Max Haiven

"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."

We imagine that art and money are old enemies, but Max Haiven argues that this myth actually helps reproduce a horrifically violent system of global capitalism and prevents us from imagining and building alternatives.

From the chaos unleased by the ‘imaginary’ money in financial markets to the new forms of exploitation enabled by the ‘creative economy’ to the way art has become the plaything of the world’s plutocrats, our era of financialization demands we question our romantic assumptions about art and money. By exploring the way contemporary artists engage with cash, debt and credit, Haiven identifies and assesses a range of creative strategies for mocking, sabotaging, exiting, decrypting and hacking capitalism today.

Written for artists, activists and scholars, this book makes an urgent call to unleash the power of the radical imagination by any media necessary.

Emerging from the Radical Imagination Project, a social movement research initiative based in Halifax, Canada, What Moves Us? brings together a diverse group of scholar-activists and movement- based thinkers and practitioners to reflect on the relationship between the radical imagination and radical social change. Combining political biography with movement-based histories, these activists provide critical insights into the opportunities and challenges that confront struggles for social justice today.

In original essays and interviews, these radical thinkers from across Canada and beyond contemplate the birth of their own radical consciousness and the political and intellectual commitments that animate their activism.

The idea of the imagination is as evocative as it is elusive. Not only does the imagination allow us to project ourselves beyond our own immediate space and time, it also allows us to envision the future, as individuals and as collectives. The radical imagination, then, is that spark of difference, desire and discontent that can be fanned into the flames of social change. Yet what precisely is the imagination and what might make it ‘radical’? How can it be fostered and cultivated? How can it be studied and what are the possibilities and risks of doing so?

This book seeks to answer these questions at a crucial time. As we enter into a new cycle of struggles marked by a worldwide crisis of social reproduction, scholar-activists Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish explore the processes and possibilities for cultivating the radical imagination in dark times.

A lively and crucial intervention in radical politics, social research and social change, and the collective visions and cultures that inspire them.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Part One: Solidarity Research
1. The Methods of Movements: Academic Crisis and Activist Strategy
2. Convoking the Radical Imagination

Part Two: Dwelling in the Hiatus
3. The Crisis of Reproduction
4. Reimagining Success and Failure

Part Three: Making Space, Making Time
5. The Life and Times of Radical Movements
6. The Temporalities of Oppression

Part Four: The Methods of Movements
7. Imagination, Strategy and Tactics
8. Towards a Prefigurative Methodology

REVIEWS

'I deserted the academy for activism over ten years ago, but this book reminds me that there are some scholars who really do radicalize their research processes so that the university once again becomes a tool of post-capitalist struggle rather than a feather in the neoliberal crown. A timely reminder for scholars to get their hands dirty, immerse themselves in radical movements and write for change rather than academic careers.'
John Jordan, artist, activist and co-founder of the direct action protest movement Reclaim the Streets.

'For Haiven and Khasnabish the 'Radical Imagination' is the most important tool of resistance to neoliberal capitalism. Drawing on a breathtaking range of examples, they urge us to learn from and understand the knowledge produced within radical political movements. This impressive book is a must-read for those committed to radical social change and concerned with producing alternate worlds.'
Imogen Tyler, senior lecturer of sociology, Lancaster University and author of Revolting Subjects

'The Radical Imagination offers astute insights into the ways capitalism and crisis constrain our social and political imaginaries. This is a compelling book, highly readable and full of possibility. A welcome contribution to the kinds of engaged research needed right now.'
Emma Dowling, senior lecturer in sociology, Middlesex University

'Theoretically sophisticated and politically grounded, The Radical Imagination challenges us to think beyond the limits of both contemporary social movement organizing and scholarship.'
Lesley Wood, assistant professor of sociology, York University

'This book is an important and thought-provoking tool for activists and scholars. It is a sort of dialogical manual, bringing the reader into a conversation on what the radical imagination is and can be. While questioning, the authors suggest alternative ways of thinking about important issues, such as the meaning of success, failure, research and methodology - all from below, and grounded in the thoughts and experiences of others involved in movements.'
Marina Sitrin, author of They Can't Represent Us! and Everyday Revolutions

'The Radical Imagination is a fantastic resource for both social movements and the scholars who study them. It insists that social transformation requires research and that the process of research should itself be transformative. It crackles with new ideas and innovative approaches while asking that most important of questions: what would it mean for social movements to win?'
Keir Milburn, lecturer in political economy and organisation, University of Leicester, and co-author of Moments of Excess: Movements, Protests and Everyday Life.

