Max Haiven (and company)

Max and Sarah sketch a framework for understanding three core fascist motivations, based on Max's forthcoming book The Player and the Played: From Gamified Capitalism to 21st Century Fascism.

- An OPPORTUNIST motivation to personally benefit from authoritarianism

- A PARANOID fear that the "natural" order is collapsing

- A PSYCHEDELIC infatuation with the power to bend and break reality

THOUGHT SNACK is an occasional podcast from Sense & Solidarity where Sarah Stein Lubrano and Max Haiven explore the big ideas that make and break our world.

Sense & Solidarity is a platform where people who want to radically change the world can learn together and build individual and collective capacity. https://senseandsolidarity.org/

Sarah Stein Lubrano is a writer and researcher who specializes in the social psychology of politics. She is the author of Don't Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st-Century Minds (2025). https://www.sarahsteinlubrano.com

Max Haiven is an researcher and educator who uses writing, teaching, games, podcasts and other techniques for the radical imagination. His latest book is Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (2022). https://maxhaiven.com/

Music by Dan Gouly.

In this episode, we discussed the concept of microfascism, which refers to everyday life practices, and intersubjective relations that establish power dynamics and form the organisation of desire. The yearning for and supplication to power is at work in everyone and must constantly be guarded against, for these are easily amenable to fascist organisations and movements. As the saying goes: “Kill the cop in your head!” We also discussed martial masculinity as it manifests in combat sports such as Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) and Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), as well as figures of such franchises such as Dana White, who is a close associate of Trump and many other fascist personalities.

Jack Z. Bratich writes about the intersection of popular culture and political culture. He applies social and political theory to such topics as social movements, craft culture, patriarchal subjectivities, and the cultures of secrecy. He is professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University and author of On Microfascism: Gender, War, Death (Common Notions, 2022) and Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture (2008). His latest publication is “What Can a Body Do(om)?: Fratriarchy’s Affects and the Capacities to Break Together” (2025) in Capacities to: Affect Up Against Fascism.

Against the Fascist Game is the second season of The Exploits of Play, a podcast about games and capitalism. Join Max Haiven and Faye Harvey as they interview game designers, critical theorists and grassroots activists struggling with games to understand, confront and abolish the rising threat of fascism in our times. We ask questions including: how is the far-right using games as platforms for ideology, recruiting and violence, both close to home and around the world? How have vicious reactionary politics emerged from a form of capitalism where most people feel trapped in an unwinnable game? What do fascism and antifascism mean today? And what role, if any do play and games have in confronting the fascist threat and creating a new world? The Exploits of Play is a production of Weird Economies, a platform for exploring the intricacies and excesses of our economic imaginaries, in cooperation with RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab.

In this episode we talked about how we got from Gamergate to the far right fascist politics we’re seeing unleashed today. Gamergate refers to a strange phenomenon that occurred in 2014, where a group of video game fans used online platforms - from Reddit to 4Chan to Craigslist - to create a harassment campaign against feminist gamemakers and critics, making tactics like doxxing and shitposting widespread. Gamergate is a signature moment in the ascendency of the new far right. We spoke with Adrienne about how Silicon Valley and its economic framework gave rise to the platforms implicated in fascist movements like Gamergate; whether we are embroiled in the normalisation of dark play; and what the Left should be doing in the face of our servitude to privatised digital infrastructure.

Adrienne Massanari is an Associate Professor at the School of Communication at American University and affiliate faculty with the AU Games Center. Her research interests include digital culture, platform politics, game studies, pop culture, and gender and race online. Her most recent book, "Gaming Democracy: How Silicon Valley Leveled Up the Far Right" (MIT Press, 2024), discusses the connections between the far right, Silicon Valley, and gaming culture. She is also the author of "Participatory Culture, Community, and Play: Learning from Reddit" (Peter Lang, 2015).

