Max Haiven's Blog

The following essay was published on 14 April 2025 in Tribune magazine.

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2025/04/radical-gaming

If the popularity of the Squid Game TV series and The Hunger Games film and book franchise are any indication, working people around the world tend to sympathise with characters trapped in a sadistic, unwinnable game. 

And why not? In this moment of capitalism, most of us feel that our chances of securing a good life are slim, no matter how dutifully we play by the rules. Forty years after the onset of a neoliberal revolution which promised to make the economy a ‘level playing field’, the rich get richer and working people continue to struggle. We feel cheated. This sentiment goes a long way to explaining the success of far-right and fascist politicians and influencers, who can redirect blame down the class ladder rather than upwards where it belongs.

It is in this context that games have the potential to reshape our imaginations. It’s also why I’m working with Pluto Books to launch the board game Billionaires & Guillotines. In it, players take on the role of plutocrats who compete to capture the wealth of the world via the acquisition of luxurious assets. But as the game unfolds, their greed leads to ecological, social and economic crises, and a rebellion brews. Players must try to win before their accumulation triggers a revolution and all the billionaires lose (their heads). 

This is all a satire, of course. In the game, the billionaires — a tech overlord, a property speculator, an aristocrat, a war profiteer and a media baron, all of whom might remind players of real-world people — gleefully sacrifice whole populations in their quest for luxury yachts, private islands and celebrity spouses. They can even bribe the government to pump up their investments or sabotage their rivals.

But who is surprised, and who actually feels threatened, by these representations? The critical potential of this game is hopefully a little more subtle than merely making fun of the super-rich, as rewarding as that may feel. It might just lie in the way that games in general speak in unique and powerful ways to working people who are struggling under a gamified form of capitalism.

Gamified Capitalism

Globally, some three billion people play a commercial game regularly — usually on their smartphones, and typically one of the top 25 games currently trending on the market. The games industry is said to be larger than the film, television, music and publishing industries combined, with major triple-A game studios pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the development of blockbuster games, from which they earn billions in returns. 

But the massive size of the games industry is only the most obvious aspect of what I will call ‘gamified capitalism’. This term can also help us to understand how struggles around work in the game industry also reflect and reveal class struggle more broadly. 

Exploitation is rife throughout the entire games supply chain, beginning with the horrific conditions of people compelled to extract the raw materials that go into the (quickly obsolescent) digital devices on which digital games are programmed and played. Even those relatively privileged workers who write, code, illustrate and playtest digital games are subject to emergent forms of exploitation.

Much of the less creative work is contracted out to the Global South, where workers are made to compete to work more cheaply to service corporations in the Global North. Even in the North, many who work for the top game companies accept precarious working conditions, gruelling schedules and abusive contracts for a chance to ‘do what they love’ and make games.

The indie game scene, where individuals and small groups make and market their own games, is similarly plagued by exploitation. And while many fascinating and innovative games are being made, a few companies own and have a stranglehold over the platforms where games are found and downloaded. Like Netflix or Amazon Prime, these platforms prioritise products that either pay for the privilege or stand what the platform-masters imagine to be a high chance of success. In such a way, the games industry reveals the horizons of class struggle today.

But the gamification of capitalism is deeper still. It also refers to the way that games and game-like elements have become a key part of everyone’s lives. Apps like Duolingo are the charismatic face of a vast industry that has used play to seduce us into accepting the harvesting of our data, the commodification of our attention and the reshaping of our social world.

As public education budgets have been slashed, schools increasingly turn to corporate e-learning apps that promise to revolutionise pedagogy, but often deliver a banal, standardised experience that has dubious outcomes when measured holistically. Gamified dating apps have revolutionised romance, but rarely for the better; most users struggle with new and old forms of objectification, alienation and disconnection.

Gamified banking and investment ‘fintech’ apps claim to help us better manage our finances and ‘nudge’ us towards a more hygienic economic life — and some working people indeed benefit from them. But they do little to remedy the austere conditions of life and work under a system where workers are getting poorer. Rather, they provide the alibi that these structural inequalities are due to individual failings.

Health and fitness apps likewise encourage individuals to imagine that their wellbeing is simply a matter of reinforcing better habits, erasing the fact that the most consequential factors in health are access to decent food, rest, good housing, a clean environment — all things that are best delivered as public goods, not private responsibilities.

The Unwinnable Game

Here we come to the broadest meaning of gamified capitalism: the way that the system as a whole makes most of us feel like we’re trapped in an unwinnable game. Consider the person trying to navigate the high-stakes maze of an immigration system — especially the UK’s ‘hostile environment’, in which every teacher, doctor, landlord and service provider becomes a border sentinel.

Consider the family trying to work out the riddle of how to get care for a loved-one in the shattered public healthcare system, or through extortionate private insurance schemes. Consider the punitive bureaucratic game of applying for benefits in a system designed to be practically impossible. Consider the worker on the phone to the human resources call centre, or trying to sort out a phone or utilities contract, or complaining about being charged too much by their bank. It’s one unwinnable, absurd game after another — and the house always wins.

The problem in a nutshell is this. For 40 years, neoliberal capitalism has told us that in order to survive and thrive, we need to become ‘players’: savvy, risk-taking, self-managing competitors. Rather than relying on employers and the state to offer us security in return for our productivity, so the logic goes, we should instead embrace the hustle and throw ourselves into the market game. And yet most of us now feel fundamentally cheated, and look for someone to blame as a result.

This is one of the main factors leading people to the far right, whose representatives promise to make the game fair again and punish those they accuse of cheating: the migrant who is allegedly cheating the border regime and free-riding on society’s wealth; the benefits claimant who is opting out of playing the game and cheating the system to sustain their own laziness; the minority subject who is cheating the capitalist meritocracy by ‘playing the race card’ and benefiting from diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

While reactionary demagogues also often complain — vaguely — about ‘elites’ cheating the system, they do nothing about, for example, the billions of dollars of public wealth being stolen in off-shore tax havens, or the innumerable loopholes by which the rich and corporations avoid paying their fair share. 

The Potential of Games

Our assumption in making Billionaires & Guillotines is that, under gamified capitalism, games have a special place and are a vital field for intervention. If we have all been told to become players, then we might learn a lot by appealing to people’s playfulness. Gamified capitalism depends at every stage on us remaking ourselves into active agents, trained and primed to play its competitive game. I believe games can speak to a world of ‘players’ in more fruitful ways. 

But this begs many questions. How to make games that don’t just reaffirm the idea of ‘the player’, but meaningful challenges it? How to make games that reveal the possibility of solidarity? How to make games that direct workers’ anger towards the real causes of it? How to make games which show that there are other ways of being in the world, and that other worlds are possible? And how to get these games past the capitalist gatekeepers?

With Billionaires & Guillotines, we are experimenting with the relatively cheap medium of board games. While these can reach far fewer people than digital games on handheld devices, they have the benefit of bringing people together in real space and time, where critical conversations and radical conviviality can transpire. While Billionaires & Guillotines is a satire, it also experiments with how asking players to take on the role of billionaires can teach us some important lessons about how capitalism works. 

Partly inspired by Rosa Luxemburg’s elaboration of Marxian crisis theory in her magisterial The Accumulation of Capital, Billionaires & Guillotines demonstrates how the seemingly rational and strategic actions of individual competitive capitalism creates unforeseen crises. As players of the game gobble up the wealth of the world for luxury assets, their actions inadvertently unleash ecological crises, political upheaval and social calamity, ultimately leading to a revolution. In other words — spoiler alert! — the game ultimately destroys itself from the inside.

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What is the Antifascist Game?A symposium for committed makers, players and organizers of games London – July 11, 2025

Fascism, yesterday and today, is a sick and deadly game. What role, if any, do play and games take in defeating it?

