Revenge Capitalism

The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts

Max Haiven

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781786806185
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

Capitalism is in a profound state of crisis. Beyond the mere dispassionate cruelty of 'ordinary' structural violence, it appears today as a global system bent on reckless economic revenge; its expression found in mass incarceration, climate chaos, unpayable debt, pharmaceutical violence and the relentless degradation of common life.

In Revenge Capitalism, Max Haiven argues that this economic vengeance helps us explain the culture and politics of revenge we see in society more broadly. Moving from the history of colonialism and its continuing effects today, he examines the opioid crisis in the US, the growth of 'surplus populations' worldwide and unpacks the central paradigm of unpayable debts - both as reparations owed, and as a methodology of oppression.

Revenge Capitalism offers no easy answers, but is a powerful call to the radical imagination.

1
Toward a materialist theory of revenge

This March is Shit

The Future is Shit

All I Want is Revenge

2010 London protest banner

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.

James Baldwin

This chapter draws on a wide archive of critical theory, on examples from popular culture, and on the rise of the revenge politics of Donald Trump to develop a materialist theory of revenge. By examining these intertwined histories of colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism I want to frame revenge as, on the one hand, something that describes the (il) logic of systems of domination as well as a pervasive political sentiment to which those systems give rise. I argue that such systems project vengefulness onto those whom they oppress and exploit precisely to hide their patterns of systemic revenge. I frame revenge capitalism as a system in extremis which, like a mad king, appears to be taking needless, warrantless revenge on its subjects. But underneath are structural contradictions that generate pathological forms of accumulation and a dangerous reactionary political climate. To face these head-on, we will need to let go of our allergy to thinking seriously about revenge.

THE LIVES AND DEATHS OF WITCHES

A man that studieth revenge, keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal, and do well. Public revenges are for the most part fortunate; as that for the death of Caesar … But in private revenges, it is not so. Nay rather, vindictive persons live the life of witches; who, as they are mischievous, so end they infortunate.¹

So concludes Francis Bacon’s 1625 treatise On Revenge, which in many ways presents, in germinal form, the conventional proto-bourgeois modern political theory of revenge. It is notable that Bacon wrote these words while gravely in debt, having some years earlier, thanks to a conspiracy of his rivals, been stripped of the title of Chancellor to James I for corruption and sedition, barely escaping with his head. This came after years of public service in which Bacon had helped plan and facilitate England’s nascent settler colonial adventures into Virginia and Newfoundland, and had presided over the Tudor enclosure of the commons and the dispossession of peasants to help enrich the Crown.² As Carolyn Merchant observes, much of Bacon’s thought, and the metaphors of the torture and interrogation of nature which would become so influential to the development of the Scientific Method which he is credited to have fathered, emerged in the context of James I’s enthusiasm for witch-hunting.³ While there is a vigorous historical debate about Bacon’s own involvement in and opinion of witch trials, the dire warning at the close of his essay On Revenge resonates with the hegemonic view of his day.

Silvia Federici and Maria Mies have both drawn key connections between colonialism, enclosure, and the witch trials as central to the birth and rise of capitalism. Witch hunts were characterized by public spectacles of vengeful vitriol that helped misdirect proto-proletarian anger at growing social insecurity and discord along gendered lines, setting the stage for the imbrications of capitalism and patriarchy to come.⁴ Bacon was a key figure in this shift, as well as in the development of a prototypical modern theory of science that feminist thinkers have shown was based in the violent and sexualized subjugation of a passive and exploitable notion of nature, which is at the root of today’s violent forms of instrumental and scientistic rationality, and also the pseudoscience of bourgeois political economy.⁵

It is, I think, no accident that Bacon would also give us a prototypical theory of revenge, which is later echoed in the work of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Adam Smith.⁶ Here, revenge is seen as a base, animal instinct dangerous to the social order. It is presented as ultimately self-destructive, an urge that consumes the subject and does not allow psychic and social wounds to heal. Revenge appears as something supernatural and untimely, a suspension of the holy order. Its suppression is the basis of the legitimacy of the state: by nominating a leviathan to adjudicate disputes and mete out punishment, man raises himself above an animalistic nature.

