Revenge Capitalism, by Max Haiven

I was perusing the stacks at Shakespeare and Co in Paris when I noticed a familiar name: Haiven. Max Haiven. Isn't that Omri's brother? I asked myself.

I picked up the book, Revenge Capitalism, and read the back. The first testimonial was from one of my favorite writers, David Graeber: "Perhaps the most theoretically creative radical thinker of the moment." Wow, I thought. That's high praise.

I went to high school and university with Omri. I always knew his family was involved in activism. The coincidence was underscored by the fact that one year ago I stood looking at the same stack, when my eyes fell on No Place to Go, the book by my university professor Lezlie Lowe, who got my first article published. As I stared at the spine, a woman pulled the lone copy off of the shelf. "She taught me how to write," I spluttered. And, on the same shelf sat Page Boy by Halifax native Elliot Page. This is the Halifax section, I thought.

I took Haiven's book over to a comfy chair to read. After a couple of pages I realized something else: his book seemed more interesting than anything else in the politics section. From Graeber's testimonial to a quote from George Orwell in the preface to a Ruth Wilson Gilmore citation in the bibliography, this felt like my book.

Now the spoiler: ultimately, it wasn't my book. But I agree with Graeber that Haiven's exploration is creative and interesting and thoughtful.

Haiven's contends that revenge describes the spirit of capitalism. He starts the book:

"When you live in someone else's utopia, all you have is revenge. We live in capitalism's utopia, a world almost completely reconfigured to suit the needs of accumulation."

In the introduction, Haiven promises to explore the idea that capitalism is a "revenge economy," which exacts self-defeating vengeance on the world.

Haiven argues that capitalism is unique as an economic system with three specific attributes:

• Complex financial mechanisms

• Dramatic inequality with an exploited laboring underclass

• A ruling class that perpetuates itself through force In capitalism, moneys serves as the "lifeblood" of a system where a minority ruling class appropriate the productivity of a majority underclass under threat of violence. This system is self-perpetuating because it depends on competition between capitalists. Writes Haiven,

Capitalism, like all systems of domination, is held together through a kind of normalized vengefulness, which is mystified as law, tradition, economic necessity, or justice.

And, later:

The vengeful dimension of capital is a reflection of its inherent structural tendencies and contradictions. Importantly it is a system not orchestrated by a total monarch, an oligarchy, or a conspiracy but, rather, by the sum of the contradictory actions of innumerable competitive capitalist actors.

Haiven argues that the spirit of revenge is essential to capitalism in two ways:

• Capitalism's ruling class enacts violence to maintain its economic superiority

• Capital accumulation is a destructive force that breeds vengefulness

"Revenge is the outcome, not the motivation, of capitalism," writes Haiven — which I think is too bad. I think it would be interesting to explore vengeance as both outcome and motivation. How does a spirit of revenge engender the attitude of capitalism? How does the attitude of capitalism create a spirit of revenge?

In general, I found Haiven's ideas stimulating, but his rhetoric unpersuasive. While I'm open to the idea that capitalism is essentially vengeful, Haiven never really convinced me and his historical research left me wanting more. In a short detour through the Enlightenment, Haiven mentions that good friends John Locke and Issac Newton collaborated in their "management of the nascent capitalist economy, Locke in the realm of policy and Newton as an early but formative Governor of the Bank of England. Both agreed that no punishment was too severe for proletarians who dared defy the state's control over the money supply, and they therefore helped pass a bevy of laws that criminalized the slightest economic infraction." I thought this was fascinating, but Haiven didn't go much further exploring Enlightenment thought or connecting it to his thesis, and I ultimately felt unsatisfied.

Haiven drawns an outline of a framework for revenge capitalism, without filling in the detail. He breaks revenge capitalism into three "patterns": unpayable debts, surplussed people, and "hyperenclosure" (referencing the English practice of land enclosures).

Haiven argues that the vengefulness of capitalism can afflict the wealthy as well as the workers, though the spirit of vengeance that is embodied in the working class has a different flavor. For example, the vengeance of the underclass might be understood as "terrorism." While we understand terrorism as anticapitalism, revenge capitalism might invite us to understand terrorism as an essential mechanism of capitalism — a response to "moments when the powerful operate vengefully on the oppressed with impunity, and when that impunity is disguised as necessary, unavoidable, natural, and just."

But the vengeance of the oppressed can also be more subtle, such as "a rejection of the oppressors' and exploiters' thought-world and stunted, narcissistic moral universe." Nonetheless, Haiven says that the revenge of the oppressed is likely to reinforce the capitalist worldview.

I loved the George Orwell quote from the preface,

There is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.

This quote serves as a meditation that carries on throughout the book. What is revenge? I think that what Orwell really means is that revenge is counterproductive. The fantasy of revenge — that you will be satisfied after you punish your tormenter — never delivers. Haiven quotes James Baldwin:

Revenge is a human dream ... there is no way of conveying to the corpse the reasons you have made him one – you have the corpse, and you are, thereafter, at the mercy of a fact which missed the truth, which means that the corpse has you.

Perhaps this is true: capitalism is a counterproductive system in which we are all in turn either fleeing or enacting vengeance. Perhaps the productivity of capitalism lies in the pursuit — the military buildup that produces innovation, the worker ambition that masks a fear of failure, the state bailouts that prevent recession. Perhaps it is a culture of anger and fear — a cycle of retribution.

On the other hand, what about the delightful side of revenge? The joy of getting back with a water balloon someone who just got you. The exquisite retort that leaves a bully speechless. The prize won back from a competitor after years of training. Maybe this is irrelevant to the discussion, but to me it undermines the idea that revenge is only a fantasy, and — in turn — the idea that revenge has no productive outcome.

Haiven never really convinced me that revenge is the spirit of capitalism, but he did leave a breadcrumb for me when he mentioned that anthropologists (notably David Graeber) associate debt and vengeance. That is an idea I will explore more when I keep reading Graeber's Debt.

Update: I did.

In the meantime, I'm still open to the idea that revenge — or at least, some mild antisocial sense of spite — is foundational to capitalism. I just read Ellen Meiksins Wood's The Origin of Capitalism which described the early days of capitalism in agrarian England. How might we imagine a spirit of vengeance to have animated England's early capitalists? At the dawn of capitalism, England's nobility were experiencing a period of extreme hardship. They coped with this hardship through increasing exploitation of the peasantry, and the peasantry responded with revolts and rebellions. What does this tell us about vengefulness in the latter days of feudalism and early days of capitalism? The coming centuries were defined by the rise of a capitalist bourgeoisie and, simultaneously, the rise of constant rebellion and warfare.

Overall, Revenge Capitalism felt perhaps too choleric. I understand that capitalism has caused profound harm, and that many capitalists have acted with deliberate intent. But Haiven's logic doesn't convince me that this is the essence of capitalism (even though I'm open to the idea). Instead, I feel like Haiven is projecting his anger towards capitalism, because we want to imagine this horrible machine to be a beast of vengeance. But, maybe that blinds us to other possibilities. I guess I'm not ready to abandon the possibility that there's something else at the heart of capitalism.