Texts
An article for Media Theory about playgroms: "an idiom of fascistic mob violence that emerges within but that also exceeds a digitalized, financialized and gamified mode of capitalism"...
For the Spring 2025 issue of Making & Breaking, I've offered a snapshot of some of the ideas from my forthcoming book The Player and the Played: Gamification, Financialization and (anti-)Fascism...
The critical potential of games is that they speak in unique and powerful ways to working people who are struggling under a gamified form of capitalism...
Join other players, makers, thinkers and organizers in London on 11 July 2025 for a gathering to debate (anti-)fascism and games...
A short article for Jacobin about the scandal surrounding the game Daybreak and the need to rethink the politics of (board) games...
Join Max Haiven and Sarah Stein Lubrano May 25-29 for a study workshop in Palermo...
An Unconventional London Symposium on Financialisation and Truth-bending...
A free print-at-home board game for 3-4 players about what makes conspiracy theories so fun... and so dangerous!...
Sense & Solidarity is pleased to present What Do We Want?, a podcast about the weird, wild and wonderful things that draw social movements together ... Read more...
An interview about the Worker as Futurist project and its edited collection, The World After Amazon: Stories from Amazon Workers...
What is the power of corporate storytelling today, especially storytelling about the future, particularly in the hands of firms like Amazon with the power to radically transform life as we know it?...
9 short stories from rank-and-file Amazon workers about the World After Amazon, available in print, online and as a podcast/audiobook...
A 3-part podcast mini-series produced in collaboration with Free City Radio...
Play 2-5 aspiring plutocrats trying to snatch the wealth of a world before your actions trigger a revolution. Coming Spring 2025 from Pluto Press...
A copy-edited version of the following paper, “Writing Back Against Amazon’s Empire: Science Fiction, Corporate Storytelling, and the Dignity of the Workers’ Word,” by Max ... Read more...
Sense & Solidarity (a project I run with Sarah Stein Lubrano) is pleased to announce the Mayday Movement (anti-)Academy, a four-day workshop for community organizers, ... Read more...
It has been a treat to work with the wonderful Weird Economies project on a new 10-episode podcast, “The Exploits of Play,” which will be ... Read more...
An edited version of this essay appeared in a catalogue published to accompany Danish artist Hannibal Andersen’s 2022 exhibition The Abstract Expression of Privatization. In ... Read more...
The following text was published in January 2024 and is the editorial introduction to a special section of the Journal of Cultural Economy on Finance ... Read more...
Hi! I hate to fundraise, but I love this project and I’d like to see it become a reality. I really think it will be ... Read more...
Ten years ago, Alex Khansnabish and I were putting the finishing touches on a book that would, in 2014, but published by the venerable Zed ... Read more...
A reflection on creating and playing CLUE-ANON, a board game about why conspiracy theories are so fun... and so dangerous...
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos often talks about humanity starting again on other planets. But a new project funding Amazon workers’ sci-fi writing is imagining how life could be different right here on...
This short text will appear in Thick Press‘s An Encyclopedia of Radical Helping, due out in 2024. 1. First: Under what conditions could care be ... Read more...
A free 12-week course for social movement protagonists about how minds change, drawing on critical theory, cognitive science and activist knowledge...
Launching a new podcast about the future Amazon is building and the workers, writers and communities that are fighting for different worlds...
A slightly updated version of this article has been published in Social Text 155 (2023): https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-10383207 Abstract The last 40 years of financialization has laid ... Read more...
This text was commissioned by the Berliner Gazette for their 2023 project Allied Grounds. It is in English here and German here. Climate Workers of ... Read more...
An edited version of the following text will be published in 2024 as part of Goldsmiths Press’s Finance Aesthetics: A Critical Glossary, edited by Frederik ... Read more...
In a world where most people feel caught in an unwinnable game, scholars should move beyond strategies of disenchantment and recognize the power of games...
An edited version of following text will appear later in 2023 as part of the Global Visual Handbook of Anti-Authoritarian Counterstrategies, published by the Rosa ... Read more...
