to say nothing of the fact that Britain was forcing the world’s largest country to import massive quantities of a ruinous narcotic that they, themselves, banned from import). But this was only the most egregious example where gunboat diplomacy was used to force patently unfair and often ruinous trade relations on vassalized sovereigns, a technique which had the added benefit of being relatively cheap: the empire was able to extract huge amounts of wealth from the colony while an installed or propped-up local despot took care of the enforcement. Surely some imperialists recognized the rhetoric of freedom and fair play to be transparently manipulative, but Lowe’s work demonstrates that the imperial project was able to cohere itself around the prominent ideas of luminary scholarly, legal, and clerical figures who presented it as Britain’s vocation to bring white fairness to a world of racialized corruption.
As Arendt notes, as unfair treaties and gunboat diplomacy gave way, in the 19th century, to the direct colonial administration of territories, the governing bureaucracies ruled without the consent or input of those whose lives they dominated. Under the promise of delivering a modern, rule-bound form of enlightened government, a fair game, Europeans typically imposed a form of capricious, bureaucratic, self-serving, and increasingly violent tyranny. This was justified either as stern but necessary tutelage for a backwards people who were deemed “not ready” to play the real game of civilization, or by simply insisting that their inherent racial inferiority required European powers to protect them from predation or justified European domination – what Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000, 8–9) has depicted as the imperial injunction “not yet” that places colonized people in the perpetual “waiting room of history.”
Arendt is centrally concerned with the bureaucratization of violence, which she sees as reaching its climax in the Shoah (and which would be the subject of her most famous book Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she introduced the concept of the “banality of evil”). The section of Origins thereforetries to unpack how a bureaucratic structure of empire, which at least nominally exists to ensure the fair and impartial administration of life in a colony, produces an even more nefarious mode of dehumanization and instrumentalization.
Arendt (1998, 215) goes on to insightfully point out that the license with which imperialists grant themselves the power to play with the fates of those in their colonies (and even with lower imperial officials and functionaries) quickly give way to a kind of proto-fascist, hallucinogenic megalomania:
as Rhodes was insane enough to say, he could indeed ‘do nothing wrong, what he did became right. It was his duty to do what he wanted. He felt himself a god-nothing less.’… It is obvious that these secret and anonymous agents of the force of expansion felt no obligation to man-made laws. The only ‘law’ they obeyed was the ‘law’ of expansion, and the only proof of their ‘lawfulness’ was success.
Here, the cheat lionizes himself as animated by an ancient and timeless, if ultimately nihilistic, wisdom: power rules, power is all that is and all that ever will be. Cheating is merely the natural expression of power to flaunt or ignore the laws and rules set in place based on the delusion the world could be fair, or as some other kind of cheat. Here, Rhodes gives us in naked form what Nazi jurist Carl Schmidt would later dress in Hugo Boss philosophical finery: power ultimately is the getting to make rules (and punish transgressors) but never having to obey them (see Agamben 2005; Bratich 2022).
Arendt (like Kipling) spends countless pages mulling over the fate of the courageous and conflicted European individual caught up in the Great Game, rather than the millions upon millions of colonized people who paid a much higher price: whole civilizations eradicated, millions murdered or starved to death, racial and religious divisions sewn to divide and conquer which continue their lethal work to the present day (Davis 2000). As with so many European critics of her generation, the concern with colonialism and empire is how it exposed Europe to a “heart of darkness” and led, through exposure, to a kind of racial regression into Nazi barbarism.
