Max Haiven (and company)

“From the Shadow of a Mine to the Shadow of a Smelter - Entanglements of Extraction from Jamaica to British Columbia” and “How finance colonised Aotearoa: A concise counter-history” and “The financialization of American slavery and the mundane political economy of sovereign debt”

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 will hear the following presentations:

Nadine King Chambers (University of Central Lancashire) “From the Shadow of a Mine to the Shadow of a Smelter - Entanglements of Extraction from Jamaica to British Columbia.”

My post-graduate work as an un-invited Jamaican guest in Indigenous territories in British Columbia examines how bauxite mining in Jamaica is connected to that province. My presentation will be an invitation to consider the neo-colonial cost of the aluminium in the technology with which I research digital archival material. I attend to the history of multinational corporations working  with various colonial nation-states to produce the conditions for how mining in Jamaica (understood as Black geography) was co-constituted with deepening settler colonialism in unceded Indigenous geographies in the 1950s. My approach gathers the works of economist Norman Girvan detailing both the thwarted dream of the bauxite industry to power decolonization as well as the fraught promise of  technology for the Caribbean. My research provides an example of tensions between de/postcolonial studies; but also links how specific Haisla and Jamaican experience with different forms of dispossession for extraction echo in current struggles by Wet'suwet'en, Saik'uz and Stellat'en peoples.

Catherine Cumming (University of Auckland, Aotearoa (New Zealand)) “How finance colonised Aotearoa: A concise counter-history”

This paper intervenes in orthodox understandings of Aotearoa’s colonial history in order to elucidate another history that is not widely known. This is a financial history of colonisation which, while implicit in existing accounts, is peripheral and often incidental to the central narrative. Economy goes unexamined as a condition of possibility for the colonial project, while the actions and motives of individuals and states are accorded centrality as key drivers of colonisation and, as such, form the anchoring points of historical narratives.

This paper brings to light a counter-history of early colonial Aotearoa in which finance, financial instruments, institutions and practices, were integral means by which colonial emigration and occupation proceeded. What this demonstrates is not simply that finance was a central instrument for and within an overarchingly state-driven colonial project, but actively colonised Aotearoa.

Catherine Cumming, of Ngāti Ranginui and Pākehā descent, completed a Masters in Sociology at the University of Auckland in 2018. With roots in critical theory and political economy, her research explores finance capital and financialisation, colonisation, decolonisation, and their intersections. Her paper ‘How Finance Colonised Aotearoa: A Concise Counter-History’ is forthcoming for publication in Wellington-based journal, Counterfutures.

John Handel (University of California, Berkeley) “The financialization of American slavery and the mundane political economy of sovereign debt”

In 1833, at the same moment that Britain abolished slavery in its empire, Britons once again became slave owners on the London securities market. In the late 1820s and early 1830’s the Baring Brothers worked with planters and bankers in the American South to create state guaranteed sovereign debt bonds that were backed by mortgaged slaves. As investment in the American South accelerated in the 1830s, other firms—most prominently the Rothschild’s—attempted to replicate the same financial instruments used by the Barings in other states across the American South. But these firms did not have the Barings same relationship with planters or network of agents on the ground, and thus their investments were not driven by the value of the underlying assets, but rather on the accumulation of transaction fees and inter-firm competition. Ultimately, the bad loans made by the Rothschild’s to slave states like Mississippi, Florida, and Arkansas culminated in the Panic of 1837 and a massive loss for the firm, but the financial instruments developed to represent mortgaged slaved eventually came to structure other sovereign debt dealings in Europe throughout the 19th century.

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 from the following:

• Nick Bernards (University of Warwick) “Colonial legacies and the limits of financialization in sub-Saharan Africa”

• Promoting access to financial services for the poor, or ‘financial inclusion’, has emerged as a major policy objective in international development in the past decade. Critics have often linked the agenda of financial inclusion to wider dynamics of ‘financialization’. Yet, little attention has thus far been paid to the fact that these initiatives have, by many measures, failed. Access to financial services remains highly uneven, and financial institutions across the global south continue to primarily serve urban, middle-class borrowers. This paper investigates the roots of these contemporary failures in the enduring legacies of colonial financial systems. In particular, I explore the limits to contemporary market-building interventions posed by the shortcomings of financial systems built up around the needs of colonial economies oriented towards primary export products, and shaped profoundly by racialized ideas about the capacities of colonial subjects to manage debt, money, and participation in ‘modern’ economies. The paper examines debates about agrarian credit in colonial Senegal in order to make this argument.

• It is widely recognized that British colonialism played a critical role in the establishment of the UK’s Overseas Territories as tax havens, and that a second ‘financial Empire’ was resurrected ‘out of the ashes of the first’ (Palan, 2015). Stories about this foundational moment are not over and done, but are constantly reworked and remade, not least in the current political moment. This exploratory paper will map and discuss some of the ways in which the history of the UK’s Overseas Territories as British colonies has been mobilised and animated by different actors in the context of efforts by the tax transparency movement to expose the structures that permit tax avoidance. It will focus on the narratives that circulated in the reporting of the impact of Hurricane Irma in September 2017 on the British Virgin Islands, Anguilla, and the Turks and Caicos Islands, and subsequently after the Mitchell-Hodge amendment to the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Bill in May 2018, which required British Overseas Territories to create public registers of businesses registered there. I will explore how these events provided opportunities for diverse actors to assert narratives about the former colonial status of the Overseas Territories in order to describe, affirm and contest relations of power and responsibility.