The following roundtable, presented here in preliminary, unedited form, will be published in a special issue of The Journal of Cultural Economy on the topic ... Read more...
In this chapter, we ask a series of speculative questions about the subterranean cultural politics of anxiety in the neoliberal university. What will, or what can, come after the ‘financialised...
We are launching a paid group for current and former Amazon workers to write about the future they envision. Applications due Feb 10, 2023...
TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies has published its 45th issue, mostly made up of a section edited by Benjamin J. Anderson, Enda Brophy and ... Read more...
An edited version of this interview will appear in a future issue of Theory, Culture, and Society. It is a transcribed and edited version of ... Read more...
This essay was commissioned as the inaugural input to Gamechanger, a Berlin-based platform to “explore contemporary mindsets and cultures of self-organization and work in the ... Read more...
This article, written be me and Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, has appeared in the 18th volume of the journal Cultural Politics. Financialization is transforming social subjects and ... Read more...
The following article appeared in 2022 a slightly different form in volume 3.1 of the open-access Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry. It stems from ... Read more...
The following text, which has not yet been copyedited or proofed, was co-authored by Max Haiven, AT Kingsmith and Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou and is forthcoming in ... Read more...
Last month, my book Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire was published by Pluto Books. Since then a number of interviews and reviews have come ... Read more...
This essay was published in the Los Angeles Review of Books on May 7, 2022. Is Amazon the Borg? We Asked Their Workers By Max ... Read more...
This text, published in English on Mediapart, is a contribution to the Berliner Gazette’s “After Extractivism” text series; its German version is available on Berliner ... Read more...
A reflection on how I came to be fascinated by the power of the imagination for The Junkyard: A scholarly blog devoted to the study of imagination...
A piece in Boston Review about the imperial history of palm oil, from the transatlantic slave trade to the invasion of Ukraine...
Text, the venerable journal of critical theory, has published a dossier of short pieces on revenge in their online annex, Periscope...
An essay on racial capitalism, empire and the gory capitalist cosmology...
An essay for the Routledge International Handbook for Creative Futures about how we can work with Amazon workers to envision radical alternatives...
mystified human sacrifice, hidden in plain sight. The stories I tell in Palm Oil trace this system’s contours and seek answers in its past...
Manchester University Press 2023: a collection edited by Paul Gilbert, Clea Bourne, Max Haiven and Johnna Montgomerie for newcomers and specialists alike...
If you aren’t automatically redirected, please visit https://reimaginingvalue.ca/genres/...
Original –> https://flash—art.com/2021/01/defi-decentralization-crypto-art/ I Dream of DeFi. A Conversation with Ruth Catlow, Max Grünberg, Max Haiven, Aude Launay, and Denise Thwaites...
The following is the uncorrected text for a chapter in the forthcoming Routledge International Handbook of Failure: Critical Perspectives from Sociology and other Social Sciences, ... Read more...
The following text is a not-yet copy-edited draft of Max Haiven. 2022 (in production). “Debt and Financialization of Childhood” in Oxford Bibliographies in Childhood Studies, ... Read more...
Original: https://transmediale.de/almanac/wages-for-dreamwork In 1838, Louis Daguerre captured a streetscape including a Parisian shoe-shiner at work, in what is said to be the first photograph of...
I’m very pleased to have contributed a framing article to the ROAR Magazine special issue MOBILIZE!, Published on 15 December 2021. The original can be ... Read more...
In February of 2022, the German Historical Museum in Berlin will open an exhibition on “Karl Marx and Capitalism.” They asked the Berlin-based bimonthly newspaper ... Read more...
I am honoured to be able to announce that I have been awarded a second term as a tier II Canada Research Chair (CRC) at ... Read more...
The following piece by Conspiracy Games and Countergames reseachers Max Haiven, A. T. Kingsmith and Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou was printed in the Los Angeles Review of ... Read more...
I am very pleased to be working with Graeme Webb and Xenia Benivolski on a new project that is piloting a methodology for using science ... Read more...