CHAPTER ABSTRACTS

1. ‘Introduction: Cultures of Financialization’

Financialization refers not merely the increasing economic power and influence of the financial sector, but also to the political, social and cultural dimensions of the rise of speculative capital in an age of globalization. Haiven argues that approaches to finance that see it as purely an imaginary realm of speculation do an injustice to the ways that financialization both preys and relies on the everyday dimensions of debt, credit and abstract monetary flows, and the ways these are stitched into the world of meaning, representation, ideology and the imagination. Offering an overview of the book to come, Haiven outlines a case for understanding financialization as driven by social practices and cultural politics.

2. ‘The Reproduction of Fictitious Capital: The Social Fictions and Metaphoric Wealth of Financialization’

Haiven takes up Karl Marx’s description of financial wealth as ‘fictitious capital,’ suggesting that finance is a social fiction whose reproduction and power depends on and drives the proliferation of social fictions throughout financialized societies.  Haiven draws on research that argues for a more nuanced approach to the ‘cultural’ dimensions of financial speculation, as well as the effects of that speculation on ‘culture’ more broadly. He posits that, while financial assets may not be ‘real’ wealth, they play a central role in the reproduction of capitalism, and that they, in turn, transform the reproduction of social and cultural life.  While ‘fictitious capital’ may be an important category, Haiven also offers the concept of ‘metaphoric wealth’ as a means to describe the interconnected and volatile nature of speculative value.

3. ‘Precariousness: Two Spectres of the Financial Liquidation of Social Life’

The rise of precarious (part-time, casualized, temporary) labour in the era of globalization (c.1990-present) cannot be separated from the ‘financialization’ of economic, political, social and cultural life. Haiven takes up two contrasting examples.  On the one hand he points to the quintessential Wall Street trader as an iconic of the hollow ideal of success in a volatile world without guarantees, one who enthusiastically and ambitiously courts ‘risk’. This figure is contrasted to the abject ‘sub-prime’ borrower, seen as the victim and/or the cause of the 2008 financial meltdown, a subject not only rendered ‘at-risk’ by financialized neoliberalism, but whose risk itself becomes exploited as a target of speculated. Haiven argues that precariousness may be a common ground for solidarity and possibility beyond financialization.

4. ‘Securitization: Walmart’s Financialized Empire’

Walmart is the world’s largest private employer and retailer, but it is also at the cutting edge of merging financial techniques, corporate strategy, global trade and commercial culture into a devastatingly effective economic, social, political and cultural machine.  Haiven argues that Walmart is a leader in mobilizing two interconnected forms of ‘securitization’: on the one hand the reimagining of everything from labour relations to marketing to supply chains as a form of ‘risk management’, on the other, the increasing mobilization of surveillance, security, military tactics and a culture of fear. Confronting Walmart’s power, Haiven suggests, requires acknowledging the way the firm addresses its legions of shoppers as astute financialized actors, and also reclaiming and transforming the meaning of ‘security’ itself.

5. ‘Play: Coming of Age in the Speculative Pokéconomy’

Traces of financialization—the intertwined economic, political social and cultural resonances of financial capitalism—can be found in children’s play. This demonstrates both the saturation of society with the ethos of speculative accumulation and the dependence of financialization on that saturation.  Examining the case of children’s play with Pokémon cards (a globally popular collectable card game) Haiven argues that children use these artifacts to gain the skills, competencies and forms of subjectivity germane to a financialized society. He posits that Pokémon card play and trading allows children to develop skills in navigating a world of rapidly shifting, relational values, all within and as part of a broader paradigm of capitalist financialization.

6. ‘Creativity: Parables of the Financialized Imagination’

The growth in the popularity and salience of the discourse of creativity over the past forty years (and especially the past fifteen) cannot be separated from the rise of financialization and the power of speculative capital.  Ideas of ‘creative capitalism’, ‘creative destruction,’ the ‘creative class’, ‘creative cities,’ and the economic potential of creativity are, Haiven argues, germane to an era dominated by financial speculation and the globalization of financial markets. Tracing this intertwined history through a variety of case studies, Haiven suggests that creativity’s euphemistic wooliness is its greatest asset in both explaining and enabling the sorts of neoliberal transformations of institutions and subjects that are part of financialization, from speculative urban property markets to a new breed corporate philanthropy, from the growth of precarious labour to the self-image of financiers.

7. ‘Resistance (and its Discontents): Finance, Regulation, and Cultural Politics’

With the financialization of the global economy, and the attendant rise in global volatility, debt, economic precarity and inequality, many have sought to imagine forms of resistance to and regulation of finance capital’s power. In response, Haiven makes three provocative arguments.  First, he suggests that finance already relies on resistance, depending on the state and on popular resistance to regulate its otherwise renegade and reckless power. Second, he argues that we might do well to imagine the growth of debt (both that of  individuals and of political entities) as a problematic form of resistance to the austere conditions of neoliberalism, an ironic reclamation of wealth.  Finally, Haiven offers that resistance is already factored in to the financial sector’s operations, and as such a different vision of agency and change is required.