The idea that racialized and colonized people are cheating, or cannot be trusted not to cheat, or are too benighted to be able to truly understand “the game” (and therefore need to be excluded, protected, or eliminated) remains with us to this day. It is part of the racist ideological reservoir on which contemporary reactionary, ethnonationalist, and fascistic politicians and commentators draw when they point to migrants “cheating” the system or stoke fears that to many immigrants will jeopardize not only the economies but also the values of Western democracies (with their reference to fair play and the level playing ground of the market) (see HoSang and Lowndes 2019). In many countries, the figure of the state benefits cheat is racialized, notably in the US where Ronald Regan popularized the term “welfare queen” with conspicuous reference to a Black woman, or where the term “anchor baby” is indelibly associated with racialized women who allegedly plan to deliver children in the US to game the birthright citizenship statutes of that country’s immigration system (Foster 2017). In the UK, the figure of the “benefits scrounger” cannot be separated from racialized implications, even if many of the journalists, politicians, and blowhards who mobilize it sanctimoniously declare they are color-blind (Shilliam 2023). In Italy, the figure of the state welfare cheat is frequently racialized, and typically held to be guilty of a worse form of cheating than those many normalized malfeasances undertaken by politicians, businesspeople, and mafiosi in a culture where, since the early modern period (if not since ancient times), the clever cheat has been celebrated (Guano 2010). In the post-war period, this association of non-European others as incompetent players or cheats has also been a justification for new forms of neoimperialism. Many of the brutal policies of the IMF and World Bank, which railroaded governments in the Global South into neoliberal policies, was imposed in the name of fighting or preventing corruption: the cheating of the free market system (Reinsberg et al. 2021). For a century, “The West” has supported dictatorial, authoritarian and fascistic regimes in the Global South based on the presumption that the nation in question is “not ready” to play the game of democracy fairly (in fact: to ensure the West continued access to resources or to prevent socialist governments from being elected to power) (Chomsky 2024).
My purpose here is neither to litigate the past nor to highlight the hypocrisy of the imperialist worldview. Rather, I am seeking to excavate a moment when the global capitalist system has integrated a form of cheating into the very core of its operations, not simply in terms of the secret malfeasance of rogue opportunists, but in terms of its dominant logic of accumulation and its prevalent ideological justifications.
Game Theory
It is difficult to overstate the importance of game theory to the operations of present-day capitalism. Game theory refers to a set of mathematical tools that purport to model rational decision-making. The nuances and complexities of game theory today are impressive, largely because it is no niche academic curiosity: its influence has profoundly shaped some of the most important sectors of capitalist society and economics, from its original deployment as a tool for cold war and nuclear military strategy to its centrality in neoliberal economic thought and governance to its pivotal role in the development of the financial models that rule our world and of so-called artificial intelligence. It is this influence, and the underlying ideological assumption that game theory depends on and normalizes, that are the subject of this section, rather than the fascinating particularities of its various iterations, theories, debates and concerns. Edward Said’s (1979) analysis of Orientalism, I am less interested in the (often quite impressive, earnest, and functional) innovations and developments within the field but, rather, the world that made the field and how that field has remade the world in its own image.
Here, I am following the excellent work of S. M. Amadae (2016), whose Prisoners of Reason demonstrates that we must locate game theory at the heart of the neoliberal revolution, both historically and ideologically. Game theory is remembered as pivotal to the West’s victory in the Cold War insofar as it informed a US and NATO strategy that would eventually articulate itself as MAD: the principle that the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction through the proliferation of ever more powerful nuclear weapons and brinkmanship would be the best way to prevent a nuclear war. As The West emerged triumphant, game theory migrated, thanks to its massive military influence, into spheres of corporate governance, public policy and macroeconomics such that it came to shape the key institutions of post-Cold War American global hegemony, including the co-evolution of finance and networked computing (Jagoda 2020).
Briefly, game theory’s modern origins are credited to the early inter-war work of Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann who, during his exile at Princeton the Second World War, would collaborate with economist Oscar Morgenstern to publish the pathbreaking Theory of Games and Economic Behavior in 1944, which laid out a series of mathematical models for rational and strategic decision-making. The field was inspired by von Neumann’s forays into gambling in his attempts to understand the mathematics of probability and uncertainty. The most famous articulation of the theory, first developed at the RAND corporation, a military think tank, is the “prisoners’ dilemma” which presents a “game” in which two accomplices to a crime are arrested and interrogated in separate cells and offered a choice: if they rat the other out (“defect” in the model’s terminology), their compatriot will be imprisoned for a long time and they will walk free. If both stay quiet, they will both serve a short sentence, but if both defect, they will both serve a long sentence. The notorious Princeton mathematician John Nash, perhaps the most influential proponent of game theory as a paradigm for micro- and macroeconomic decision-making, demonstrated that defection is always the most strategic choice. He won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in part for demonstrating logically that a system made up of ruthlessly competitive agents could produce stabile equilibrium, something that became key to neoliberalism’s ideological justifications.