The following is a preliminary version of the text published on October 6, 2021 in ArtReview: https://artreview.com/should-artists-take-the-money-and-run-jens-haaning/ The mainstream news cycle is...
This review of Review: J. Lorand Matory’s The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud and the Gods Black People Make will appear later this year in the ... Read more...
The following essay appears in English and Romanian a special issue (#48/49) of the highly-regarded Romanian journal ARTA, edited by the artist Dan Mihălțianu, whose ... Read more...
Hosted by RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab What? A three-week online Summer Institute bringing together artists, activists, scholars, students, gamers and weridos to learn ... Read more...
Launched in June 2021, this is a podcast, research and intervention project about conspiracies fantasies in a gamified capitalist world, led by Max Haiven, A.T. ... Read more...
This essay first appeared on March 8, 2021 in The Los Angeles Review of Books: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/revenge-against-revenge-bidens-revenge-politics-and-the-cure-at-troy/ An audio...
This essay originally appeared in HyperAllergic –> https://hyperallergic.com/624288/was-the-gamestop-frenzy-an-artwork/ Was the GameStop scandal some kind of massive, participatory activist...
I was interviewed by the fascinating Podcast The Brief about the opioids crisis and revenge politics. It’s available here: http://thebriefpodcast.com/revenge-capitalism-the-drug-war/...
My essay “The GameStop Saga Is Not the Revenge Against Finance We Deserve” has been published by Truthout here:...
ROAR Magazine has published my essay “The power, potential and peril of the GameStop affair” –> https://roarmag.org/essays/gamestop-affair-financialized-resistance/ There...
Haiven, Max. 2020. “Settler Capitalist Multiculturalism, Indigenous Refusal, and the Spectre of Bankruptcy: Rebecca Belmore’s Gone Indian.” in The Aesthetics of Ambiguity: Understanding...
Phanuel Antwi and I prepared this dialogue for publication by Ramallah’s AM Qattan Foundation in their ebook Isolation, Separation and Quarantine: More than a Pandemic, ... Read more...
The following interview, conducted by Liam Hough, appeared in ROAR 0n 26 November 2020: https://roarmag.org/essays/max-haiven-revenge-capitalism-interview/...
It is my great pleasure to present “Empires of Pain: A story of Racism, Opioids and Revenge,” a short 15-page web-comic I produced along with ... Read more...
My essay on endangered whales attacking boats in the Strait of Gibraltar has been published by ROAR Magazine here and below. Here is also an ... Read more...
My short essay, “Thirteen Theses Toward a Materialist Theory of Revenge Capitalism,” has appeared in a new edited collection: Challenging the Right, Augmenting the Left ... Read more...
A video of an illustrated lecture I gave (virtually) at The Slade School at UCL in May. It offers something of an overview of my ... Read more...
I spoke with scholar and Furtherfield co-founder and co-director Marc Garrett as part of RadicalxChange‘s 2020 online conference. We discuss many of the key themes ... Read more...
Novara has published a short essay “‘Revenge Spending’ Won’t Get Us Out of a Crisis of Racial Capitalism” Like the commodification of revenge culture, the ... Read more...
We are pleased to launch The Order of Unmanageable Risks: A Podcast about Capitalism and Anxiety on June 15 at 9am EST, 2pm BST. Join ... Read more...
ROAR Magazine has published a short essay I wrote “Rising up against white revenge.” The current uprisings reveal that America is haunted by the reality ... Read more...
The Order of Unmanageable Risks is an eclectic podcast about the crisis of anxiety in our society today and its links to the system of ... Read more...
E-Flux has published an edited excerpt from my book Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts. ... Read more...
L’Internationale, the joint online and print publishing initiative of seven major European art institutions, has published a new essay “Capital’s Vengeful Utopia: Unpayable Debts from...
The journal Socialism and Democracy has published an edited transcript of a interview with me by C. S. Soong of KPFA’s long-form interview show Against ... Read more...