In cooperation with Games Transformed (“a London festival for discussing, making and playing radical games”) and Weird Economies (a platform for tracing the “economic imaginaries extraordinary to financial arrangements of our time”), RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab presents What is the Antifascist Game?, a one-day symposium of game-makers, game-thinkers, game-players, game-artists and game-interventionists to consider this vital question.

This symposium is organized in conjunction with the 2025 Games Transformed Festival, which will take place the following day, July 12, at the same location.

In solidarity with internationalist material struggles to defeat fascism in the streets and with broader struggles to build radical democracy, we will gather to pose common questions about the growing threat, including but not limited to:

How are today’s forms of fascism (dangerously) playful and with what consequences? How are they mobilizing games? How do they make use of gamified platforms, from (Twitch, YouTube, Discord)? Does this gamification make them different from their 20th century ancestors? How are fascist games and play entwined with the hyper-capitalist and games industry and its exploitation of workers throughout its supply chains, from the extractive mining operations to the self-exploitative hustle of “independent” developers? How are they entangled with the broader tendency towards capitalist gamification, and with the even broader climate of capitalism that feels, to so many people, like an unwinnable game?How are these phenomena connected to resurgent patriarchy, racist nationalism, colonialism and genocide (in Palestine and beyond), revanchist politics, and rampant and murderous transphobia? How do mainstream and alternative games (digital and analogue) promote or encourage fascist attitudes in either content or form (or both)?

We will also ask questions of resistance, rebellion and renewal, including:

What role (if any) do play and games play in defending our communities from and ultimately abolishing fascism?How can anti-capitalist, queer, feminist, crip and other forms of “gaming from below” coordinate with anti-fascist efforts?How shall we, who care about the power of games, draw the line and hold the line against fascist imaginaries? How shall we recognize enemies and encourage our allies? What games will help us win a new postfascist, postcapitalist world? How will games and play feel after we win? What games will we play on the way?

These intentionally provocative questions are intended to excite, rather than limit the imagination about what kind of work and thinking might be welcome at our gathering. 

When we speak of games, we are not only thinking of the massive digital games industry. We also want to expand our attention to include board games, role-playing games (tabletop, live action/LARP and more), sports, the gamification of… everything, sexual and romantic play, educational games, and the broader concept of play. When we speak of fascism, we are thinking historically and in the present, both in the thing we call “The West” and also “The Rest,” about not just an ideology and political organization but also a reactionary set of attitudes, dispositions and orientations that entrench and celebrate power and domination.

We welcome a plurality of responses to our call from people including game designers, interactive theatre practitioners and artists, scholars and intellectuals (with or without institutional affiliations and credentials), community organizers who share an opposition to fascism and a recognition of its entanglements with racism and nationalism, with patriarchy, homophobia and transphobia, with capitalism, with ableism, and with other systems of domination.

Format

The exact format of this symposium will depend on the participants, however it will not be a conventional presentation of academic papers. Rather, we will devise a well-facilitated format that prioritizes sharing ideas, meeting like minds, posing important questions, and generating new connections and collaborations. We welcome participants who are genuinely curious and interested in collaborative thinking, not grandstanders and know-it-alls.

Most of the day’s events will be private, for registrants. There will be one public-facing panel, which will also be recorded and appear as the final episode of the Weird Economies podcast The Exploits of Play, Season 2: Against the Fascist Game.

Logistics 10am-5pm on July 11At a central London venueThe event is freeLunch will be providedLimited small travel and care subsidies are availableStick around for the Games Transformed 2025 festival, beginning on the evening of the 11th and continuing all day on the 12th.Organizer

RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab is  a workshop for the radical imagination, social justice and decolonization based in Thunder Bay (Canada) with activities around the world. It is directed (and this symposium is hosted) by Dr. Max Haiven, Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination, creator of the board game Billionaires and Guillotines, the producer of the podcast The Exploits of Play and author of many books, including the forthcoming The Player and the Played: How the Game of Financialization led to Fascism.

Apply

Please apply by 2 May 2025.

If the form does not appear below, try https://forms.gle/oJf99Qo475W7N2RV9

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The post What is the Antifascist Game? (London Symposium, July 11) appeared first on Max Haiven.

This piece appeared on 16 march 2025 in Jacobin.

All Games are Political

Max Haiven – 2025-03-16

Why was the winner of the world’s most prestigious prize for board game makers banned immediately after the ceremony by the very organization that awarded him?

Palestine.

When Daybreak won the Spiel des Jahres (SdJ, or “Game of the Year”) for the best “expert” board game, it affirmed what many reviewers and players knew: the game, which models geopolitical blocs cooperating to solve the climate crisis, broke new ground and showed that board games can be important tools for reimagining urgent social issues.

But when one of the designers dared to quietly demonstrate solidarity with Palestine at the SdJ awards ceremony in Berlin in July, a scandal erupted.

This story could be counted as simply another example of a German institution’s fanatical anti-Palestinian bias — the kind that, in other contexts, has seen Palestinians and their supporters surveilled, arrested, deported, blacklisted, and defamed.

But it also raises a wider question of board games’ politics today, in a moment of burgeoning fascism and deepening crisis. And these politics matter. Games are not only fun ways to come together. They play a unique role in helping us envision new worlds and new ways of working together.

A Game for Our Moment

During the pandemic, London-based game designer Matteo Menapace began working with Matt Leacock, creator of the legendary Pandemic series of board games. The first of these highly innovative games was released in 2008 to widespread acclaim, busting the myth that cooperative games are boring and sanctimonious. When the global COVID-19 outbreak forced billions of people to stay home or limit social interactions, makers of independent board games found millions of new fans. Given its themes, Pandemic — where players take on the roles of scientists and public health workers collaborating to cure and eliminate global diseases — emerged as a clear winner.

Early in the pandemic, Menapace wrote a blog about what the game Pandemic could teach us about the real-world event. This then led him and Leacock to develop the idea for a game about another crisis: the climate emergency. The two researched extensively and interviewed and play-tested early versions of their game with dozens of scientists, activists, and policymakers.

The final result, Daybreak, was published by CMYK Games in 2023. Up to four players take on the role of geopolitical blocs (the United States, Europe, China, and the Majority World). In a game that takes about ninety minutes to play, they try to share resources and technologies so that they can each transition their economies away from fossil fuels and help communities deal with the ecological and social disasters brought by climate change.

The game has been celebrated by reviewers for the satisfying way it allows players to focus on the challenges of their own region but also collaborate on global problems, and for creating a game that foregrounds the difficult questions of what paths to take toward climate justice. That the players often lose the game by triggering climate tipping points doesn’t seem to be discouraging. Each card has a QR code linking to the data and debates that animate the game about, for example, the risks and benefits of nuclear power, the feasibility of solar at scale, and the possibility of degrowth.

Like socialist speculative fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson’s blockbuster Ministry for the Future (which was a big inspiration for the game), Menapace and Leacock’s game Daybreak brings us into the near future of capitalism’s climate chaos and invites us to imagine what kind of power and institutions we would need to build globally to deliver us from calamity.

The Game of the Year Debacle

Packing that much complexity into a game that remains genuinely fun and challenging is no small feat, and so it was unsurprising when Daybreak was nominated for a SdJ award. The SdJ might be compared to the film industry’s Oscars: an award unparalleled in its prestige since its launch in 1978. Hundreds of thousands of people, especially in Germany, follow the awards, which celebrate games that are both critical and commercial successes. The SdJ brand represents the gold standard of board games.

But in Germany and elsewhere, the board game industry is biased toward “apolitical” games. Games as commodities are often framed as family-friendly activities, a safe platform for good-natured competition, an uplifting alternative to television or other forms of entertainment. The preference has been for games that are themed around historical or fantasy settings that will not offend or perturb players.