Ultimately, at the core of game theory, is a model of the ideal human “player” is a completely selfish, ruthlessly rational, self-maximizing and competitive agent – to play as anything less is irrational and counter-productive. Game theory as a method brackets out other motivations, which cannot be modelled except in the negative (the amount one would be willing to sacrifice, subtracted from the gains of one’s optimal position). Ultimately, as Amadae notes, it is the personification of the perfect neoliberal subject, the idealized homo oeconomicus. This is a figure Sylvia Wynter (2015) called “Man 2,” the abstract ideal telos of the colonizing, white supremacist, masculine figure against whom all the other people of the earth are judged and found wanting.
Game theory is not a reliable model for how people actually behave, and not even a particularly good model for how many people play games (see Jagoda 2020). Extensive research shows that not only humans but many other animals play both unstructured and structured games based on a much more complex set of behaviors and motivations (Huizinga 1971; Sicart 2017; Toomey 2025). Like the players of a competitive game of Monopoly or dogs wrestling, players frequently sacrifice their own rational self-interests for reasons that include personal honor, care for their opponents’ wellbeing, long-term relationships, or simply fun. The entire field of behavioral economics has emerged and thrived to demonstrate the limits of the model of homo oeconomicus. And economic sociologists and anthropologists have decades of research within and across cultures that demonstrate economic behavior is deeply socially embedded, governed not simply by cold rational self-interest but also norms, institutions, and values (McMahon 2015). Nonetheless, as Amadae argues, the paradigm that game theory presupposes is expedient for proponents of a neoliberal worldview, in part because it reiterates the basic assumptions of that worldview about human nature and in part because it makes these accessible in a mathematical language that can be integrated into other systems.
Game theory came to be taught in university economics classrooms in the 1950s and 60s, during a time when the discipline was moving away from its concern with the more sociological study of political economy and towards a more mathematical focus on microeconomics and econometrics. This was the case at the University of Chicago, where a cluster of thinkers affiliated to or inspired by the Mont Pelerin Society free market think tank were becoming increasingly influential. As is now well-known, these thinkers not only pioneered the models that would become central to the neoliberal policy revolution (though they never used the term, which they consider pejorative), they also became key consultants to regimes around the world that were using natural or unnatural disasters to impose market-oriented regimes, notably Pinochet’s fascistic regime in Chile (Klein 2007; Slobodian 2020). They would later play starring roles in the administrations of Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher, and their approach would fundamentally reshape the policies and orientations of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank that essentially leveraged their stranglehold over international credit to set the economic policy for the developing world since the 1970s. Game theory was merely one weapon in the neoliberal arsenal, but one that lent mathematical precision and prestige to a set of policy orientations that were based, fundamentally, on the belief that economies and the societies of which they were a part were reducible to the aggregate behavior of economic actors who were, in the last and ideal instance, homo oeconomicus.