‘Conclusions: The Dialectics of Financialized Culture’

Haiven argues that finance capital, while a massive and destructive force in economic, social, political and cultural life, also possesses the seeds of its own negation and its replacement. He notes the importance of reclaiming concepts like ‘security’, ‘debt’, ‘creativity’, ‘speculation’ and ‘play’ from financialization.  He also argues that, in an age where the global economy is predicated on the reproduction of financialization at the level of culture and everyday life, the work of creating new meanings, relationships, subjects and forms of material and cultural power are more important than ever.  Calling for a more militant tenor to the study of financialization, Haiven warns of speculative capital’s capacity to incorporate and digest critique and asks ‘what would a cultural politics look like that took seriously the desires that feed financialization?’

"Today, when it seems like everything has been privatized, when austerity is too often seen as an economic or political problem that can be solved through better policy, and when the idea of moral values has been commandeered by the right, how can we re-imagine the forces used as weapons against community, solidarity, ecology and life itself?

In this stirring call to arms, Max Haiven argues that capitalism has colonized how we all imagine and express what is valuable. Looking at the decline of the public sphere, the corporatization of education, the privatization of creativity, and the power of finance capital in opposition to the power of the imagination and the growth of contemporary social movements, Haiven provides a powerful argument for creating an anti-capitalist commons. Not only is capitalism crisis itself, but moving beyond it is the only key to survival.

Crucial reading for all those questioning the imposition of austerity and hoping for a fairer future beyond it."

Financialization is transforming social subjects and institutions, including the university. This article explores overlooked links between the financialization of public postsecondary education on both sides of the North Atlantic and the ongoing “anxiety epidemic” among students (and, indeed, staff). The article argues that the “anxious university” represents a unique space to study the economic, political, social, and cultural impact of the rise in power and influence of the financial sector. By unraveling the complex sociological dimensions of the anxiety epidemic, we offer a vantage on the emergence of new forms and platforms of struggle within, against, and beyond financialization.

This paper traces the current prescription opioid crisis to some of its origins in the orders of race, colonialism and empire that connect our present day to the past. It is something of a sketch of a larger work that seeks to complicate our understanding of the power dynamics at play in what some estimate to be the world's most profound anthropogenic public health crisis

This intentionally provocative paper makes three interwoven arguments. First, that the rise of the far-right and of authoritarian and fascistic and fundamentalist regimes and organizations around the world (but especially in the country of the essay's focus: the US) signals the emergence of a "revenge politics." This term is here explored in two figures, one of early and one of late capitalism: Francis Bacon and Steve Bannon respectively. The second argument is that these emergence revenge politics cannot be seen except as part and parcel of the emergence of a form of "revenge capitalism" marked by a horrific illogic that compounds the routine cruelties of capitalist exploitation with new pathological tendencies. I offer a genealogy of revenge as a tool of the powerful, but one that consistently displaces the accusation of sick vengefulness onto those whom it oppresses and colonizes. This leads to the final point: whereas it has become taboo to mention revenge as a keyword of liberation, I excavate a hidden history of radical "avenging" from proletarian, feminist and anti-colonial struggles. I propose the notion of the avenging commons as a way of thinking through not only creating living alternatives to capitalism but also reclaiming wealth and reimagining value.

This essay examines three critical artists who orchestrate participatory spectacles and experiences as a means of challenging neoliberal financialization, an overarching paradigm and process that is reshaping economics, politics, society and culture. Critical art, I argue, can offer us a particularly insightful vantage point on these transformations. This is not, as it is usually supposed, because art has some lofty transcendental perspective above society; rather, it is precisely because art is already so deeply integrated into finance and financialization. Not coincidentally, "participation" appears as a keyword for the restructuring of both art and finance today, which I argue is key to understanding the challenges, limits and potentials of even avowedly critical participatory art, with lessons for cultural production more broadly. In order to analyse and draw broader lessons from the three artworks in question, I identify each with a strategic paradigm: benign pessimism, tactical parasitism and the encrypted common. These strategies, I argue, emerge within, against and beyond financialization and can help complicate our approach to its complex cultural politics.