That said, the board game industry has been rightly criticized for regularly promoting racist and exoticist tropes, including in the famous Settlers of Catan, where players invade an island and proceed to build trading empires, all the while beset by a mysterious “robber,” implicitly recalling European fantasies of colonialism.

So Daybreak’s more explicit political orientation already ruffled feathers in board game communities. But when it won the prize, it was Menapace’s expression of solidarity with Palestine that really set things off. In addition to making a short speech encouraging game designers to engage with real-world challenges, Menapace affixed a sticker to his T-shirt that depicted the silhouette of historic Palestine in a watermelon motif.

Shortly afterwards, without notifying Menapace, the SdJ issued a public statement, declaring that “we find it intolerable that a game author we invited wore a symbol on his clothing on stage that must be perceived as antisemitic by Jews.” (It was unclear if any Jews were consulted, and if so which ones, or how they felt about being told what they “must” find offensive.) The organization was keen to point out that their concern revolved around the shape of the map of Palestine, which extended to the 1948 borders, allegedly implicitly delegitimizing the State of Israel — which is illegal under Germany’s singularly draconian laws.

The SdJ also accused Menapace of behaving “in an extremely uncollegial manner toward the others involved in his game (author, editorial team, publisher),” in spite of the fact they had spoken to none of the supposedly disrespected parties. They announced that “Menapace is no longer welcome at events organized by the Spiel des Jahres association” — quite a sanction, given the singular prestige of the organization.

Menapace responded with a thoughtful letter explaining his reasons and rightly denying the highly offensive accusation of antisemitism. Others have since written letters condemning the SdJ’s actions, notably its spurious accusation that solidarity with Palestine is inherently antisemitic, which is unfortunately commonplace in Germany.

Whatever the case, beyond the scandal of German exceptionalism around Israel and Palestine, this story reveals what’s at stake when a game “breaks the rules” and dares to take an explicitly political orientation.

Games Have Always Been “Political”

Perhaps all civilizations engage in what anthropologists call “deep play,” games that give expression to and help a society reflect on its fundamental beliefs and conflicts. In many societies, games and sports offer proxies for war and mechanisms to navigate political relations, for good or for ill.

The original Olympics, for example, were a vital diplomatic opportunity for the ancient Greeks. Given the ornate materials of many archeological relics, some scholars speculate that tabletop games like go, chess, senet, and the Royal Game of Ur were highly prized and may have been important tools for navigating domestic and international conflicts.

Modern board games stem from the tabletop war games used to train military officers, and from attempts to use the printing press to create toys for middle-class children to teach history and impress bourgeois values on them. This was hardly apolitical.

As early as the nineteenth century, social movements began using board games to convey their messages, including Suffragetto, a board game developed by militants fighting for women’s right to vote that simulated street fights with the police, or Monopoly, which was a critique of free-market capitalism before it was hijacked and turned into the game we all know today.

There have also been explicitly anti-capitalist games. In 1978, Marxist philosopher Bertell Ollman gained international notoriety for bringing to market Class Struggle, a socialist response to Monopoly that eventually sold over 230,000 copies worldwide. That game inspired Jacobin to release two-player board game Class War in 2022.

The idea that games are “not political” is really a fiction cooked up by late twentieth-century corporations who were keen to sell first board games and then video games to kids, mostly boys. This industry developed in the postwar years when childhood was being increasingly commodified and conformity to white-supremacist, homophobic, and sexist norms was being strictly enforced.

These days, the anti-politics of games serves an industry that promises to deliver players an escape from unnecessarily busy and stressful lives under modern capitalism. But often games’ reactionary politics are hidden in plain sight. In Playing Oppression, Mary Flanagan and Mikael Jakobsson catalogue the past and present of racist and colonial tropes in board games, notably in popular genres like 4X (also prevalent in video games) where players “eXplore” curiously cleansed landscapes, “eXpand” their empire, “eXploit” resources and people, and “eXterminate” their opponents. Many games are built around market mechanics that, inspired by the myths of neoliberalism, imagine economics as a matter of pure calculation and risk, failing to recognize the role of power and exploitation, or the possibility of solidarity.

In the past decades, many game designers have struggled to tell different stories and create games that move us away from the common themes of accumulation, competition, violence, and scarcity. But it was only with the recent rise of crowdfunding platforms, as well as the emergences of diverse online gamer communities, that a space has opened to a multitude of experiments.

Menapace’s collaborator on Daybreak, Matt Leacock, is widely recognized as a hero of today’s “board game renaissance” when it comes to cooperative games, a genre of games that many children of lefties (like the present author) remember as boring, pedantic, and profoundly unfun. Leacock and others have developed ways to make cooperative games deeply engaging and enjoyable, and so accessible to many players who don’t enjoy games that trade in stress and competition.

Many others have followed by adapting these mechanisms to speak to radical themes. T. L. Simon’s Bloc By Bloc, for example, is a (mostly) cooperative game of urban insurgency where players work together as students, workers, incarcerated people, and local activists to defend their neighborhoods from the cops. The TESA Collective works closely with progressive and environmental organizations to produce cooperative games like STRIKE! The Game of Worker Rebellion, Community Garden: The Board Game, and Space Cats Fight Fascism.

While not cooperative, Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory is a phenomenal simulator of class struggle in social democracy (including the possibility that the workers take over the state and institute communism or that the ruling and middle classes team up to impose fascism). Board games like Red Flag Over Paris or Chicago ‘68 help us reflect on the victories and defeats of movements in the past.

My own game, Billionaires and Guillotines, is a satire that dramatizes the lessons of Rosa Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital: the capitalist class cannot be trusted to solve the crises its competition has created; they will cascade out of control unless we rise up and establish a system that serves people and the planet, not profit.

As Richard Barbrook argues in his fiery book Class War Games, games help every radical hone their skills at developing meaningful movement strategy, something the Left desperately needs as it contends with growing corporate power, rising fascism, and climate and social crisis.

Many board game designers use the format to do radical work that is less concerned with market success. Avery Alder’s mapmaking game A Quiet Year movingly depicts the joy and struggle of building community after the fall of “civilization.” Live action role-players (LARPers) explore queer and radical political themes from the past, present, and future by playing characters in immersive, interactive theatrical productions that can be profoundly transformative.

Organizations like Red Plenty organize “mega games” (large simulations, kind of like a Model United Nations) at radical and lefty events and festivals to help us explore potential futures. And many movement facilitators and educators around the world have been inspired by Theatre of the Oppressed to use social and board games to help train a new generation of activists and community organizers, and many compendia of these games are now available.

New Games for an Age of Crisis

The ruling class has always resented and feared workers’ playfulness, even as sports and other spectacles of play have long been used to defuse social tensions or sew divisions among oppressed people.

But play is our birthright. All animals play — David Graeber even argued that subatomic particles play. If capitalism forces us to work for the benefit of bosses, play and games contain within them a kernel of resistance.

Some of our first and most meaningful experiences are small games that caregivers play with us when we’re infants. This is because, as the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen makes clear, games allow us to explore how the world shapes us and how we shape the world. Games offer us a chance to try on other forms of agency: what is it like to be a property tycoon trying to bankrupt your opponents, or a geopolitical bloc trying to collaborate on fixing the climate crisis, or an orca taking revenge on the boats that killed your family? Many games allow us to simulate real-world radical struggles, from organizing a union to managing an anti-capitalist government. But even when they are more poetic or abstract, games invite us to, for a time, gain and share new powers.

Most people today feel like they’re caught in an unwinnable game, hence perhaps the popularity of TV shows like Squid Game or the Hunger Games film and book franchise. The far right has capitalized on this feeling, but offers racist and reactionary explanations: it’s the immigrants, the “special interest groups,” and some nebulous “elites” who cheated the system, which is presented as otherwise a fair meritocracy.

The reality is that the capitalist game was always rigged, from the very beginning: it works to cheat the working class of its time, power, and wealth and transfer it upward.