I was thrilled to talk with my friend Dr. Phanuel Antwi about my new book Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, ... Read more...
My short, provocative essay “No Artist Left Alive” has appeared in the 11th issue of the Berlin-based broadsheet Arts of the Working Class. It argues ... Read more...
My short essay “Beyond capitalist authoritarianism, the radical imagination” appears in the collection We Resist: Defending the Common Good in Hostile Times, edited by Cynthia ... Read more...
The radio program This is Hell! interviewed me about my recent article (and post-script to my forthcoming book Revenge Caitalism) in ROAR Magazine “No Return ... Read more...
My old friend Scott Stoneman interviewed me for his podcast Pretty Heady Stuff about themes in my forthcoming book Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, ... Read more...
Original at: https://roarmag.org/essays/no-return-to-normal-for-a-post-pandemic-liberation/ Spanish translation: http://comunizar.com.ar/sin-retorno-la-normalidad-una-liberacion-poscoronavirus/ The...
I was pleased to have an opportunity to talk through some of the themes in a chapter titled “Our Opium Wars Pain, race, and the ... Read more...
An audio recording of the introduction to Art After Money, Money After Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (2018)...
In the Spring and Summer of 2019 The Conversation Art Podcast was kind enough to publish a four-part interview with me about my 2018 book ... Read more...
Citation Haiven, Max. 2020. “Culture and Financialization: Four Approaches.” In The Routledge International Handbook of Financialization, edited by Natasha van der Zwan, Daniel Mertens, and ... Read...
Today, the problem of anxiety among students on university campuses has reached epidemic proportion, gaining the attention and concern not only of university administrators and ... Read more...
By Krystian Woznicki An interview with the art collective The University of the Phoenix about responding to the climate crisis with a global secret society ... Read more...
Original: https://roarmag.org/essays/from-anxiety-to-revolt-against-the-financialized-university/ From anxiety to revolt? Against the financialized university By Max Haiven and Aris...
Citation Haiven, Max. 2019. “Art, Money and Financialization: Six Radical Money Artists on Either Side of 1973.” In A Cultural History of Money: The Modern ... Read more...
Geert Lovink and I had a conversation about my book Art After Money, Money After Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization in the context of Dan ... Read more...
Citation Haiven, Max. 2019. “The Art of Unpayable Debts.” In The Sociology of Debt, edited by Mark Featherstone. London: Policy. Abstract This chapter provides a ... Read more...
In the lead up to the Digital/Debt/Empire gathering in April 2019 Public Seminar, the online platform of the New School for Social Research, hosted a ... Read more...
CS Soong of KPFA’s excellent radio program Against the Grain interviewed me about the theoretical core of my forthcoming book (May 2020) Revenge Capitalism: The ... Read more...
Citation Haiven, Max. 2019. “Currencies of the Undercommons: The Hidden Ledger of Proletarian Money Sabotage.” In State Machines: Reflections and Actions at the Edge of ... Read more...
This essay, published in ROAR Magazine, explores the deep colonial roots of anti-Indigenous racist violence in the city of Thunder Bay. Original:...
The journal Third Text has published a short essay titled “Our Opium Wars The Ghosts of Empire in the Prescription Opioid Nightmare” (v.32, i.5-6, it ... Read more...
Citation Haiven, Max. 2019. “Our Opium Wars: The Ghosts of Empire in the Prescription Opioid Nightmare.” Third Text 32 (5-6): 662-669. https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2018.1559169 Abstract The...
Original: https://cpress.org/arts-culture/news-item-64/ Book review: Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization by Max Haven Roxanne Dubois | 17 November, 2018 Ten...
The Berliner Gazette‘s Krystian Woznicki interviewed Max Haiven as part of their 2018 thematic track AMBIENT REVOLTS. Originally published in Transversal:...
A PDF of the review can be downloaded here...
Citation Haiven, Max. 2018. “Representing (and Being Represented in) Financialization’s Derivative Sociality.” In Screening Economies: Money Matters and the Ethics of Representation, edited by Daniel...