Against the Fascist Game is the second season of The Exploits of Play, a podcast about games and capitalism. Join host Max Haiven and producer Faye Harvey as they interview game designers, critical theorists and grassroots activists struggling with games to understand, confront and abolish the rising threat of fascism in our times. We ask questions including: how is the far-right around the world using games as platforms for ideology, recruiting and violence, both close to home and around the world? How have vicious reactionary politics emerged from a form of capitalism where most people feel trapped in an unwinnable game? What do fascism and antifascism mean today? And what role, if any do play and games have in confronting the fascist threat and creating a new world? The Exploits of Play is a production of Weird Economies, a platform for exploring the intricacies and excesses of our economic imaginaries, in cooperation with RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab.

A short selection from Max Haiven's forthcoming book The Player and the Played: How Gamified Capitalism led to 21st Century Fascism in which he goes over why it's fruitful for antifascists to keep three meanings of fascism in mind. For more information, visit http://maxhaiven.com

This episode was recorded as part of a live panel event at Pelican House on the 13 April 2025 celebrating the London launch of Max’s board game Billionaires and Guillotines, published by Pluto Press. In this episode we talked about the role of games and play in the coming revolution; the game mechanics of Billionaires & Guillotines and what its format might offer players; why Max chose the guillotine as the instrument of abolition; and we even played a game role-playing a war profiteer, an aristocrat and a tech overlord.

Danny Dorling is Oxford geography professor and bestselling author of books including Seven Children: Inequality and Britain's Next Generation and Peak Injustice: Solving Britain’s Inequality Crisis.

Meg Jayanth is an award-winning narrative and game designer whose credits include 80 Days, Sunless Sea and Horizon Zero Dawn.

Max Haiven is Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination, writer of books including Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire and Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts.

Against the Fascist Game is the second season of The Exploits of Play, a podcast about games and capitalism. Join host Max Haiven and producer Faye Harvey as they interview game designers, critical theorists and grassroots activists struggling with games to understand, confront and abolish the rising threat of fascism in our times. We ask questions including: how is the far-right around the world using games as platforms for ideology, recruiting and violence, both close to home and around the world? How have vicious reactionary politics emerged from a form of capitalism where most people feel trapped in an unwinnable game? What do fascism and antifascism mean today? And what role, if any do play and games have in confronting the fascist threat and creating a new world? The Exploits of Play is a production of Weird Economies, a platform for exploring the intricacies and excesses of our economic imaginaries, in cooperation with RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab.

On 21 May 2025, Sarah Stein Lubrano, author of Don't Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st-Century Minds sat down with Max Haiven at Berlin's Shakespeare and Sons bookshop.

"Democracy is dying because we are clinging to a dangerous and outdated myth: talking about politics can change people's minds. It doesn't.

This provocative debut from a bold new voice combines a fascinating range of research to show us the psychological and sociological factors that really shape our politics.

Drawing from ancient philosophy to modern neuroscience and social science, Dr Sarah Stein Lubrano reveals the surprising truth about how people think and behave politically. From friendship to community organizing and social infrastructure, she explores the actions that actually do change minds.

In a world where politics keeps getting more irrational, dishonest, violent and chaotic, it's getting much harder to reach people with words alone. So people who really care about democracy must ask: how can we stop arguing and do the deep work to build stronger foundations for political life, and a better world for us all?"

In this episode, we talked about how fascism transforms itself in and across different historical conjunctures; how the far right uses race and gender as key points of articulation and why we should be engaging with psychoanalytic theories of fascism alongside radical anti-fascist thinkers; our current moment of transition as one of systemic instability, uncertainty and reorientation; and how in the contemporary moment of resurgent fascism, migration must be thought together with carcerality, especially when deportation has become the emblem of the Trump administration.