As such, for Bacon “public revenges,” those undertaken by or for the sovereign or which, in retrospect can be said to be justified in the name of the commonwealth (as narrated by its victors), are legitimate, especially as they target those “witches,” those unruly, uncanny, un-godly subjects who refuse to abandon their right to revenge outside of the state’s vengeful law.

MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS

In the late 1980s a lower middle class Virginian man in his early 30s quit his job as special assistant to the chief of naval operations at the Pentagon to attend Harvard Business School. Bright and ambitious but older, poorer, and lacking the cultural and social capital of most of his colleagues, his chances were dim. One night he was a wallflower at a Goldman Sachs recruitment party and got into a conversation with two equally awkward men about baseball. They turned out to be two of the company’s executives; he was hired shortly afterward and, thanks to his maturity, cunning, ruthlessness, and yen for the grueling hours, he quickly rose to become one of the firm’s vice-presidents (not as high and mighty a position as it sounds) in the burgeoning mergers and acquisitions department.

Thanks to Reagan-era deregulation, mergers and acquisitions had become one of the bank’s key profit generators, facilitating the merciless takeover of smaller, local firms by large monopolies in sectors including retail, manufacturing, communications, infrastructure, and banking itself. The resulting financial boom has given us the film-and tell-all memoir-inspired stereotypes of the coked-up, oversexed financier so desperate to make his commission he’ll sell his own grandmother to his fellow wolves of Wall Street. But this stereotype individualizes a systemic and structural problem: financialization, driven by the crisis-prompted acceleration of capitalist competition for profit, was actively destroying the bedrock of the Keynesian capitalist economy on which it preyed, gutting jobs and benefits, specifically targeting for destruction firms with strong unions and low profit margins (see Chapter 5). Our financier, to whom we shall return, for now we know him well, was among those who aided and abetted a system of economic vengeance on American proletarians.

THE RULE OF HISTORICAL RETRIBUTION

Marx’s relationship to revenge is ambiguous, perhaps because he unhappily inherits a Western tradition that understands revenge as a retrograde, atavistic, dark force unworthy of a humanist let alone a materialist. For a man who sought, in Harry Cleaver’s words, to put intellectual weapons in the hands of the oppressed, exploited and brutalized working class, it is somewhat surprising he rarely mentions vengeance.⁷

Writing in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1845, Engels, with whom Marx surely agrees on this point, assures bourgeois readers that

it does not occur to any Communist to wish to revenge himself upon individuals, or to believe that, in general, the single bourgeois can act otherwise, under existing circumstances, than he does act … Communism, rests directly upon the irresponsibility of the individual. Thus the more … workers absorb communistic ideas, the more superfluous becomes their present bitterness, which, should it continue so violent as at present, could accomplish nothing; and the more their action against the bourgeoisie will lose its savage cruelty.⁸

So a mature political approach is one that renounces or transcends individual acts of violence. According to what Engels would later identify as dialectical materialism, history itself will avenge the wrongs of capital. Elsewhere, Engels associates vengefulness with the immature socialism with the followers of Auguste Blanqui, the towering professional revolutionary of the nineteenth century whose writings are full of trenchant fury and vengeful promises for the bourgeois oppressors, but contain little systematic analysis of their power.⁹ For Engels, mature communism is the antidote to vengeance, in part because it foresees a world without systemic injustice, in part because, as a political movement, it sublimates vengeance into political organization and aims for a horizon of transformation, rather than retribution. Indeed, it sees this as necessary because to a very real extent, it is predicated on the irresponsibility of the individual, both the bourgeois and the proletarian: both, historically speaking, are motivated by systemic forces that mean their actions are not entirely their own. The final goal of the proletariat is not to decapitate this or that capitalist but to abolish all classes, both bourgeoisie and proletariat.