Amadae goes on to show that this set of presumptions, and game theory itself, quickly migrated to the realm of public policy and administration. Under the previous Keynesian regime the state took on a paternalistic role, providing regulation, care and stability for (some, typically white) citizens such that they could more securely participate in the capitalist economy as workers and businesspeople, based on the presumption that universal public services (health, education, transit, old age security, etc) were both fairest and most efficient. Here, the normative subject was the dutiful, well-intentioned citizen. The neoliberal revolution not only demanded drastic cuts to public services (in the name of offering tax cuts) or their privatization, it also led to a set of changes to how public services and institutions were managed, including the importation of market measurements of productivity and efficiency, in which the presumed normative subject was modelled on game theory’s ruthless, self-maximizing player. The recipient of state assistance and public services came to be distrusted as a ruthless homo oeconomicus whose urge to take advantage of the state’s generosity was only rational, but nonetheless costly and potentially ruinous to the economy. Amadae notes the shift in neoliberal policy away from the provision of the common necessities of life and towards tax cuts, subsidies and incentives for competitive market behaviors (see also Cooper 2017). Here, game theory was often explicitly used to model and justify a shift towards a more minimalist and market-oriented form of government intervention. Game theory’s implicit agent or subject, homo oeconomicus, is motivated by the same fundamental drives regardless of if they are a Fortune 500 corporation with an army of lobbyists in Washington or a destitute migrant in rural Nebraska. But, of course, the consequences and capacities are far, far different.
But perhaps most consequentially, game theory became a crucial component in the building of mathematical computerized financial models (Allen and Morris 2002; Ganti and Singhania 2025). The complex algorithms that, today, execute a huge percentage of global trades, or that advise market analysts at the world’s top investment banks and private equity firms, are built, fundamentally, on an adversarial paradigm that is calibrated to outmaneuver other market actors who are assumed to be playing the same game (Grindsted 2016). With a huge proportion of global financial trades made autonomously or semi-autonomously by rival supercomputers, and with these actions in many cases determining the flow of global goods and services, it’s not such an exaggeration to propose that we are, indeed, living in a kind of gamified simulation.
Within game theory, cheating is defined narrowly as the strategic choice of one player to deviate from a previous cooperative agreement for their own benefit. It is, ultimately, synonymous with defection. For example, if the two accomplices in the prisoners’ dilemma promised before their arrest to not confess, but one then confesses based on their assumption the other will remain loyal to the promise, the first player is cheating. And yet in this case and seemingly all cases in game theory, cheating does not actually involve a breaking or bending of the rules, but rather a kind of amoral deception of another player. This isn’t actually cheating at all within the shrunken moral world of game theory: it’s perfectly rational if it maximizes a player’s advantage. In fact, one might say that within the paradigm of game theory, cheating per se is impossible: the mathematical model cannot comprehend a deviation from its rules that is not already anticipated within the model.
Another way of looking at this is that, within game theory, cheating is always already normative: advantage-seeking players will naturally (indeed inevitably) defect and deceive when it is in their interests, otherwise they are playing with a suboptimal strategy or (and this is often more practically the case), they are actually playing the wrong game.
The upshot of this is that, while the paradigm of game theory has in many ways taken over the world, it is a paradigm within which cheating is both impossible and normalized. On a systemic level, one cannot cheat free market capitalism because, outside of laws that prevent fraud and theft, the game (recalling Green’s definition of cheating above) has no mandatory prescriptive, regulative, and conduct-governing rules that cannot be broken in the name of profit. Indeed, the breaking of these rules is key to success and innovation within the system.
My argument here is not that game theory is somehow the secret code or grand conspiracy that has guided the neoliberal revolution. Game theory has, above all else, been useful to various actors who have, collectively, both driven forward and benefited from that revolution without always being aware of it. Game theory is an elegant and sophisticated set of mathematical tools that present themselves as pure logic and, as we have seen, claim to derive from natural laws. And yet it in fact functions as part of an ideological substrate. It came to prominence because it mirrored a market-oriented thought world of competitive individualism and it offered various actors (military, corporate, financial, technological) a set of tools that helped them navigate and reproduce the reality that this thought world created in its image. But most significantly for our purposes, game theory helps us delineate some of the ideological and material consequences of the neoliberal revolution that articulate themselves in terms of games, and they help us see the underlying tendencies and modes of justification for a system that, while allegedly based on liberal values of fairness based on individual opportunity, normalizes and makes a virtue out of cheating from the very outset.