This paper explores the utopia for the wealthy and the utopia for money itself that solidifies in the form of the Singapore Freeport, a purpose-built, highly securitized luxury warehouse that abuts the city-state's airport where some of the world's richest people stash their art. Beyond the sanctimony and chagrin news of the hyper-inflated art market often evokes, this essay probes deeper, exploring the transformation of the world into an archipelago of utopian spaces for the financialized super-rich. But it also contends that spaces like the Freeport are utopian for money itself: they represent nodes in a network of capital accumulation where different forms of capital transform with unimaginable speed and unprecedented ease. It offers the freeport as a public secret, a massive monument and museum to the communization of capital.

This paper is a contribution to critiques of the mainstream trends in financial literacy education and argues that they typically produce a profound financial illiteracy by obfuscating the systemic and structural dimensions of debt, financial hardship and the patterns of financialization, thus reaffirming a neoliberal trend to privatize social problems. I explore how this financial illiteracy dovetails with the production of " white ignorance " and the erasure of the racialized injustices of contemporary global capitalism. While the case study of financial literacy educational materials targeting Indigenous people in Canada largely confirms this approach, it also gives us clues as to what another, better financial literacy might look like. The paper concludes by asking what a financial literacy education for the radical imagination might look like, and what the further decolonization of that education might imply. It ends with a celebration of settler-colonial bankruptcy as a moral and political-economic opening for a radical way forward.

Recent decades of financialisation have seen a significant growth in art that mobilises various forms of money as artistic media. These range from the integration of material money (coins, bills, credit cards) into aesthetic processes, such as sculpture, painting, performance, and so on, to a preoccupation with more ephemeral thematics including debt, economics, and the dynamics of the art market. This article explores three (and a half) strategies that artists use to engage with money: crass opportunism; a stark revelation of money’s power; a coy play with art’s subjugation to money; and a more profound attempt to reveal the shared labour at the heart of both money and art’s aesthetic-political power. Money’s perennial appeal to artists stems from the irony of its tantalising capacity to almost represent capitalist totality. At their core, both money and art are animated by a certain creative labour, a suspension of disbelief, and a politics of representation. Such artistic practices can provide critical resources for studying, understanding, and seeing beyond the rule of speculative capital.

In 2010, we won a grant to experiment with “convoking” the radical imagination. We wanted to contribute to efforts to reimagine the relationships between social movement researchers and the social movements they study. We chose to do this research in the unromantic and marginal city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, an intentional departure from the cosmopolitan contexts which tend to dominate social movement studies. With a population of just under 400,000, sprawling out across a huge geographic area on Canada’s east coast, we were interested in working with movements experiencing stagnation, frustration, and failure, rather than those enjoying momentum, exhilaration, and success. We wanted to imagine a form of solidarity research aimed not just at supporting or working for particular social movement campaigns or organizations, but at intervening in the difficult, slow space between and amidst movement participants and groups as they attempted to contend with global and local issues.

    Three years later, after dozens of interviews, several public events and dialogue sessions, and a goodly amount of participant observation, we found ourselves reflecting on the successes and failures of the project (not the least because our funders, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, required us to do so to justify the money they gave us). While we have published the particulars of our research method elsewhere (Khasnabish and Haiven, 2012) and will be sharing some of the results of our research in a forthcoming book (Khasnabish and Haiven, forthcoming), the present essay is a critical reflection on how we measure and imagine “success” and “failure” in social movement research, especially research that strives to work in solidarity with the social movements in question.

    We begin by narrating the development of academic social movement studies, from its functionalist origins to recent forms of co-research or solidarity research. But we suggest that even some of the best examples of this work take for granted the categories of “success” and “failure” both in terms of what makes for “successful” movements and what makes for “successful” research.  In the second half of the paper, we draw on thinkers like Judith Halberstam, Fredric Jameson and Donna Haraway to argue that a more substantial understanding of social movements, and of social movement research, can come from a more dynamic mapping of success and failure. Drawing on our ethnographic research, we argue that social movements typically dwell in the “hiatus” between “not-success” and “not-failure,” and that researchers seeking to work in solidarity with social movements can fruitfully reimagine their own criteria of success and failure through this model.

This essay seeks to draw connections between, on the one hand, the financialization of the global economy and everyday life in the post-Bretton Woods era (post-1973) and, on the other, the simultaneous rise to prominence of discourses of creativity in the “new economy.”  I argue that the financial sector both orchestrates a fundamentally unequal global division of creative labour, and lays claim to an inherent creative power and a duty to unleash “creative destruction” on social and economic life.  I suggest that the idea of derivative can help illuminate the wooly rhetoric of “creative capitalism,” “creative cities” and the “creative economy,” as well as the stark realities of precariousness and self-exploitation that animate creative labour today. Not only is the derivative the emblematic technology of a financial system based on the quasi-scientific management of risk, it also names creativity’s antonym, and the tension between the two allows us to retheorize both the financial system and the idea of creativity itself.