Games can and should help us understand this system for what it is and envision alternatives. Daybreak is a phenomenal example of just such a game, and for that it couldn’t be forgiven.

The post All Games are Political (Jacobin) appeared first on Max Haiven.

A study workshop for thinkers, makers, organizers, and interventionistsSunday 25 to Thursday 29 of May in PalermoApply by March 31

It need hardly be said: fascism has seduced people around the world, and the world hangs in the balance. 

Why has fascism been so successful? What can be done?

Sense & Solidarity, a platform where radical thinkers and movements come together to study what changes hearts and minds, invites applications to join a 5-day study intensive in Palermo.

We will be focusing on reading and discussing theoretical and historical texts that illuminate our current conjecture.

Today, those of us who believe another world is necessary find our hopes destroyed and our fears realized in the rising spectre of fascism. It is capitalizing on a deepening global crisis and unleashing profound violence. Meanwhile, the centrists, whose obedience to corporate rule and neoimperialism caused the crisis that opened the doors to fascism, seem to have learned nothing. How can we retain and expand a radical vision while also meaningfully defending our communities from the fascist threat? How can we recognize fascism’s incubation within neoliberal capitalism? How can we envision radical alternatives and make them irresistible.

Uniquely, at this study workshop we will be asking questions about the mass psychology of fascism. How does it capitalizes on and reshapes people’s sense of self and other, disgust and desire, their craving for community and fear of freedom? How can this be opposed, destroyed and replaced?

Every day of the intensive Max Haiven and Sarah Stein Lubrano will lead discussions on readings that concern questions including:

How can social movements for collective liberation and anti-fascist artists, intellectuals and other interventionists best respond to fascism, not only in terms of opposing and rebelling against specific policies, but also in terms of responding to fascism’s widespread appeal? How is 21st century fascism similar to and different from its 20th century predecessors, especially in terms of how it seduces and poisons hearts and minds? What should movements and interventionists learn from those anti-fascists who have come before us, and are fighting in other contexts?How does fascism intersect with patriarchy and misogyny, with racism and imperialism, with transphobia, with ableism and with other systems of domination? How can anti-fascist struggles and interventions advance collective liberation? What actually works to fight fascism, in its germinal state and in its fully-grown form (and how do we know the difference)? What can we learn from the victories and defeats  of the past and from other spaces?What role, if any, do those things we call art, culture, literature, writing and education play in an anti-fascist struggle?

The facilitators do not claim to be experts on this topic, but rather propose to convene a generative space to learn together.

Who is it for?

This intensive is open to all people intentionally engaged in anti-fascist struggle, with the understanding that this means a wide variety of things and that a diversity of tactics is essential in this moment.

We envision cultivating a space shared by front-line organizers, people working within/against/beyond organizations, radical thinkers (with or without credentials or jobs), and artists and writers and other interventionists who see culture as both a weapon and a cure.

We will be reading and discussing theoretical texts, and while the facilitators (Max and Sarah) are very experienced teachers of this material, it will require a significant commitment to read complex and at times abstract texts and discuss them in English.

By applying, all potential participants agree to help proactively co-create and foster an atmosphere of collective joy, intensive inquiry, mutual support, community care, and intellectual rigour which is as free as possible from sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and other systems of domination and that, for a moment, prefigures the world we want to create after we destroy fascism.

We anticipate about 10-14 carefully selected participants.

What will happen?

We will gather each day for five days, from Sunday May 25 to Thursday May 29 from 10:30 to 3, including a lunch together, with a combination of facilitated group discussion of assigned readings and small group work. We’ll ask you to do some structured journaling and share how this fits in the wider work you’re doing. 

When and where will it take place?

We’ll be meeting in a small lovely building in Palermo each day. You can book accommodation nearby at a variety of price points, and you will book your own travel.

What does it cost and how do I apply?

To apply, please fill out this short application below. We will charge a programme fee of £200 or equivalent, which includes lunches on the 25-29. You will be responsible for your accommodation and other mealss

What are we reading/discussing?We will read from the old and golden texts understanding the desire for fascism including Frankfurt School theorists like Adorno, Fromm, and Benjamin. We’ll look at the role of gender, including male fantasies about power, enemy feminisms, and the role of the tradwife. And we’ll wrestle with why the fash are so obsessed with trans people (not in a good way). We’ll consider some very different kinds of fascism in the global south, and look at the ecofascists and their allure. We’ll look at digital fascisms in particular, and the strange modern forms of fascism that have been inspired by accelerationism.

We will share our reading list soon.

Who are Max and Sarah?

Sarah is a public intellectual who writes about the breakdown of the public sphere. Her book, Don’t Talk About Politics: Changing 21st Century Minds, comes out in May. It looks at why persuasion through exposure to ideas doesn’t work, what does change people’s views on politics, and why the internet is good at division and bad at everything else. She has a PhD in critical theory and cognitive science from Oxford. 

Max is the Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination and author many books, including the forthcoming The Player and the Played: Gamification, Financialization and (anti-)Fascism. He edits the VAGABONDS book series and makes games, including ​​​​Billionaires and Guillotines.

Together, Sarah and Max run Sense & Solidarity, a platform where movements for collective liberation and radical interventionists (artists, writers, thinkers) gather to study what actually works to change hearts and minds. They produce a podcast, host regular schools and workshops, and support the next generation of radical public intellectuals.

How to apply

Please complete this form by March 31: https://senseandsolidarity.org/dreams/

Upon collecting all of the applications we will adjudicate them based on what we perceive to be the best fit and also to ensure a good mix of participants relative to personal and professional background. We will endeavour to let selected participants know by the first week of April and may also create a waitlist. we may require a small non-refundable confirmation payment to help us with upfront costs.

Those wishing to participate who would be prohibited from doing so by the registration cost should please include a note in their application and we will do our best to ensure that money is not a barrier.

200 GBP for participation (including lunch) but we’ll accept less. A large percentage of our costs are covered by rival: the reimagining value action lab. Registration fees cover the cost of food, logistics, and a small honorarium for the course leader. 

Do you want to volunteer to be our assistant?

(and get to participate and stay for free?)

Based on past workshops, we have found that including an assistant helps everything run more smoothly. To that end, we are inviting inquiries from people who can be present for the entire duration of our study workshop and–in return for free tuition, accommodation and some assistance with transportation costs–will assist the course leaders with administrative tasks in the lead up to the event and take charge of preparing lunch and cleaning up for the five days of the workshop. This assistant is welcome to participate in the programming, however their first priority must be to facilitation, so we can’t guarantee they will always be able to participate in all aspects of the program.

An assistant would need to…

Arrive one day early (on May 24)Buy groceries and prepare a light lunch each day for participants and take responsibility for coordinating cleaning up from lunch (with help)Help Max and Sarah with occasional administrative tasks in the lead-up to the gathering (maybe 1-2 hours per week of work)

They would get…

Free registration to the event (though you may not be able to participate in everything)Free accommodation from May 24-30 (your own room)Free lunchesSome assistance with transportation (depending on budget and distance)Ongoing mentoring from Max and/or Sarah (if it’s helpful)

Desirable qualities: fun and/or easy to be around, responsible, interested in the topic, would find this an important opportunity in their personal development, bonus: speaks Italian.

If you’d be interested, please write us a quick email by March 24th about why you’d like to do this, what makes you a good choice for the position and if you have any concerns etc. We will schedule some interviews (on zoom or in London) the week of March 24.

The post Fascist Dreams, Antifascist Awakenings (study workshop – 25-29 May) appeared first on Max Haiven.

A study workshop for thinkers, makers, organizers, and interventionistsSunday 25 to Thursday 29 of May in PalermoApply by March 31

It need hardly be said: fascism has seduced people around the world, and the world hangs in the balance. 

Why has fascism been so successful? What can be done?