Finance’s normalization of cheating
This is in large part the gospel of billionaire Silicon Valley venture capitalist and far-right éminence grise Peter Thiel, an avid chess enthusiast who has often compared his manipulation of markets and politics as a kind of game (Chafkin 2021). As one of the founders of PayPal, he presided over and enriched himself through a business plan that took advantage of the loose and outdated regulatory framework around emerging digital network technology to conspicuously cheat the system by essentially creating an unregulated bank. The plan, which he would repeat subsequently (notably with his AI-driven surveillance and security firm Palantir) was to scale up the enterprise and userbase rapidly by any means necessary so that, when finally regulators responded, it would be too late: millions of people would rely on the infrastructure and the firm would be rich and powerful enough to undermine any attempt to regulate it or interrupt its enjoyment of a monopoly. Later, this strategy (which would be popularized by early Thiel acolyte Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, as “move fast and break things”) would also include scouting out potential competitors in their larval phase and buying them outright, poaching their staff or destroying them before they could become a threat.
For Thiel and his many devotees and proteges (including current US Vice President JD Vance), this behavior, can only be said to be cheating if one fails to understand the real game that is being played. Like the mind-bending, seemingly chaotic moves made by chess- and go-playing AI (some of Thiel’s favorite pet investments), his business model does not explicitly break any rules or laws, just conventions and norms (Thiel and Masters 2014). In fact, they are, according to this philosophy, a more perfect strategy for playing the game of capitalism by its natural and eternal rules. Those who fail to do likewise are cheating themselves by clutching on to an outdated, outmoded set of pieties and expectations. Indeed, within Thiel’s influential worldview, these pieties and expectations are far from innocent: they functioned to protect and enshrine an older, equally manipulative (but far less honest) elite, who were served well by a mutual agreement to uphold those norms and keep challenging and innovative newcomers out of the game, like snobbish imperial universities of old who claimed they were open to anyone, so long as they can speak basic Latin and Greek, knowing full well only elites would have been educated to do so. Indeed, within this worldview, it is the old residual elites who are cheating: they are bending the game around an unspoken set of non-transparent norms that, effectively, become rules. He, and those like him, are merely playing the game as it was intended to be played.
In this, Thiel is not new or original. In fact, one might make the argument that the whole history of major turning points in so-called “financial innovation” can be narrated as a series of normalized cheats (Klaus 2014). When it emerged in the 16th and 17th centuries, the joint stock corporation, which allowed many investors to pool resources into a new meta-entity, was decried by contemporaries as a legal but dubious effort to cheat not only the conventional rules of trade (which at the time were very deeply tied to notions of honor, character, Christian ethics and fraternal relationships) but also God’s exclusive right to create new life (Perelman 2000). Established and conservative bankers and traders were horrified when, in the moment of European powers’ ambitious imperial expansion in the early 18th century, class-transgressive “stock-jobbers” cheated the norms of finance (but did not break any law) and pioneered what would come to be known as retail trading, where securities (in this case in hallucinated colonies) were sold directly to consumers (Dale 2004). In the industrial age, market insiders likewise condemned “innovative” traders’ manipulation of new telegraph technologies to game the markets with complex forms of arbitrage, or to use increasingly integrated and connected global markets to speculate on land or buy and sell derivative contracts on the fruits of imperial pillage (de Goede 2005). But in all these cases and many more the cheat became the rule: within months or years (although often only following scandal and, occasionally, regulation) these techniques would become standard conventions. So too with the use, in the 20th century, of increasingly complex mathematical models, such as those that priced derivatives or portfolios, to create powerful trading strategies that upended financial markets and forever changed the way finance operated, contributing to a transition from a conservative, staid and prudent world of haut-bourgeois civility to a crude game now famous from films like The Wolf of Wall Street.