In May of 2018 my colleague Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou and I organized a collaborative walking tour of the City of London historical financial district to explore ... Read more...
This essay was originally published on Open Democracy on 10 October 2018. Art after money Max Haiven Banksy’s prank on the art market rhymes with ... Read more...
This essay originally appeared on the blog of Pluto Press in September of 2018. What is the Fate of Creativity Under Capitalism? Max Haiven I ... Read more...
This article was originally published in Canadian Art in September of 2018. Political Economy at Art School Max Haiven Why we can’t—and shouldn’t—disentangle art from ... Read more...
In September 2018 the UK-based scholarly online platform Discover Society published a short selection of texts edited by Clea Bourne, Paul Gilbert, Max Haiven and ... Read more...
The podcast This is Hell interviewed me about the relationships between art and capitalism based on my 2018 book Art After Money, Money After Art: ... Read more...
As part of the Counterspecualtions tour of the City of London I organized with Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou I conducted this interview with the French art ensemble ... Read more...
Dr. Rachel O’Dwyer was kind enough to interview me for the Irish national broadcast network RTÉ’s show Culture File in January of 2018 about themes ... Read more...
This talk, “Marx’s Vindication or Marx’s Revenge?” by RiVAL co-director Max Haiven, was recorded in March of 2018 at the “200 anos de Marx” conference ... Read more...
Citation Haiven, Max. 2018. “The Crypt of Art, the Decryption of Money, the Encrypted Common and the Problem of Cryptocurrencies.” In Moneylab Reader 2: Overcoming ... Read more...
Citation Haiven, Max. 2017. “The Uses of Financial Literacy: Financialization, the Radical Imagination, and the Unpayable Debts of Settler-Colonialism.” Cultural Politics 13 (3): 348–69...
A shorter interview with the folks at Chicago’s finest radio program, This is Hell! about financialization. Writer Max Haiven finds financialization at the heart of ... Read more...
Original: https://roarmag.org/essays/haiven-cultures-financialization-excerpt/ The following is an excerpt from Max Haiven’s 2014 book Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular...
Original: https://publicseminar.org/2017/09/confronting-financialization-demands-a-radical-cultural-politics/ The following is a synoptic excerpt from the conclusion of Max Haiven’s Cultures of...
An interview with the legendary feminist theorist and organizer Silvia Federici as part of the collection What Moves Us: The Lives and times of the ... Read more...
Be Prepared to Win: Indigenous Struggles and the Radical Imagination (Interview with Sherry Pictou))
I interviewed my friend and colleague Sherry Pictou for a collection that Alex Khasnabish and I edited titled What Moves Us: The Lives and Times ... Read more...
Citation Haiven, Max. 2018. “Participatory Art within, against and beyond Financialization: Benign Pessimism, Tactical Parasitics and the Encrypted Common.” Cultural Studies 32 (4): 530–59...
This essay touches on themes covered in more detail in my book Art After Money, Money After Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization Original:...
Citation Haiven, Max. 2017. “Commons as Actuality, Ethos and Horizon.” In Educational Commons in Theory and Practice, edited by Alex Means, Graham Slater, and Derek ... Read more...
Citation Haiven, Max. 2017. “Beyond the Violence of Colonial Civility: The Art of Raven Davis.” In The Art of Civil Action, edited by Pascal Gielen ... Read more...
A review essay on Miranda Joseph’s Debt to Society:Accounting for Life under Capitalism published in Dialogues in Human Geography 6(3). In her acute, apt, and ... Read more...
Citation Haiven, Max. 2016. “Ghosts and Vagabonds.” In The Vancouver Carts: Photographs by Kelly Wood, 113–20. London: Black Dog. Abstract This short illustrated chapter discusses ... Read more...
Citation Haiven, Max. 2016. “The Commons Against Neoliberalism, the Commons of Neoliberalism, the Commons Beyond Neoliberalism.” In The Handbook of Neoliberalism, edited by Simon Springer, ... Read...
