Max Haiven (and company)

• Phanuel Antwi works with dance, is a poet as well as an assistant professor in the Department of English language and literatures at University of British Columbia.

FURTHER READING: 'Revenge Capitalism' is published on May 20th. You can pre-order your copy from plutobooks.com. To get 40% off the cover price, enter the code 'REVENGE40' at the checkout. https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745340...

RADICAL MAY: Check out the rest of the Radical May programme for more talks from a plethora of international radical publishers. https://radicalmay.literalbcn.cat/

The third of four presentations by Max Haiven on his forthcoming book "Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts" (maxhaiven.com/revengecapitalism), as part of an online seminar in April and May 2020. In this episode Haiven discusses the following sections:

This is the lecture component of the second of a four-part seminar on Max Haiven's forthcoming book Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (maxhaiven.com/revengecapitalism), published by Pluto Press in May 2020. In it, Haiven offers an overview of the book as well as more detail on two chapters (one on debt, one on money) and two briefer, inter-chapter interludes (one on Merchant of Venice, one on Moby-Dick).

This is an audio recording of the opening lecture to the first of four online seminars offered by RiVAL co-director Max Haiven on the topic of his forthcoming book Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (May 2020, Pluto Books). In it, Haiven gives a chapter-by-chapter overview of the book and focuses on the introduction and first chapter exploring what it means to explore revenge from a materialist perspective.

This lecture is also available for viewing on RiVAL's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEQ2uiW_930

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 government officials but the general public as well.  What is wrong with the kids these days? In this presentation, Dr. Max Haiven, Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice and co-director of the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL) explores the link between this "epidemic" and financialization: the transformation of society towards an increasingly anxiety-inducing, cut-throat competitive idiom.

Recorded in Thunder Bay (Canada) in October of 2019, Haiven outlines a new research agenda he is pursuing with Dr. Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou (University College London) to explore the hidden radical potential of the anxiety epidemic. Without discounting the terrible toll it is taking on millions of young people or the challenges it poses to universities and their staff, Haiven and Komporozos-Athanasiou propose that it may represent a rejection of financialized society and hold the seeds for a different vision of the future. They see the university as a crucial site of struggle.

Komporozos-Athanasiou and Haiven's writing on the subject can be found here: https://roarmag.org/essays/from-anxiety-to-revolt-against-the-financialized-university/

In this recording

• PART ONE: Introduction: Financialization and the anxiety epidemic (00:00 - 12:30)

Some of the charts and visuals referred to in the talk:

• Animation of 0.2 seconds of high-frequency stock trading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_k_elbBz8c

"Future directions: Write-offs, write-downs and reparations" with Cathy Berin, Gargi Bhattacharyya, and Johnna Montgomerie.

On April 5-6, 2019 RiVAL was among the hosts of a two-day symposium at the University of Sussex on the topic of "Finance Capital and the Ghosts of Empire" which brought together artists, activists and academics. For more information, visit: http://rival.lakeheadu.ca/ghostsofempire/

In this recording you'll hear presentations from:

Cathy Bergin is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities at University of Brighton. Drawing on a background in literary history and cultural discourse, Bergin's primary research interests are in the politics of 'race' and colonialism in  African-American and Caribbean writing, focussing on cultural formations and Communist politics in the 20th Century. She is particularly interested in the concept of 'rage' as the expression of black historical consciousness and agency.

Gargi Bhattacharyya is Professor of Sociology and co-director of the Centre for Migration, Refugees and Belonging at the University of East London. Her recent work includes Rethinking Racial Capitalism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018) and Crisis, austerity and everyday life (Palgrave, 2015

Johnna Montgomerie is a Reader in International Political Economy at King's College London, she serves as the Co-Convenor of the International Political Economy Group (IPEG) and is a Council Member of the Progressive Economy Forum. Her research interests are in debt, financialisation, and the household, in particular in Anglo-America. Her newest book, Should We Abolish Household Debt? (London: Polity) offers new solutions for ending debt-dependent growth. Her most recent article, co-authored with Daniela Tepe-Belfrage, 'Spaces of Debt Resistance' is published in Geoforum, analyses the growing movements to resist debt in everyday life.

"Making Visible Finance and the Afterlives of Empire" panel, with Research For Action and Femke Herregraven

On April 5-6, 2019 RiVAL was among the hosts of a two-day symposium at the University of Sussex on the topic of "Finance Capital and the Ghosts of Empire" which brought together artists, activists and academics. For more information, visit: http://rival.lakeheadu.ca/ghostsofempire/

Research for Action is is a London-based workers’ co-operative producing research to support social, economic and environmental justice.

Femke Herregraven is an Amsterdam-based artist with a research-based practice in which she maps out abstract financial processes and considers their implications. Her work concerns the physical infrastructure that financial processes need in order to operate, as well as their grave ecological consequences. These processes create images only built from code. These 'images' are not meant for human eyes, but are translated into representations that are visible to us and understandable to a certain extent. Herregraven focuses on the position of the human in these mechanisms and thus makes the immeasurable abstraction of data visible on a human scale