• Green finance has become a game changer. The Sustainable Development Goals have set an ambitious agenda, which cannot succeed without the generous support of private capital. To achieve the 7th SDG – stable and reliable access to clean energy – an estimated US$ 308-333 billion has to be channelled into power infrastructures. This requires establishing new green funds and promotion programs as much as implementing special derisking instruments for green investors. In this regard private actors increasingly seek to tap Africa's renewable energy potential. Yet, while countries as for instance Uganda or Zambia have abundant resources, their political and economic infrastructures do not match the standardized investment conditions expected by foreign investors.

At the event itself, the following presentation was made, but has been excised from the audio recording at the request of the presenters.

• Sarah-Jane Phelan and Jenny Hewitt (University of Sussex) “Playing with Experiences of Displacement: Complexity,  Accountability, Global Reach Ambitions and the Toy Industry”

• Children shape and reshape subjectivities through play. The UN Refugee Agency estimates there to be over 11 million refugee children worldwide and ‘Play’ for these children has the potential to support the processing of experiences, as they grapple with understanding loss, new languages, isolation, racism, and potentially changes in family roles. Research has explored how refugee children use play to process, including using it as a way to perform resistance (Marshall: 2015). Recently, the Lego Foundation has pledged £100 million to support The Sesame Workshop’s work with refugee children to “provide critical new insights into effective models of learning through play for children affected by crisis” (Lego Foundation, 2019).  Mapping out the scope of this project’s philanthropic and research agenda, we will consider the potential impact of play and knowledge production when enacted in relation to toys and methods rooted in Euro-centric genealogies, and explore the issues inherent in holding such brands accountable.

"Tracing Imperial Legacies: Interventions" with the Traces of Nitrate project and the Museum of British Colonialism.

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/

This second panel brought together two important projects that aim to trace the material, cultural and financial legacies of empire.

The Museum of British Colonialism is a UK / Kenyan collective encouraging a more truthful account of Britain’s colonial past through a wide variety of media interventions. Their first exhibition has focused on Mau-Mau detention centres.  museumofbritishcolonialism.org.

Traces of Nitrate: Mining History and Photography Between Britain and Chile explores the histories and legacies of British investment in Chilean nitrate mines and involvement in its global trafficking. Through an examination of sites, artifacts and images, the project traces nitrate’s route from natural mineral state processed in the oficinas of the Atacama desert through transported commodity and stock market exchange value to become, ultimately, part of the material and symbolic inheritances of London mansions and of estates in the capital’s surrounding countryside. It undertakes new photographic documentation of geographically disparate but historically connected landscapes, remote nitrate fields and metropolitan financial districts, accompanied by an analysis of nitrate’s material and visual culture. tracesofnitrate.org

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/

This inaugural panel begins with a dialogue between K-Sue Park and Jerome Roos on the topic of "Race, colonialism and debt, past and present"

K-Sue Park is the Critical Race Studies Fellow at UCLA School of Law for 2017-2019. She was previously an Equal Justice Works Fellow from 2015-2017, during which time she investigated predatory mortgage lending schemes and practiced foreclosure and eviction defense in the El Paso office of Texas RioGrande Legal Aid. Her scholarship examines the creation of the American real estate system and the historical connections between property law, immigration law, and American Indian law.

Jerome Roos is a Fellow in International Political Economy at the London School of Economics, and founding editor of ROAR Magazine. His first book, Why Not Default? The Political Economy of Sovereign Debt, is now out from Princeton University Press.

Third Text has just published RiVAL co-director Max Haiven's short essay "Our Opium Wars: The Ghosts of Empire in the Prescription Opioid Nightmare." Here it is in audio format.

The prescription opioid crisis in the United States is among the worst human-caused public health disasters in modern history, with over 500,000 dead and by some estimates almost 5% of the American population ‘misusing’ these drugs. This article supplies some unusual resources for understanding that crisis and the way it inherits a legacy of empire, now transfigured for a corporate age. From the museums funded by the sale of these drugs to the British-led Opium Wars to the present-day racialised dimensions of the epidemic, much can be gained from dwelling with its tangled and haunted complexities. The article concludes with a consideration of Susan Buck-Morss’s reading of Walter Benjamin’s meditations on the aestheticisation of politics in an age of what she calls capitalist anaesthetics.

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 in Lisbon, hosted by Bloco Esquarda (Left Block). Slides here.

This is an audio presentation of the introduction to RiVAL co-director Max Haiven's 2018 book Art After Money, Money After Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization published by Pluto Press.

On January 23, 2019, Dr. Gary Kinsman presented a talk titled "Connecting Queer and Indigenous Struggles: The Canadian War on Queers, Police Repression, the Charter and Settler Homonationalism" - Click here for Powerpoint slides.

This essay, originally published in ROAR Magazine, unpacks the deeper roots of the crisis of racist violence in the Canadian city of Thunder Bay in capitalism and colonialism.