The trading computers that today execute the vast majority of global financial exchanges, or that guide the decisions of the world’s investment banks and asset management companies are all built implicitly on the logic of game theory, where the presumption of an equivalent adversary or adversaries is part of the code (Khan and Bao 2021). Within such a system, all else being equal (as it so rarely is), the only way to beat the market is to find a cheat, a legal (or legalish) method to gain a slight advantage (Angel and McCabe 2013). This, for example, happened in the case of the development of high frequency trading algorithms, as famously retold by luminary financial journalist Michael Lewis (2015) in Flash Boys. Here, high-tech investment firms competed with one another to “game the plumbing” of the American digital financial infrastructure by placing their servers mere meters closer to major data centres, gaining millisecond advantages on their rivals that, over the span of millions of trades, resulted in tremendous windfalls (Toscano 2013).
Indeed, Lewis’s whole profoundly influential oeuvre since the success of his breakout semi-autobiographical hit Liar’s Poker in 1989, has been dedicated to what, in a later book (this one about football) he calls The Blind Side: the unseen gap, liability or exploitable opportunity hidden within a competitive system that some clever innovator recognizes, seizes upon and thereby changes the game (for good and for ill). In both The Blind Side and Moneyball (both made into hit Hollywood films), the “game” is a sport and the cheat involves coaches, investors and players looking at the game from a completely new angle, for example eschewing the typical strategy of recruiting expensive star players and, instead, using statistical data and models to create a portfolio of mediocre and inexpensive players whose skills counterbalance to produce a winning team. These activities, at the seam between cheating and strategic innovation are perhaps best explored through the idea of the exploit. As Alexander Gallow and Eugene Thacker (2007) note, the term was coined by hackers to name a program that takes advantage of a flaw, mistake or oversight in a network or system, but can now be used to identify a much broader trend: computer, financial, legal, and other systems in a complex and competitive capitalist society are the result of past exploits (or attempts to prevent them), and produce new opportunities for future exploits.
Finance capital, historically and in the present, is built on the normalization and incorporation of what might well be considered cheating: actions that do not necessarily explicitly break laws (although sometimes they do) but take advantage of grey areas, loopholes, unrecognized vulnerabilities, back doors, and that, more generally speaking, defy the norms rather than the rules of the proverbial game (Calathes and Yeager 2023; Klaus 2014). But this tendency has intensified in the past 40 years period I have identified as financialization. The subprime mortgage scandal was paradigmatic: on multiple levels, a wide array of financial actors sought to “game the system” to return profit to their investors (Lapavitsas 2013). The fact that none of them were ever brought to justice indicates not simply corruption, but the deeper truth: it is, from one perspective, a system ruled by and for cheats. The cheats in this case may be intentional and unethical, passive and benevolent (such as those who genuinely if misguidedly thought they were doing good work by providing poor people access to housing), or simply following explicit or implicit orders; cheating here is not a description of intentions, but rather, a quality of the system itself.
Before and since, examples abound. The LIBOR scandal, for example, saw financial insiders at some of the world’s leading investment banks conspire to fix the rate of interest at which banks lend to one another in the very short term, a rate that serves as an important benchmark for many other processes in the global financial economy, including an estimated $350 trillion worth of financial derivatives (yes, that is indeed four times the global GDP) (Calathes and Yeager 2023). Such manipulation allowed huge banks who were essentially part of a rate-setting cartel, to subtly influence other deals that might include a reference to LIBOR. Even though orders to game the rates were authorized by the field marshals of the world’s leading investment banks, a seven-year investigation (costing some £60 million) was only able to convict five footsoldiers, whose cases largely hinged on whether their actions were dishonest or simply represented normal practice in the industry at the time (their convictions were later overturned). Several banks were fined or settled their cases for what amounted to tiny factions of the profits they had earned through the manipulation. The power to set the LIBOR rates was handed over to a UK regulatory body.