Walmart is not only the world’s single largest retailer and employer, it is also a crystallization and an agent of a broader paradigm shift towards “securitization”: the convergence of financial and security-oriented logics of risk-management. This paper examines the way Walmart mobilizes and manipulates risk to cultivate profit and power and to transform the social and cultural politics of those who fall within its orbit.  Walmart emblematizes and advances a paradigm securitization and offers a “risk free” consumer space as a refuge in an uncertain world, yet it ultimately contributes to systemic insecurity and economic anxiety.

"The somewhat cheeky title of this essay advances three provocations to our meditations on “resistance to finance” that highlight the way the digitization, globalization and neoliberalization of the financial sphere over the past 40 years has created new political conditions we ignore at our peril. Specifically, we cannot afford to address finance merely as a form of economic discipline and power exercised “from above” and limit our understanding of financial agency to the hijinks of insufferable banking executives. Instead, I suggest we need to recognize financial power as intimately stitched into everyday life and embracing the entire globe. In so doing we can deepen our understanding of finance as a distinct social force and as an essential, if crisis-prone, aspect of capitalist accumulation. All the better to overcome it and reclaim the future from the terror of endless “speculation.”
First I suggest that finance intimately depends on resistance (predominantly as mediated by the state) in order to put critical limits on this aspect of accumulation, for its own good. Second, I argue that we can understand people’s recent engagements with finance as an ultimately tragic form of resistance to their material conditions of life under neoliberalism. Finally, I question the term “resistance,” arguing both that finance is a critical element of a form of capital that works today by anticipating and co-opting resistance, and that the time for “resistance” as such is long past – we need to create more radical material and discursive openings towards a world beyond capitalism."

This article reflects critically on “The Radial Imagination: A Research Project About Movements, Social Change, and the Future,” an engaged social movement research project conducted with self-identified “radical” activists in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. In so doing, the authors explore a research strategy that seeks not merely to observe the radical imagination—the ability to envision and work toward better futures—but to convoke it: to mobilize the singular location of academic inquiry to create a research environment within which the radical imagination can be better understood.Through a critical examination of the project’s theoretical architecture and methodological framework the authors investigate the promises, possibilities, and difficulties implicated in critical social movement research carried out through a strategy of convocation, contrasting it with more conventional approaches to social movement research.

I argue that Pokémon offers a demonstrative and constitutive moment of the financializaion of contemporary cultural life in ways that signal an intensification of finance, risk, debt and cognitive labour as global imperatives. I suggest that children's play with Pokémon cards can help us revisit tenacious debates within Cultural Studies over structure and agency by focusing on the social production of value (in this case, the way children produce common forms of value for their card collections) and how this is connected to economic value in an age of speculative capital. In particular, I argue that Pokémon emblematizes emerging trends in the way the financialized economy develops and depends on commodified social practices that offer resources for the development of financialized subjectivities and engineered forms of agency.

This essay seeks to contribute to the theoretical groundwork for a cultural studies of finance by recasting a Marxist theory of value toward an analysis of the politics of the imagination under financialized capitalism. My argument is as follows. (1) Social cooperation, creativity, and reproduction are the products of the ongoing negotiation of social values. This process is undergirded by the work of the imagination: the synthetic and creative quality of mind that allows us to both conceive of social totality and futurity and gain agency within them. (2) Capitalism is a socially destructive logic of social cooperation, a viral value paradigm that guides social action and agency toward its own endless reproduction and expansion. This implies a struggle over the dialectic of imagination and value. I suggest that imagination is the “living” aspect of “living labor.” (3) Money is capital's material articulation of this struggle. It works by seeking to subordinate the rich, dense world of qualitative social values under its cyclopean logic of quantified economic value. (4) Finance is the redoubling of the complexities and abstractions of money. It creates a world-embracing matrix of signals that allows for a form of synthetic comprehension of social totality and futurity. It functions as capital's imagination. (5) The current rise of neoliberal financialization both relies on and produces the expansion of a financialized imagination on the levels of everyday life and of broader social imaginaries. This comes at the expense of the radical imagination.

This article tries to think through the importance of memory and, specifically, the memory of radical events for the project of the commons or commoning.  It draws on two books about the events of 1968 in Southern Europe: Lucia Passerini’s Autobiography of a Generation and Kristen Ross’s May ’68 and its Afterlives to suggest that radical events gesture toward (but do not embody) a utopian moment beyond alienation.  This “flash” of utopia makes them both impossible to fully represent or “recall” but also makes the imperative to recall impossible to refusable.  I conclude with some comments on the project of “commoning memory” as a means to render recallings of the past militant and transformative.