Sense & Solidarity, a platform where radical thinkers and movements come together to study what changes hearts and minds, invites applications to join a 5-day study intensive in Palermo.

We will be focusing on reading and discussing theoretical and historical texts that illuminate our current conjecture.

Today, those of us who believe another world is necessary find our hopes destroyed and our fears realized in the rising spectre of fascism. It is capitalizing on a deepening global crisis and unleashing profound violence. Meanwhile, the centrists, whose obedience to corporate rule and neoimperialism caused the crisis that opened the doors to fascism, seem to have learned nothing. How can we retain and expand a radical vision while also meaningfully defending our communities from the fascist threat? How can we recognize fascism’s incubation within neoliberal capitalism? How can we envision radical alternatives and make them irresistible.

Uniquely, at this study workshop we will be asking questions about the mass psychology of fascism. How does it capitalizes on and reshapes people’s sense of self and other, disgust and desire, their craving for community and fear of freedom? How can this be opposed, destroyed and replaced?

Every day of the intensive Max Haiven and Sarah Stein Lubrano will lead discussions on readings that concern questions including:

How can social movements for collective liberation and anti-fascist artists, intellectuals and other interventionists best respond to fascism, not only in terms of opposing and rebelling against specific policies, but also in terms of responding to fascism’s widespread appeal? How is 21st century fascism similar to and different from its 20th century predecessors, especially in terms of how it seduces and poisons hearts and minds? What should movements and interventionists learn from those anti-fascists who have come before us, and are fighting in other contexts?How does fascism intersect with patriarchy and misogyny, with racism and imperialism, with transphobia, with ableism and with other systems of domination? How can anti-fascist struggles and interventions advance collective liberation? What actually works to fight fascism, in its germinal state and in its fully-grown form (and how do we know the difference)? What can we learn from the victories and defeats  of the past and from other spaces?What role, if any, do those things we call art, culture, literature, writing and education play in an anti-fascist struggle?

The facilitators do not claim to be experts on this topic, but rather propose to convene a generative space to learn together.

Who is it for?

This intensive is open to all people intentionally engaged in anti-fascist struggle, with the understanding that this means a wide variety of things and that a diversity of tactics is essential in this moment.

We envision cultivating a space shared by front-line organizers, people working within/against/beyond organizations, radical thinkers (with or without credentials or jobs), and artists and writers and other interventionists who see culture as both a weapon and a cure.

We will be reading and discussing theoretical texts, and while the facilitators (Max and Sarah) are very experienced teachers of this material, it will require a significant commitment to read complex and at times abstract texts and discuss them in English.

By applying, all potential participants agree to help proactively co-create and foster an atmosphere of collective joy, intensive inquiry, mutual support, community care, and intellectual rigour which is as free as possible from sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and other systems of domination and that, for a moment, prefigures the world we want to create after we destroy fascism.

We anticipate about 10-14 carefully selected participants.

What will happen?

We will gather each day for five days, from Sunday May 25 to Thursday May 29 from 10:30 to 3, including a lunch together, with a combination of facilitated group discussion of assigned readings and small group work. We’ll ask you to do some structured journaling and share how this fits in the wider work you’re doing. 

When and where will it take place?

We’ll be meeting in a small lovely building in Palermo each day. You can book accommodation nearby at a variety of price points, and you will book your own travel.

What does it cost and how do I apply?

To apply, please fill out this short application below. We will charge a programme fee of £200 or equivalent, which includes lunches on the 25-29. You will be responsible for your accommodation and other mealss

What are we reading/discussing?We will read from the old and golden texts understanding the desire for fascism including Frankfurt School theorists like Adorno, Fromm, and Benjamin. We’ll look at the role of gender, including male fantasies about power, enemy feminisms, and the role of the tradwife. And we’ll wrestle with why the fash are so obsessed with trans people (not in a good way). We’ll consider some very different kinds of fascism in the global south, and look at the ecofascists and their allure. We’ll look at digital fascisms in particular, and the strange modern forms of fascism that have been inspired by accelerationism.

We will share our reading list soon.

Who are Max and Sarah?

Sarah is a public intellectual who writes about the breakdown of the public sphere. Her book, Don’t Talk About Politics: Changing 21st Century Minds, comes out in May. It looks at why persuasion through exposure to ideas doesn’t work, what does change people’s views on politics, and why the internet is good at division and bad at everything else. She has a PhD in critical theory and cognitive science from Oxford. 

Max is the Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination and author many books, including the forthcoming The Player and the Played: Gamification, Financialization and (anti-)Fascism. He edits the VAGABONDS book series and makes games, including ​​​​Billionaires and Guillotines.

Together, Sarah and Max run Sense & Solidarity, a platform where movements for collective liberation and radical interventionists (artists, writers, thinkers) gather to study what actually works to change hearts and minds. They produce a podcast, host regular schools and workshops, and support the next generation of radical public intellectuals.

How to apply

Please complete this form by March 31: https://senseandsolidarity.org/dreams/

Upon collecting all of the applications we will adjudicate them based on what we perceive to be the best fit and also to ensure a good mix of participants relative to personal and professional background. We will endeavour to let selected participants know by the first week of April and may also create a waitlist. we may require a small non-refundable confirmation payment to help us with upfront costs.

Those wishing to participate who would be prohibited from doing so by the registration cost should please include a note in their application and we will do our best to ensure that money is not a barrier.

200 GBP for participation (including lunch) but we’ll accept less. A large percentage of our costs are covered by rival: the reimagining value action lab. Registration fees cover the cost of food, logistics, and a small honorarium for the course leader. 

Do you want to volunteer to be our assistant?

(and get to participate and stay for free?)

Based on past workshops, we have found that including an assistant helps everything run more smoothly. To that end, we are inviting inquiries from people who can be present for the entire duration of our study workshop and–in return for free tuition, accommodation and some assistance with transportation costs–will assist the course leaders with administrative tasks in the lead up to the event and take charge of preparing lunch and cleaning up for the five days of the workshop. This assistant is welcome to participate in the programming, however their first priority must be to facilitation, so we can’t guarantee they will always be able to participate in all aspects of the program.

An assistant would need to…

Arrive one day early (on May 24)Buy groceries and prepare a light lunch each day for participants and take responsibility for coordinating cleaning up from lunch (with help)Help Max and Sarah with occasional administrative tasks in the lead-up to the gathering (maybe 1-2 hours per week of work)

They would get…

Free registration to the event (though you may not be able to participate in everything)Free accommodation from May 24-30 (your own room)Free lunchesSome assistance with transportation (depending on budget and distance)Ongoing mentoring from Max and/or Sarah (if it’s helpful)

Desirable qualities: fun and/or easy to be around, responsible, interested in the topic, would find this an important opportunity in their personal development, bonus: speaks Italian.

If you’d be interested, please write us a quick email by March 24th about why you’d like to do this, what makes you a good choice for the position and if you have any concerns etc. We will schedule some interviews (on zoom or in London) the week of March 24.

The post Fascist Dreams, Antifascist Awakenings appeared first on Max Haiven.

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The following essay will appear in the online journal Making & Breaking in Spring 2025.

It’s all a Game, and the Game is Deadly Real:A psychogeography of unwinnable capitalism and the fascisms it incubates

Max Haiven – 2025-02-02

In the bestselling young-adult fiction trilogy The Hunger Games (2008-10) and the subsequent blockbuster film franchise (2012-present), children are forced to murder one another in the titular televised gladiatorial spectacle, all for the pleasure and glory of The Capitol, an exploitative dystopian regime. As the series proceeds, our heroes refuse to be human sacrifices in the sadistic games and, instead, lead a revolutionary insurgency. But they soon discover that, institutionally and geographically, the Capitol is a mind-bending labyrinth of games within games, and the series ends ambivalently.