The case is noteworthy because it was such an egregious conspiracy to cheat, hidden in plain sight, with massive consequences, and because, shockingly, it actually led to (paltry) fines, convictions and new regulation. The vast majority do not (Culpepper and Lee 2026). State financial regulators are typically overwhelmed not only by the scale of cheating but by the complexity and the recognition that much of it is so normalized that to take action against it would jeopardize the financial system and risk plunging already volatile financial markets into chaos, something most capitalist governments are loathe to do. Further, many regulators have been (or will in the future be) employees of the same financial firms they scrutinize (Brezis and Cariolle 2019). This is perfectly legal, but it represents a kind of cheating in plain sight. Beyond the direct incentives for regulators to look the other way, it also means that many have already been party to this kind of malfeasance and might fear that punishing it (even if it were possible) might affect them or their friends and associates. But more generally, having worked in the financial sector, they are part of a culture where such cheating is not only accepted but often celebrated: traders, analysts and managers who discover new cheats and exploits are often handsomely rewarded (Stevenson 2024).
To witness the consequences, we might follow Hudson’s (2012) proposal that we see financial markets as, essentially, the decentralized but massively consequential engine of capitalist economic planning, one so powerful it would be the envy of the most megalomaniacal dictator. The financial sector ultimately determines the global flow of goods and services, the price of food, the accessibility of housing, the kinds of technologies that will be developed, the way cities and countries will grow, what governments will be allowed to rule and which will be starved of access to the credit that is the lifeblood of any modern government. While the LIBOR scandal was indeed, explicitly, an illegal conspiracy, the thousands of other similar cheats, revealed or still undertaken in the shadows, are the normal operations of this global governance structure.
There is of course, nothing new about corruption, and many regimes throughout history have run on it. But my argument here is that neoliberal financialized capitalism makes the cheat central to its operations as never before. Partly this has to do with the sheer complexity of a system built on a rapidly evolving network of on extremely sophisticated and multilayered private financial institutions, byzantine and contradictory sub-national, national and supra-national governance institutions, and rapidly advancing technology, all of which offer innumerable opportunities to find niches, grey areas, hacks, exploits and cheats that play off one part of the apparatus against another. It also has something to do with the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of an ever smaller number of individuals and corporations (and the diminishing power and capacity of the regulatory state, at their behest) that means the cheat or exploit is no longer simply the tactic of the marginal gangster or opportunist, but the strategy of whole firms who control the commanding heights of the economy. But, as we have seen, it is also something at work within the core logic of the system itself. Cheating is the rule, and cheating rules as never before.
Conclusion: of cheats and spoilsports
To conclude, I want to turn to some of the fascistic consequences and resonances of such a system. In The Player and the Played: From Gamed Capitalism to 21st Century Fascism, I argue that financialization has compelled most people to adopt the agency of the player: the savvy, risk-taking, exploit-seeking homo oeconomicus, competing to survive and thrive in an austere world (Haiven 2026). It is in this context that a reactionary politics takes root around a set of feelings related to feeling cheated – not cheated of one’s entitlement to a share of social wealth, but of one’s right to compete.
Writing in the late 1930s, shortly before the brutal occupation his native Netherlands and his own brief incarceration by the Nazis, Johann Huizinga (1971, 11–12) made the important distinction between two key figures that might occupy a magic circle, the term he gives to the consensual orbit of play.
The spoil-sport is not the same as the false player, the cheat; for the latter pretends to be playing the game and, on the face of it, still acknowledges the magic circle. It is curious to note how much more lenient society is to the cheat than to the spoil-sport. This is because the spoil-sport shatters the play-world itself. By withdrawing from the game he reveals the relativity and fragility of the play-world in which he had temporarily shut himself with others. He robs play of its illusion–a pregnant word which means literally “in-play”… Therefore he must be cast out, for he threatens the existence of the play-community… It sometimes happens, however, that the spoil-sports in their turn make a new community with rules of its own.
Ultimately, part of the charm of the cheat is that they do not unduly disturb the game, whereas the spoilsport makes it impossible to play. The cheat, after all, is just another player, just like us, until their malfeasance is revealed. When their cheating is discovered, the other players are faced with a choice. Do they refuse to play any furthers, or kick the cheat out and thereby jeopardize the game? Or do we all now begin to cheat, reasoning that it is the only way to win? Part of us even admires the cheat for their cunning. Ultimately, what makes a cheat acceptable is that they have walked the tightrope between a normative and a legal breach, and in so doing they have simply elevated the logic of the game to its next level: in their attempt to win, they have transgressed the norms of fair play, but not catastrophically. They did as any player would, had they the courage or intelligence. Ultimately, we accept the cheat because they do not call into question the motivations, legitimacy and sense of agency of the other players, they in fact vivify it in magnified form.