Halifax’s Nocturne: Art at Night has been met with almost universal enthusiasm from both the city’s arts community as well as local political and business elites. This essay argues that, while there is much laudable about civic spectacles like Nocturne, and while many of the works and performances they feature are reflexive and critical, they risk participating in (and promoting) what I term “neoliberal civics.” Ironically, these public events take place and have resonance only within a cultural, social and political landscape already dramatically privatized, one where the meaning of “creativity” has become a battleground.

Finance is a means by which capital develops an imagination of the future. As a volatile churning mass of speculative investments, finance aggregates and interlaces millions upon millions of individual acts of prescience into something almost akin to a collective intelligence. But this form of “systemic cognition” is chaotic, contradictory and volatile and while finance plays a key role in coordinating the global economy (disciplining global actors from transnational corporations to nation states, from international financial institutions to private banks) it can hardly be characterized as rational or sane because it is driven only by the value of accumulation. For this reason I characterize finance as capital’s imagination and ask us to think of financial crises as crises of both capital’s imagination and of the social imagination more broadly. 
While financial speculation predates the rise of capitalism to global prominence, and while capitalism has always relied on a crisis-prone financial sector, today’s “financialization” is qualitatively different because it reaches deeper into social life than ever before. From sub-prime to micro-credit, from online banking to IMF loans, from mortgages to student loans, the integration of finance into everyday life is unprecedented. As Randy Martin argues, this “financialization” of daily life fundamentally reorients our sense of possibility and futurity and works in tandem with neoliberal restructuring to instigate new forms of social relations and subjectivity based around individualized speculation and risk-management in an uncaring world. Financialization, I argue, both relies upon and contributes to a colonization of the imagination (individual and collective
respond to the crisis is symptomatic of this crisis of the imagination.

At a moment when the future of global capitalism seems altogether uncertain, we want to take another look at Wal-Mart, the world’s largest corporation. Despite its importance to the American and global economy, surprisingly little critical scholarship has emerged on the “Beast from Bentonville.” In this working-paper we suggest that we can understand Wal-Mart as both a unique instance as well as a telling example of tendencies within the process of planetary social transformation that has come to be known as globalization. In particular, Wal-Mart strives to become what we will call a “panopticon of time”: a particularly acute and emblematic crystallization of social, economic and technological forces which express a new constellation of power under globalizing capitalism. Wal- Mart represents among the most advanced consolidations of corporate, financial, technological and managerial technologies which employees afford it unprecedented control over consumers, employees, sub-contractors, communities and even nations, as well as unprecedented profit. We argue its power stems in part from its ability to hinge various modes of power: the local and the global, spectacle and surveillance, the private and the public, the everyday and the exceptional. And it is driven as much by the need to intervene in the production of subjects and the shaping of networks as the need to generate profit; indeed, these two imperatives have become inseparable. Wal-Mart is a symptom and an agent of the depotentiation of time under corporate globalization, the confinement or incarceration of temporality within the neoliberal webs of technology, commerce and management.
We begin by reviewing the case of Wal-Mart’s financial, managerial and logistic power. Next, we take up extant criticisms of Wal-Mart which we argue tend to fail to fully apprehend and sufficiently contend the qualitatively new form of global power the firm represents. In order to better chart this new power, we then turn to some less commented-on aspects of the dispositif or assemblage of historically specific power relations Wal-Mart represents including its informatics empire, its network ontology, and its mobilization of finance, health, spectacle and security to become a pivotal intervention in both global flows and everyday life. It is for this reason that, finally, we advance an argument that Wal-Mart is a panopticon of time which brings together multiple technologies of power to define a new architecture of control over temporality, a complex machine whose purpose is to imprison human potential in multiple overlapping ways.

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)

This chapter briefly examines the relationship between culture and financialization from four inter-related angles. First, we explore the finance culture. Here I mean culture in the more anthropological sense of the term and intend to outline some of the recent scholarship on the institutional codes, value systems, representational schemas, quotidian practices and structures of feeling that circulate in and hold together corporations and institutions in the financial sector. Here we will take the example of the institutional culture of Wall Street investment banks.
Second, I want to outline some dimensions of the cultures of financialization, by which I here mean the way the logics, codes, value paradigms, speculative ethos, measurements and metaphors of the financial sector have filtered into other (non-financial) economic and social spheres, offering a set of techniques or dispositifs for the recalibration of institutional priorities towards an alignment with financialization. Here, we will examine the financialization of Anglo-American universities.
Third, I want to dwell on the financialization of cultural production, by which I mean two things: (a) the increased influence of the financial sector on creative industries and creative workers, and (b) the role of film, fiction, art and other creative media in exploring and critiquing financialization. Here, I take up the example of the financialization of the (visual) art world.
Fourth, I turn to the quandaries of cultural production about financialization discussing how producers might adequately represent and respond to financialization, contrasting several recent Hollywood films with John Lanchester’s novel Capital.