In one of the most successful TV serials of all time, Game of Thrones (original series 2011-2019), warring elite families of a fantasy kingdom toy with the fate of several continents through eight blood-drenched seasons. Deftly combining palace intrigue with highbrow pornography and gratuitous violence, the series captivated its viewers for nearly a decade with the recursion of political games within games, from which no clear winner can emerge. The show’s core creative team would, in 2024, release Three Body Problem, a series based on the bestselling Chinese science fiction trilogy that begins with a novel of the same name (2006-10 in Chinese, 2014-16 in English). The plot includes malevolent aliens covertly recruiting humanity’s top scientists to their cause through a beguiling but unwinnable video game.

Game of Thrones would then be displaced from its own throne in 2021, when the South Korean Netflix drama Squid Game became the most streamed series ever, depicting a world where hundreds of  heavily indebted people are manipulated into travelling to a secret island to compete in a sadistic and lethal versions of children’s games for the pleasure of bored and perverted billionaires, the last survivor entitled to a huge cash windfall. As the first series ended with our good-hearted hero the reluctant and traumatized victor of the vicious tournament, we are led to believe that an even greater game is afoot. The sequel series (2024) was more of the same.

One of the top-grossing, most downloaded and most played video games of all time, Fortnite (released 2017) places players’ warrior avatars in a never-ending battle royale, wars of all against all, where the last one standing takes the title and where there is no greater objective than to gain and maintain prestige, power and ranking. This idiom is echoed in any one of dozens of blockbuster “reality TV” franchises, most recently The Traitors, where contestants must slowly betray and eliminate one another until (usually) only one remains.

today, we almost all feel, to a significant extent (if in different ways), trapped in an unfair, inscrutable and unwinnable game.

What are we to make of the startling global success of these spectacles? Certainly, the theme of being trapped in a violent, unwinnable game has precedents, but it has never been so popular. Perhaps it is because the vast majority of people living under the direct rule of capital in the 21st century also feel like they, too, are caught up in an unwinnable but compulsory game?

Already in her 2007 book Gamer Theory, McKenzie Wark speculated on the sublation of what Guy Debord dubbed the “society of the spectacle” into what Wark calls the gamespace. Here, where the idiom of the game pervades society and all social subjects, not just gamers, are haunted by the uncanny sense that they are trapped in some sort of game. Today, this structure of feeling finds its hysterical expression in the millions of people who participate in gamified online conspiracy communities to share evidence that the world is, in fact, a vast simulation. But even where suspicions are never voiced, the disquiet remains: today, we almost all feel, to a significant extent (if in different ways), trapped in an unfair, inscrutable and unwinnable game. What political affects, structures of feelings and psychogeographies take hold in such a situation?

Gamification

On one level, this may be the result of at least twenty years of “gamification,” a term that generally describes the application of game mechanisms, processes and enticements into non-game atmospheres. While play is perhaps elemental to all human (and many animal) forms of learning and sociality, and while many civilizations have used games for millennia to train people for care, for war, and for much else besides, gamification names something newer, unique to the dangerous convergence of the finance and tech sectors so characteristic of capitalist power in the 21st century.

Here, games and play are broken down into their most elemental components (the dopamine-inducing hit of constrained agency, the urge to safe competition, the proxy for collectivity offered by episodic cooperation) and then synthesised into other digitalised vectors of late capitalist life. Banking apps use game elements to reward us for good behaviour; dieting and health apps use leaderboards to nudge us towards hygienic behaviour; education and learning apps create a user-friendly panopticon; dating apps turn us all into avatars.

These gamified platforms function as a kind of meta-ideological apparatus, hailing us silently, from within.

Critics of the trend often satisfy themselves with warning us about the grim uses of the data we players generate, that is now commodified and speculated upon. This data may soon be used (or is already being used) to target us for customised spam (if we’re relatively high up in the hierarchy of human disposability) or a drone or airstrike (if we’re not). Other critics note the way gamified interfaces, which have been birthed by an unholy alliance of software engineers, neuroscientists and venture capitalists, wreak havoc with our bodyminds, captivating and habituating us with apps calibrated to excite, reward and render dependent our ill-prepared mammalian neurotransmitters. To these we may add that the norms and values embedded in and encouraged by these gamified platforms (bourgeois financial responsibility, extrinsic enrichment of human capital, transactional romance) function as a kind of meta-ideological apparatus, hailing us silently, from within.

We might be said to live in a kind of decentralised totalitarian regime, where all aspects of life are dictated by the market. As compelling a fable as it may be, the dystopian world of The Hunger Games, where totalitarianism takes the form of a centralised state using naked violent repression, is ideological misdirection. In contrast to a regime that utterly represses all human agency, the regime of gamified capitalism relies on using gamified mechanisms to entice, seduce and channel our agency, holding our social reproduction at ransom.

The development of gamified platforms is not some random or necessary development of human technology. Rather, driven forward by the entanglement of speculative finance and the tech sector. The former is eager to plough its ill-gotten wealth into the latter, which must in turn constantly prove an expansion of userbases, an ever-more successful harvesting of attention, more engagement and greater user dependency. Needless to say, the financial returns almost exclusively flow upwards. Meanwhile, at a systemic level, the spectrum of gamified interfaces with which we engage every day, in sum if not always individually, have the effect of installing in each of us a post-disciplinary system that, ultimately, makes our labour power cheaper, more accessible and more pliable for extraction.

Players

For this reason, to focus exclusively on the very real dangers of gamification in a limited frame would be to risk missing a larger, even more important picture. The 21st century financialised capitalist economy in which we all participate is, indeed, a kind of vast game, unwinnable for the vast majority of us. Within it, almost everybody is exhorted to adopt this disposition of the player, the savvy risk-taking agent, operating both within but also bending or breaking the rules in a competition of all against all.

In his bestselling 2024 autobiography The Trading Game, Gary Stevenson offers detailed account of his rise from London working class origins to becoming one of the world’s most successful financiers around the time of the 2008 financial crisis. He reveals how investment banks and hedge funds identify and recruit new talent through poker-like betting games, and train and retain them through gamified protocols and platforms that make the movement of billions of dollars of wealth a form of play. Veteran financial reporter Michael Lewis has often revealed the importance of games among financial insiders, notably in his breakout tell-all Liar’s Poker (1989) and more recently in his insiders’ view of the empire of convicted crypto-Ponzi schemer Sam Bankman-Fried, Going Infinite (2023). The latter book makes clear how important video, tabletop, and live action role-playing games were to the corporate culture of the firm that was, until its frauds were revealed, heralded as the future of finance. Numerous scholars have made clear that the line between gambling and allegedly economically productive financial speculation has never been clear. But if it is somehow a game, the consequences are deadly real: it directs the accelerating flows of global wealth that entrench wealth and poverty and fuels the extractive industries that are murdering the earth. Individual acts of strategic or tactical play, in sum, produce an almost universally catastrophic game, hidden in plain sight.

Perhaps in every regime, games are a mechanism to seduce young men into acts that perpetuate systems of unspeakable cruelty. The drone pilots that have been weaned to kill on violent, dehumanising video games are the postmodern echo of the war-gaming elite officers of the Napoleonic Wars, sons of privilege, who commanded working class soldiers on the front via perfumed letters, following the action on exquisite tabletop models, the pieces moved by servants. Like today’s financial engineers who program supercomputers to do algorithmic gladiatorial battles against one another for the profit of their masters are the modern-day equivalents of the heavily armoured knights of old, who waged wars that killed and maimed mostly unarmoured peasants. It’s not coincidental that today’s financial robots are built on the basis of so-called “game theory,” a school of thought developed primarily by American engineers to calculate how a nuclear war might be won and which soon became an important part of the neoliberal worldview and policy apparatus, with its presumption that all actors are either competitive and acquisitive… or simply stupid or incompetent, destined to drag the winners down.