Meanwhile, the spoilsport but be excluded and castigated not only because they make the game unfun, but because they call into question the game itself and, more vexingly, the subjectivity and sense of agency of the other players. If we are playing (and enjoying, and betting on) a broken or rigged game, as the spoilsport, what does that say about us?
And what if the game were compulsory, and its outcomes determined our lives? What if we had come to imagine that the game was natural, normal, and eternal. In that case, the cheats actions and motivations would certainly be understandable, given the stakes. And the spoilsport? What good would their complaints about the game’s inherent injustice or unfairness do any of us? The spoilsport may indeed tell us we ought to play a different game, that the game relies on us, the players, more than we, the players, depend on the game. And yet for those of us who play and imagine we have a chance to win, or even those of us who acknowledge the game is rigged but still aren’t the greatest of all of its losers… for us, the spoilsport is at best a hopeless romantic or at worst that most reprehensible of cheats: one whose criticism of the game is just a ploy to distract us from our competitive pursuits with sanctimonious pieties, or to hoodwink us into come kind of doomed collaboration from which they will no doubt come out ahead. If we’re all cheats, at heart, then the spoilsport is just either the worst cheat (in denial of the fact) or the very best. And for both, they can never be forgiven.
To return to the key point with which we began, this might help us understand the success of far-right, reactionary and neofascist political actors who promise to take revenge on those whom they present as cheats: welfare claimants allegedly gaming the system; migrants who cross borders outside the legal frameworks; nebulously defined “elites” (a term that conveniently often conflates or substitutes cultural for economic capital) who manipulate the otherwise fair and meritocratic system; minorities that manipulate the guilt of majorities to gain special advantage. Numerous prominent left-wing and progressive parties and commentators have, rightly, observed that these targets of reactionary rage are almost insignificant in their effects of the economy and working peoples’ lives compared to the massive forms of cheating happening in plain sight. The world’s real economic elites today squirrel hundreds of billions away in tax havens; golden visa programs allow them to avoid the law; corporations hire armies of lawyers and lobbyists to sabotage any efforts to hold them to account for labor, environmental, and other infractions. And yet these facts appear to have little influence. Instead, conspiracism is mushrooming: a general paranoid search for nefarious actors who are cheating the system, rather than a reckoning with a system that is built on cheats and makes cheats of us all (see Haiven et al. 2022; Haiven 2023).
Perhaps this is because subjects habituated to a form of gamified capitalism distrust and resent the spoilsports who call into question the legitimacy of the game? To play the game of neoliberal, financialized capitalism is to be afforded a sabotaged agency. One clings to it not because it promises redemption and success, but because without it one cannot imagine what agency would be: one would be a loser, not a player. Everybody has a sneaking suspicion the game is rigged, but few are afforded the systematic opportunities to imagine a dignified life beyond the game. We are, then, inclined towards the emotive claim that some people are person are cheating and also resentful toward those who would (rightly) point out that the game is rigged, which we all know but cannot truly admit. The bombastic cheat, who promises that, by cheating, they will make the game fair, holds a special and dangerous place in our political imagination.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for feedback from and conversations with many people including Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Sarah Stein Lubrano, Bue Hanson, Faye Harvey, Luce DeLire, audiences at the Marxist Literary Group’s Institute for Culture and Society, and the three anonymous reviewers at Finance and Society. Special thanks to my research assistants Sam Cousin and Stella Lawson. This research was undertaken, in part, thanks to funding from the Canada Research Chairs Program and with the support of UCL’s Institute for Advanced Studies and Centre for Capitalism Studies.
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