Wanted, Dead or Distracted: On Ressentiment in History, Philosophy, and Everyday Life (original) (raw)
Related papers
2014
This paper documents the shift toward increasingly coercive means of collecting debt from working class and poor borrowers, with a specific focus on incarceration. Placing this trend within an historical trajectory, it is argued that the law has always been central to creating and securing the social relations of debt as class relations. While the abolition of debtors’ prisons in the 19th century helped to shift struggles between debtors and creditors out of public view and into the depoliticized realm of ‘the law’, a number of factors have led to its reappearance in the contemporary era. These include (1) changes to bankruptcy legislation that have given creditors greater power over debtors, (2) the emergence of the debt-buying industry and (3) the growing privatization, decentralization and commercialization of the state, which have transformed it into a creditor that relies on its power to punish to compel payment from some of the poorest debtors.
The Ethics of Debt: Kant, Hegel, and Marx
2024
The conflation between debt and duty has defined the ethical analysis of debt hitherto. The issue of debt has increasingly become an important issue in the lives of individuals where credit-sustained consumption is necessary for attaining the basic means of subsistence, yet economic conditions have rendered them destitute and unable to repay. This raises the question of whether it is morally permissible to not repay, and whether the institution of debt and its imperative to repay, must always be honoured, by which is considered a number of principles for grounding the responsibilities of indebted individuals. Through considering a number of given defences of the institution of debt in terms of the principles of utility, consent, and intention, it is shown that there exists no rational basis for this conflation, but reaches a deadlock whereby the formal analysis cannot demonstrate that one system, one with debt, is preferable to another, one without debt. By turning to Kant, Hegel, and Marx, this question is reoriented in terms of freedom as the absolute ethical principle: is the institution of debt conducive to freedom, or not? It is then shown that the institution of debt is not conducive to freedom, but inseparable from a structural unfreedom, such that the institution of debt and its imperative to repay at all costs ought not to always be honoured, but rather overcome.
Thirteen Theses Toward a Materialist Theory of Revenge Capitalism
Challenging the Right, Augmenting the Left, 2020
My argument is that today’s capitalism is the evolution of a tendency towards systemic revenge. I intend to sketch this argument on three levels. First, like all systems of domination, the hegemonic institutions of capitalism frame the actions of its opponents as meaningless, nihilistic revenge precisely because the economies of justice these opponents insist upon are unintelligible in the moral algebra of the system. Second, revenge should not be understood as simply a transhistorical individual human passion (and certainly not only as a personal emotion), but rather as something manifested by and through the reproduction of systems-in-crisis. I want to argue that today’s particularly crisis-ridden, highly financialized, carceral, and neocolonial mode of global capitalism can be fruitfully interpreted as a system of revenge. Third, I suggest many of the political and cultural pathologies of our moment, including the recent global rise of far-right and neo-fascist tendencies, can be seen as produced by and reproductive of the underlying system of vengeance. These arguments are made in more detail in my book Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (Pluto, 2020)
2020
"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."