Citation Khasnabish, Alex, and Max Haiven. 2015. “Outside but Along-Side: Stumbling with Social Movements as Academic Activists.” Studies in Social Justice 9 (1): 18–33...
Citation Haiven, Max. 2015. “Art and Money: Three Aesthetic Strategies in an Age of Financialisation.” Finance and Society 1 (1): 38–60. https://doi.org/10.2218/finsoc.v1i1.1370 Abstract Recent...
Citation Haiven, Max. 2015. “Money as a Medium of the Imagination: Art and the Currencies of Cooperation.” In Moneylab Reader: An Intervention in Digital Economy, ... Read more...
I was pleased to talk with CS Soong of KPFA’s radio programme Against the Grain about financialization and its impacts on the imagination. ...
An excerpt from the introduction to my 2014 book Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life. This book is a contribution ... Read more...
In 2014 I, along with Jody Berland, edited a special double issue of TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies on “The Financialized Imagination.” It is ... Read more...
Citation Haiven, Max. 2014. “The Creative and the Derivative: Historicizing Creativity under Post-Bretton Woods Financialization.” Radical History Review 118: 113–138...
Citation Haiven, Max. 2013. “The Dammed of the Earth: Reading the Mega-Dam for the Political Unconscious of Globalization.” In Thinking with Water, edited by Cecilia ... Read more...
Citation Haiven, Max, and Alex Khasnabish. 2013. “Between Success and Failure: Dwelling with Social Movements in the Hiatus.” Interface: A Journal for and about Social ... Read more...
Citation Haiven, Max. 2013. “Walmart, Finance, and the Cultural Politics of Securitization.” Cultural Politics 9 (2): 239-262. https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-2346964 Abstract Walmart is not only the...
This interview was first published in the journal Wasafiri. Hari Kunzru (b. 1969) is a British-born author, journalist and essayist who lives and works in ... Read more...
Citation Haiven, Max. 2013. “Finance Depends on Resistance, Finance Is Resistance, and, Anyway, Resistance Is Futile.” Mediations 26 (1–2): 85–106...
Citation Haiven, Max, 2013. “The Metaphoric Wealth of Finance: Or, Capitalism with a Différance.” In The Economy as Cultural System: Theory, Capitalism, Crisis, edited by ... Read more...
Citation Khasnabish, Alex, and Max Haiven. 2012. “Convoking the Radical Imagination : Social Movement Research, Dialogic Methodologies, and Scholarly Vocations.” Cultural Studies<=>Critical...
Citation Haiven, Max. 2012. “Halifax Nocturne versus (?) The Spectacle of Neoliberal Civics.” PUBLIC: Art, Culture, Ideas 45 (July): 79–93. https://doi.org/10.1386/public.23.45.78_1 Abstract Halifax’s...
Citation Haiven, Max. 2012. “Can Pikachu Save Fannie Mae? Value, Finance and Imagination in the New Pokeconomy.” Cultural Studies 26 (4): 516–541. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2011.630480 Abstract...
Citation Haiven, Max. 2011. “Finance as Capital’s Imagination?: Reimagining Value and Culture in an Age of Fictitious Capital and Crisis.” Social Text 108: 93–124...
Citation Haiven, Max. 2011. “Are Your Children Old Enough to Learn About May ’68?: Recalling the Radical Event, Refracting Utopia, and Commoning Memory.” Cultural Critique ... Read more...
In 2011 Alex Khasnabish and I edited a special issue of Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action (volume 4, issue 2) on ... Read more...
In 2009 Scott Stoneman and I edited a special issue of the online, open-access journal Politics and Culture on the topic of “Food(&)Sovereignty” Editorials Scott ... Read more...
Citation Haiven, Max. 2010. “The Financial Crisis as a Crisis of Imagination.” Cultural Logic 30 (online). https://doi.org/10.14288/clogic.v17i0.191526 Abstract Finance is a means by which capital...
Citaiton Haiven, Max. 2007. “Privatizing Resistance: AdBusters and the Culture of Neoliberalism.” The Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies 29 (1): 85–110...