Can we rethink the ‘disruption’ of money from another perspective? Many of us have been educated or habituated to look upon money as the powerful see it: either as a neutral tool of commerce or as a useful lever for the transformation of society. What if we learned to see money from a different viewpoint, for instance from the perspective of those for whom money has always felt like a whip, a thief, or a bad lover? This might prove necessary if we truly want to disrupt money in ways that look to the kind of common egalitarian horizons the world so desperately needs. I share some optimism that new digital technology will open new methods for coordinating and sharing the fruits of human cooperation—an almost sacred role our societies have increasingly trusted to capitalist forms of money, backed by state power. But, I am concerned that the common discourses surrounding blockchains, cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, and similar emergent technologies – which often posit themselves as revolutions in money, payments, and economics – all too often replicate the perspectives of the powerful and, as such, threaten (often against their designers’ or proponents’ intentions) to either supplement or supplant the ruling state-capitalist power nexus, rather than to abolish it.
In this chapter, I look at money ‘from below’ to problematize our utopian dreams so that we might dream more dangerously together. I take up the almost forgotten examples of convict love tokens, hobo nickels and Notgeld to illustrate how proletarian subjects have transformed money into an experimental medium of mutual aid, class struggle and solidarity, representing a ‘hidden ledger’ of meaningful ‘disruptive innovation’ that can inspire us today.

This chapter provides a reading and a contextualization of three recent performative public artworks to map the way unpayable debts manifest across politics, economics, culture and society under the global order of financialized capitalism today. By unpayable debts here I have in mind both, on the one hand, the proliferation of financial debts that cannot be repaid and, on the other, the subterranean collective moral or political debts that, though they cannot be quantified, are no less real or important for that. Starting with a brief consideration of the power and materiality of the imagination as a key dimension of capitalism’s financialization, I then turn to a reading of UK artist Darren Cullen’s Pocket Money Loans (2012-present), Argentine artist Marta Minujín’s Payment of Greek Debt to Germany with Olives and Art (2017), and Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore’s Gone Indian (2009). I am in search of two parallel counter-currents: In the first place, the way dominant systems and structures of financialized power impose unpayable financial debts as a methodology of domination that secures exploitation, extraction, oppression and/or inequality; In the second place the way that these same systems and structures of financialized power depend upon the disappearance, denial or diversion of the unpayable debts owed to or claimed by the dominated and exploited on which they are, ultimately, based. My effort here is not to provide a comprehensive theorization of the topic of unpayable debts, but rather to map some coordinates that, between them, triangulate the particular ways that, in the current financialized global order, a dialectics of unpayability plays out.

In this chapter, I describe one part of the strange and fateful symmetry between art and money, focusing on how this entanglement has evolved through the advance of financialization. I have selected the six works by radical artists from two key moments of crisis in the history of financialization: 1973 and 2008. All six directly engage with money, either as a tangible medium or as a prompt for artistic, political and cultural critique and invention. By critically examining this work, we can see how artists understand the broader economic conditions in which they find themselves, gain an understanding of those conditions, and trace the fate of money itself. Artists like these seize upon the contradiction with which I opened this chapter: under late capitalism money and art appear as sworn enemies but in fact share deep affinities. It is these affinities that give money-art, and especially radical money-art, its aesthetic and its critical heft. Such approaches are especially important today, in our moment of financialization.

This chapter takes up the recent work of interdisciplinary Anishinaabe artist Raven Davis as a way to explore the tensions around the notion of civility and civil action in the colonial-settler state of Canada. Focusing on Davis's provocative interactive and political performances in the east-coast city of Halifax in 2017 (the 150th anniversary of Canadian confederation), the article traces the ways in which "civility" and related notions have been used as ideological weapons against Indigenous people, culture and political autonomy, both historically and in the present. It does so by briefly examining the colonization of Mi'Kmaqi (lands along what is now Canada's eastern shore) as well as the contemporary use of "civility" as a means to defame and castigate social movements in Canada such as Idle No More, Black Lives Matter and for Palestinian human rights.

The idea, and the ideal, of the commons has encountered a surge in popularity in recent years . But the concept itself is at risk of enclosure . While it has become a rallying cry for grassroots, anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist revolt, today it is also being conscripted to the service of capital’s reproduction . This short essay explains how this is happening, then outlines a three-part method for imagining the commons in a more radical fashion: the actuality of the commons, the spirit of the commons, and the horizon of the commons. It does not provide a guide or a blueprint, but it does suggest a way to make some important distinctions at a very crucial time.