Individual acts of strategic or tactical play, in sum, produce an almost universally catastrophic game, hidden in plain sight.

As financialised neoliberalism came to supplant Keynesian political economy in the last half-century, the idiom of the player seeped into the social fabric. As principles of social welfare gave way to individualised risk-management and competition, those with the means to do so were encouraged to play the market. It was not only that, thanks to the affordances of ubiquitous networked computing, it became easier than ever for those with means to try their hand at investing, including on gamified phone apps that trigger in us psychochemical rewards indexed to the performance of our miniature portfolios. Though it presented itself as a popular insurgency of Davids against the Goliaths of Wall Street, the crypto craze was little more than a systemic side hustle, a grimy, scammy craps game out the back for those not dressed well enough to get in the casino. But the game was, essentially, the same.

Even beyond direct forms of investing, we have all been exhorted (and occasionally rewarded) to remake ourselves as players of a financialised game that now pervades almost all aspects of life. Houses became vehicles for investment; education became an investment in one’s human capital; exercise and diet became investments in health and wellbeing; personal connections and relationships became investments in social capital. Lest we believe this paradigm only extended to the borders of middle-class delusion, it ought to be noted that domestic and international “development” agendas have, over the last three decades, increasingly taken their cues from the paradigm of the player. The subprime mortgages that triggered the 2008 financial meltdown were intended to give poor Americans access to the financial game of home ownership and leveraging. The (largely abandoned) craze for microfinance lending, or today’s enthusiasm for “fintech” (financial technology) rests on the idea that new technologies and market mechanisms will unleash the competitive spirit of the world’s poorest people, making them players too. While in many ways this game-like competitive imperative is coded as masculine, we should not ignore the many ways that liberal/white/girlboss feminisms advertises itself with the promise that women can and should prepare themselves to play and win at the boys’ game, nor the reality that by far the most popular aspiration of girls and young women around the world is to leverage a dependency on social media platforms like Instagram or TikTok to become an influencer, nor the way that patriarchal romantic and relationship norms are (once again) repackaged as a game that can be won through tactical moves and a strategic mindset.

 Meanwhile, everywhere, neoliberal cuts and austerity has been justified by recourse to the idea that those seeking economic support are probably cheaters, scammers and frauds who must be relentlessly suspected, surveilled, disciplined and punished.

Gamed

This is a world where everyone is instructed to take up the mantle of the player, and yet where everyone is also paranoid that they are being played. And we’re right: the game is indeed gamed. The rich get richer. Things fall apart. We are taught to blame the wrong people.

Capitalism has always been thus. Even Marx himself, who sought to show that the system is, in an ideal sense, ruled by certain laws that go beyond the agency or venality of any particular individual bad actor, readily admitted (and castigated) the competitive gaming of the system by various capitalist actors who used monopolies, cartels, bribery and all manner of financial chicanery to rig the capitalist game. Today, only the most delusional neoliberal economist could convince themselves that the capitalist game isn’t utterly corrupted. The manipulation of domestic and international law to create tax havens (no relation to the author) is only the tip of the iceberg. Scandal follows scandal follows scandal, and no one is surprised.

Structural changes in… capitalism over the past 50 years have meant that we have all had to… adopt the habitus of the player. And yet the fable that this system had delivered us a level playing field is constantly belied. The game is rigged. We find ourselves in a world of cheated players.

But something is also different now. In previous moments of capitalism, the class system appeared far less fluid. Capital was largely invested in exploiting workers’ bodies. While it may have provided a few opportunities for the entrepreneurial spirit of middle and working-class people (often in the form of a share in colonialism or the domination of a frontier), conformity and stability were both the norm and the (false) promise.

Today, massive profit (and perhaps even surplus value) is generated through consumer debt and credit. Whatever stability capitalism once promised to the middle class is gone, replaced with the imperative to innovate, compete and manage one’s own risks, to play the field. Moreover, capitalism as a set of social relations expands, in part, by making each of us its pioneer, tasked with “colonising” new spheres of life, now as entrepreneurs, now as influencers, now as gig workers turning our bedrooms into hotels, our cars into taxis, our hobbies into side hustles, our charisma or wit into “content,” all held to ransom by proprietary platforms that play us for fools.

In other words, structural changes in neoliberal, financialised capitalism over the past 50 years have meant that we have all had to, in various ways and to varying extents, adopt the habitus of the player. And yet the fable that this system had delivered us a level playing field is constantly belied. The game is rigged. We find ourselves in a world of cheated players.

Unfortunately, this reality only rarely manifests a systemic critique. More often it generates conspiracy theories, the urge to punch down or absurd fantasies of escape. As the late Fredric Jameson argued over three decades ago, today’s conspiracy theories can be seen as faulty but beguiling “cognitive maps” that attempt to offer a resource for generating a holistic and cohesive view of a world chaotically fragmented and fissured by the pressures of financialisation. They attempt to explain why the game is rigged: they hallucinate a kind of meta-human agency, a superplayer (an evil mastermind, a cabal, a secret society, an alien intelligence) that is stacking the deck or loading the dice.

Increasingly, and very dangerously, this kind of conspiracism dovetails with the idea that unscrupulous “minorities” are gaming the system, playing the long-suffering majority for rubes and chumps. The European template of such conspiracism is, of course, the modern antisemitic conspiracy complex. But today this model is applied to trans people accused of toying with gender and children for their own dark pleasures, to Muslims held to be playing a secret game to “replace” white Christian populations, to refugees and other irregular migrants who are rumoured to be exploiting the goodwill and sportsmanship of a nation of earnest entrepreneurs.

Meanwhile, even dreams of liberation are caught up in the game. It would be misguided to imagine that the last decade of cryptomania was simply delusional. It represented (and became) for many young people a means of participating in the financialised game foreclosed to them. For those Keir Milburn hoped would emerge as “generation left,” who had no access to invested capital (like savings or houses) and who also felt acutely the hopelessly diminishing returns of investments in their “human capital” (infertile university degrees), crypto investment as well as memestock play, like the infamous Gamestop gamble, were imagined as methods to exit the rigged game of their parents’ capitalist economy and jumpstart a new one, where the real players could, finally, get what they deserved. 

Revenge

I have elsewhere theorised this tendency through the lens of revenge. Gamified, financialisation capitalism’s annihilation of any other potential futures and its relentless reduction of all of us into cheated players lends itself to a turn towards a revenge politics that is a grim reflection of the vengeful economy from which it emerges.

The nihilism, cynicism and spamminess of today’s far right and neofascist leaders, and the key to their success, lies in the way they appeal to a world of cheated players who feel trapped in an unwinnable game. Their apocalyptic rhetoric and viciously vindictive policies, which occasionally promise to punch up but always only punch down, appeals to subjects wrought of four decades of financialisation. That so many of today’s clownish fascist personalities are conspicuous cheats is fitting: like the stage magician who trumps his rivals by showing the audience how the trick is performed, the cheater-in-chief empowers his followers by promising to reveal how the game is fixed, and to take revenge on their behalf.

Neoliberal financialised capitalism has bred within it a form of fascism that both mimics and exceeds it. This is a fascism where the cheated would-be players, rather than ending the rigged game, take sadistic revenge on those they blame for cheating.

In the 20th century, fascism first and most successfully festered not in the dispossessed working classes, but in the downwardly mobile petit-bourgeoisie, who felt they’d played by the rules and been cheated of the pride, security and normative life they’d been promised. So too today, in 21st century fascism, except for two things.

First, financialisation has seen the proletarianisation of the petit-bourgeoisie as more and more forms of “professional” work in the so-called “knowledge economy” have become precarious and subject to profound market discipline. This, as well as an increasingly international labour market and competition mean that those that considered themselves “middle class” feel, everywhere, under threat and cheated.