Yet, importantly, the other place revenge appears is as a condemnation of sanctimonious and false bourgeois appeals to justice and necessity. For instance, the term appears in Marx’s excoriating analysis of the bourgeois response to the Paris Commune of 1871: the murder of tens of thousands of communards in the streets, the show-trials and exile of tens of thousands more.¹⁰ Likewise, Marx comments with horror on the racist, revanchist vitriol whipped up in the bourgeois press for the punishment of what the British Empire called the “Sepoy Mutiny” of 1857 (in actuality it was a much wider anti-colonial revolt), which led to the mobilizing of an British Army of Retribution that unleashed sickening public executions and torture, mass rapes and looting, with a death toll of up to 10 million people.¹¹ Marx, who publicly decried the fake news propounded by the English press about the sexual crimes of Indians against white women and girls that justified the revanchist expedition,¹² sagely offered the following:

However infamous the conduct of the Sepoys, it is only the reflex, in a concentrated form, of England’s own conduct in India, not only during the epoch of the foundation of her Eastern Empire, but even during the last ten years of a long-settled rule. To characterize that rule, it suffices to say that torture formed an organic institution of its financial policy. There is something in human history like retribution: and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself.¹³

I think Marx means two things here. The first is that revenge and retribution enacted by the oppressed and exploited are forged in the normalized torture of the oppressor and exploiter’s extortionate economy, something thinkers like C.L.R. James and Aimé Césaire echoed and expanded in their treatment of Caribbean anti-colonial revolts.¹⁴ Second and related, the primary act of vengeance is always that of the oppressor against the oppressed, but this vengeance is presented by the oppressor as the legitimate, legal, and even benevolent, in this case the business of the East India Company.¹⁵ Even more profoundly, this vengeance is endemic to the system itself, so normalized and routine that it becomes invisible, at least to the abusers. The economy of revenge only becomes visible when its typically one-way flows are reversed. That “torture formed an organic institution of its financial policy” implies that, when it comes to systemic vengeance, the punishment always already comes before the crime.

Marx corroborates this approach in an 1849 article on English bourgeois power in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung:

In England’s workhouses – those public institutions where the redundant labor population is allowed to vegetate at the expense of bourgeois society – charity is cunningly combined with the revenge which the bourgeoisie wreaks on the wretches who are compelled to appeal to its charity … These unfortunate people have committed the crime of having ceased to be an object of exploitation yielding a profit to the bourgeoisie – as is the case in ordinary life – and having become instead an object of expenditure for those born to derive benefit from them.¹⁶

Here we see the glimmer of a theory of systemic vengeance to which we shall shortly return: the notion that, far from the obsequious theories of establishmentarian philosophers like Bacon or Hobbes, vengeance is not banished with the witches at the borders of the State, but, rather, is inherent, integral, and immanent to the workings of power. Indeed, power works to conceal its fundamental reliance on unwarranted, preemptive, banalized revenge precisely by defaming its antagonists and rebels as consumed by the demonic, base, and animalistic passion of revenge. Beyond the sanctimony of the law, which claims to save us from the endless cycles of primordial vengeance, there is the mystified vengefulness of the system itself, in this case cunningly disguised as charity.

THE VENGEANCE OF RACE

For all that defamation, proletarians and other oppressed and exploited people have consistently drawn on the thematic of revenge as a key means to mobilize themselves.

Consider the famous lines of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the v...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction: We want revenge
• 1 Toward a materialist theory of revenge
• 2 The work of art in an age of unpayable debts: Social reproduction, geopolitics, and settler colonialism
• 3 Money as a medium of vengeance: Colonial accumulation and proletarian practices
• 4 Our Opium Wars: Pain, race, and the ghosts of empire
• 5 The dead zone: Financialized nihilism, toxic wealth, and vindictive technologies
• Postscript: After the pandemic – against the vindictive normal
• Notes
• Index