Alberto Toscano is the author of Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (Verso, 2010; 2017, 2nd ed.), Cartographies of the Absolute (with Jeff Kinkle, Zero Books, 2015), La abstracción real. Filosofia, estética y capital (Palinodia, 2021), Terms of Disorder: Keywords for an Interregnum (Seagull, 2023), Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (Verso, 2023), and Communism in Philosophy: Essays on Alain Badiou and Toni Negri (Brill, 2025). He is the co-editor of the 3-volume The SAGE Handbook of Marxism (with Sara Farris, Bev Skeggs and Svenja Bromberg, SAGE, 2022), Ruth Wilson Gilmore's Abolition Geography: Essays in Liberation (with Brenna Bhandar, Verso, 2022), and Georges Bataille's Critical Essays, vols. I and II (with Benjamin Noys, Seagull, 2023 and 2025). He is series editor of Seagull Essays and The Italian List for Seagull Books, and a columnist for the magazine In These Times. He has also translated the work of Antonio Negri, Alain Badiou, Franco Fortini, and Furio Jesi.

Against the Fascist Game is the second season of The Exploits of Play, a podcast about games and capitalism. Join host Max Haiven and producer Faye Harvey as they interview game designers, critical theorists and grassroots activists struggling with games to understand, confront and abolish the rising threat of fascism in our times. We ask questions including: how is the far-right around the world using games as platforms for ideology, recruiting and violence, both close to home and around the world? How have vicious reactionary politics emerged from a form of capitalism where most people feel trapped in an unwinnable game? What do fascism and antifascism mean today? And what role, if any do play and games have in confronting the fascist threat and creating a new world? The Exploits of Play is a production of Weird Economies, a platform for exploring the intricacies and excesses of our economic imaginaries, in cooperation with RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab.

On 28 April 2025, Max Haiven presented an outline of his forthcoming book "The Player and the Played: Gamification, Financialization and (anti-)Fascism" at Brussels' Au JUS space.

If fascism names a form of tyranny that incubates within capitalism and bears its' traces, what kind of 21st century fascism emerges from financialized capitalism?

1. Why do we feel trapped in an unwinnable game?

2. How can we think about fasicsm?

3. What is financialization?

4. What is gamification?

5. What is "derivative" and what is new about today's fascism?

6. How can we make sense of gamified fascist violence?

7. Why do fascist cheats succeed (and why is cheating so central to their rhetoric?)

8. What is fascist worldbuilding (and worldrazing)?

9. What is the antifascist game?

In this episode we talked with Luce about her latest work on digitalised tyranny. About how private property structures the terms of the contract and gives rise to ever more terms; how the far right are both breaking the rules and playing by the rules to break the game; and about the overall structure of desire across society and what it’d mean to exit the transsexual contract of libidinal intelligibility, towards a horizon of hospitality and indeterminacy, driven by joy.

Luce deLire is a ship with eight sails and she lies down by the quay. As a philosopher, she publishes on the metaphysics of infinity and early modern philosophy but also on art, queer theory, anti-racism, postcolonialism, and political theory. In her performances, she embodies figures of the collective imaginary. She is currently an assistant professor at the department of philosophy at Humboldt University, Berlin. For more (including booking), see getaphilosopher.com and IG :@Luce_deLire

Against the Fascist Game is the second season of The Exploits of Play, a podcast about games and capitalism. Join host Max Haiven and producer Faye Harvey as they interview game designers, critical theorists and grassroots activists struggling with games to understand, confront and abolish the rising threat of fascism in our times. We ask questions including: how is the far-right around the world using games as platforms for ideology, recruiting and violence, both close to home and around the world? How have vicious reactionary politics emerged from a form of capitalism where most people feel trapped in an unwinnable game? What do fascism and antifascism mean today? And what role, if any do play and games have in confronting the fascist threat and creating a new world? The Exploits of Play is a production of Weird Economies, a platform for exploring the intricacies and excesses of our economic imaginaries, in cooperation with RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab.

In this short bonus episode...

👹 We at Sense & Solidarity invite you to apply for our study workshop “Fascist Dreams, Antifascist Awakenings” in Palermo, May 25-29 (applications due April 7!).

📘 Sarah tells you about her forthcoming book Don’t Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st Century Minds and events this Spring and Summer.  

🎲 And Max tells you about the crowdfunding campaign on now for his board game Billionaires & Guillotines. 

🖼️ Plus, we critique public art and muse about the end of the world.