Second, financialisation and neoliberalism have been so successful in their decimation of working class identity, consciousness and communities that, today, we are witnessing the horrific ideological consequences of the petit-bourgeoisification of the proletariat. Today, everyone has learned to identify with the morality, expectations, dispositions and ambitions of the phantom middle class. Everyone is a player, tasked with leveraging their assets even if they don’t have any, investing in themselves even if there’s no real hope of payback.

Neoliberal financialised capitalism has bred within it a form of fascism that both mimics and exceeds it. This is a fascism where the cheated would-be players, rather than ending the rigged game, take sadistic revenge on those they blame for cheating.

It would be tempting to imagine that games are inherently anti-fascist because they reject it’s rigid ordering of human passions. But this would be to fatally misunderstand how 21st century fascism differs from its 20th century ancestor. They each emerge from very different forms of capitalism, the first an industrial and imperialist system that turned the working class into cogs in a machine; now a more decentralised, sublet and seductive system that exports each of us to hone our subjectivity and agency to chart our own (doomed) strategy of participation. In 20th century capitalism, it was clear we were all sacrificial pawns, and something about what the Frankfrut school theorists (prudishly) identified as the sadomasochism of fascism preyed on this; 21st century capitalism tells us we’re all potential queens, if only we can beat one another in the race to the back row. We must dwell with a new matrix of systemic contradictions, subjective reactons and political affects.

But moreover, today’s fascism is playful. It delights in making serious business a stupid game, and making stupid games serious business. They will hunt you in online packs for making fun of their avatars; they will livestream their massacres on gaming platforms and worship the one with the highest score. Today’s playful fascism flexes by making kings bow to clowns, by changing the rules in the middle of the game, by cheating in plain sight, by mimicking a dozen contradictory ideological positions (libertarian? Royalist? Nazi? Neo-Futurist? Hayekian? Randian?) and insisting, with force, they are all coherent and consistent. And through these actions it espouses, silently but unmistakably, it’s one and only rule: power is, and nothing else.

There are only two kinds of people: those real players who make and break the rules, and those NPCs (non-player characters) who obey them and are therefore disposable.

It’s all a game, and the game is deadly real.

The post It’s all a Game, and the Game is Deadly Real (Making & Breaking) appeared first on Max Haiven.

Status: In development

Comrade Orca is a 3+ player party game of interspecies anticapitalist solidarity. it’s actually three games in one.

In the first game, play a pod of orcas ramming ships in revenge for all the horrible things humans have done to whales and the oceans. Your fearless Leader of the hunt (distinguished by her prestigious headgear: a dead fish) needs your help to locate the ships – use ridiculous whale noises to guide her to victory! For extra fun, you can add a traitor orca (trained and released by the nefarious human Navy), or you can add in competition to become the new Leader of the hunt.

In the second game, it’s orcas versus humans. While some players continue to play the whale pod, others take command of the boats and try and steer their valuable assets out of danger… while throwing their opponents to the wolves orcas.

In the third game, humans and orcas try and bridge the chasm of misunderstanding and mistrust to take down massive cargo ships and grind the capitalist logistics empire to a halt.

The post Comrade Orca (board game) appeared first on Max Haiven.

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Status: In development

Comrade Orca is a 3+ player party game of interspecies anticapitalist solidarity. it’s actually three games in one.

In the first game, play a pod of orcas ramming ships in revenge for all the horrible things humans have done to whales and the oceans. Your fearless Leader of the hunt (distinguished by her prestigious headgear: a dead fish) needs your help to locate the ships – use ridiculous whale noises to guide her to victory! For extra fun, you can add a traitor orca (trained and released by the nefarious human Navy), or you can add in competition to become the new Leader of the hunt.

In the second game, it’s orcas versus humans. While some players continue to play the whale pod, others take command of the boats and try and steer their valuable assets out of danger… while throwing their opponents to the wolves orcas.

In the third game, humans and orcas try and bridge the chasm of misunderstanding and mistrust to take down massive cargo ships and grind the capitalist logistics empire to a halt.

The post Comrade Orca appeared first on Max Haiven.

In financialised times, the scam is normal. In this economy, driven by hype, spin, distortion and volatility, there seems to be little profit in truth. Scandals, fakes and frauds have become routine and from this peculiar world, a new cast of characters emerges: the scammer in chief, the revenge speculator, the conspiracy gamer, the crypto trickster, the real fake… In the wake of this finance-driven fake, what’s left of politics? What does this mean for culture, meaning-making, and subjectivity? What might it mean to resist (let alone transform) such a system?

The UCL Centre for Capitalism Studies invites expressions of interest to participate in a half-day, unconventional symposium on the broad topic of Financialisation and Truth-bending, including but not limited to the rise of the fake, the fraudulent, the scam, the charlatan, the hoax, the (para)fiction, the weird, the perverse and the mythical.

We look forward to an imaginative gathering that includes not only scholars in a range of areas (sociology and anthropology, history and political economy, literary and cultural studies, and much more) but also artists, activists and other interventionists.

Our key questions include:

How does financialization bend and break reality, and what comes next?Is this new? Or what’s new about it?What is the role of financial technologies and market practices in today’s post-truth politics?Who suffers from these processes? Who benefits?What can be done? Who should do it? What role (if any) do scholars and artists play?

This event is hosted by Max Haiven and Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou and is co-sponsored by the UCL Centre for Capitalism Studies and RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab.

We are devising a symposium format that will maximise creating space and time to meet and exchange ideas. There will be no reading of papers or presentations but, rather, curated large and small group conversations. To that end, we would be grateful if interested parties could use the below form to apply to participate by supplying the following information:

Name and affiliationsA 250 word summary of your work or research as it relates to the topics under discussionLinks to 2-3 of your relevant works or publicationsA 100 word biographical note

Space is limited at this symposium so that we can ensure a generative conversation. 

Apply to be a participant. Deadline: 3rd March 2025Loading…

The post The Truth? In this Economy? (London symposium, April 10, 2025) appeared first on Max Haiven.

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In financialised times, the scam is normal. In this economy, driven by hype, spin, distortion and volatility, there seems to be little profit in truth. Scandals, fakes and frauds have become routine and from this peculiar world, a new cast of characters emerges: the scammer in chief, the revenge speculator, the conspiracy gamer, the crypto trickster, the real fake… In the wake of this finance-driven fake, what’s left of politics? What does this mean for culture, meaning-making, and subjectivity? What might it mean to resist (let alone transform) such a system?

The UCL Centre for Capitalism Studies invites expressions of interest to participate in a half-day, unconventional symposium on the broad topic of Financialisation and Truth-bending, including but not limited to the rise of the fake, the fraudulent, the scam, the charlatan, the hoax, the (para)fiction, the weird, the perverse and the mythical.

We look forward to an imaginative gathering that includes not only scholars in a range of areas (sociology and anthropology, history and political economy, literary and cultural studies, and much more) but also artists, activists and other interventionists.

Our key questions include:

How does financialization bend and break reality, and what comes next?Is this new? Or what’s new about it?What is the role of financial technologies and market practices in today’s post-truth politics?Who suffers from these processes? Who benefits?What can be done? Who should do it? What role (if any) do scholars and artists play?

This event is hosted by Max Haiven and Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou and is co-sponsored by the UCL Centre for Capitalism Studies and RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab.

We are devising a symposium format that will maximise creating space and time to meet and exchange ideas. There will be no reading of papers or presentations but, rather, curated large and small group conversations. To that end, we would be grateful if interested parties could use the below form to apply to participate by supplying the following information:

Name and affiliationsA 250 word summary of your work or research as it relates to the topics under discussionLinks to 2-3 of your relevant works or publicationsA 100 word biographical note

Space is limited at this symposium so that we can ensure a generative conversation. 

Apply to be a participant. Deadline: 3rd March 2025Loading…

The post The Truth? In this Economy? (April 10, 2025) appeared first on Max Haiven.