This chapter explores the work of artists who use various forms of money as media of creative expression and contestation. It advances the idea that we understand money as a medium of imagination: a means to comprehend and act within the webs of cooperation that make up the world. However, today's particular forms of financialized, capitalist money allow us to do so only within a strict set of constraints that orient the imagination and social action towards the reproduction of capital(ism). This helps explain the sorts of tensions and opportunities for money-art, but also the dangers and pitfalls. Without accompanying material transformations, symbolic and aesthetic strategies fall short.

My basic argument is this: first, that along with the rise of modern, Western (capitalist/imperialist/colonialist/patriarchal/ecocidal/etc.) forms of authority there arose a modern notion of the author as the “authoritative voice” of a text.  Indeed, capitalist-modern forms of political and social authority and the figure of the unique author have supported one another ideologically and materially.  As anarchists have built various historically-specific movements challenging authority, they have also struggled with the figure of the author. 
Second, while many anarchist(ic) thinkers have challenged and even rejected this figure, matters have been complicated in part because it has been necessary to mobilize the idea(l) of the author in order to communicate anarchistic ideas as one aspect of anarchist struggle. 
Third, I suggest that Ursula K. Le Guin, renowned American novelist and essayist, living legend of science-fiction, Taoist and anarchist, has done some very powerful work in her writing that can help us think with the problem of anarchism and authority. Le Guin has never succumbed to more post-modern impulses to shatter what I’ll call “authoriality” or the presence of the “authoritative voice” within her writing (attempts which, more often than not, create works that can only be “enjoyed” by bourgeois audiences who can afford to share their educated time and cynicism with these nigh-unreadable experimental texts).  Instead she has, throughout her career, worked with an inspirational subtlety and grace to both infuse her work with complex anarchist themes and to walk a fine line with regards to authoriality. 
In this sense, I want to identify Le Guin’s project as one of authoring “prefigurative fiction,” drawing on the anarchistic (or maybe more accurately feminist) idea of “prefigurative politics” or a politics that stresses acting out and creating the world we would like to see in the present.  In movement organizing praxis this means that activists do not wait until “after the revolution” to challenge sexism, racism, ablism and other forms of oppression or to build alternative institutions and forms of collectivity beyond capitalist exploitation and alienation; we do it here and now, within the broader structures of oppression and exploitation, seeking to capsize them from within and stitching together and experimenting with those forms of radical humanity that would make any decent revolution possible. 
By “prefigurative fiction,” then, I mean a form of writing that does not merely map out radical tomorrows in advance.  Instead, it is fiction that opens up futures in the present as spaces of reflection and growth, of hope and possibility and, most importantly, as spaces where “the human” might be otherwise, spaces of the radical imagination.  Prefigurative fiction is distinct from other forms of science fiction or utopian literature in its modesty when it comes to its prognostications and in its modeling of a radical form of authoriality, one that does not seek to impress the egoistic stamp of the author upon the descried future but, instead, rejects author-ity even as it exists within a form (the novel) where authoriality is (seemingly) compulsory.  Just as prefigurative politics plant and tend the seeds of a better tomorrow in the poisoned soil of today, so too does prefigurative fiction hint towards another, post-revolutionary form of “culture” from within today’s authoritarian form of the novel.  Like prefigurative politics, prefigurative fiction isn’t perfect and is always muddy, confused, learning, making mistakes, and “getting called” on it.  But both are built on a radical unending “humanism” and a profound but never simple love and optimism.  It is this critical optimism that marks prefigurative fiction from other acts of speculative fiction, even when it is avowedly dystopian.

"In an age of global “flows” and historical blockages, amidst a crisis of financial “liquidity” and a general rhetoric of “fluid” identities, political communities and ideologies, the hydro-electric mega-dam looms as both an icon and a technology of global power relations that is rich with metaphoric and material significance. On the one hand, the mega-dam promises modern and modernist empowerment, electrification, and the subordination of something called nature to something called nation. On the other hand, the mega-dam’s shadow is a legacy of exploitation and destruction around the world: one fundamental to the production and reproduction of the contemporary colonial world system and one which has flooded specific peoples and places with a profound and toxic debt that is not merely financial, but also ecological, social and cultural.

In order to unpack this dense site of global struggle, Haiven’s paper advances in three parts. In the first part, he suggests that the climactic scenes of dams breaking in recent Hollywood blockbusters reveal both a profound ambivalence and desire in the Western political unconscious. He reads these recurring scenes of fantastic structural collapse as a vexed neo-diluvian longing for the return of repressed and oppressed flows of water—an apocalyptic counterpoint to modernity and globalization within privileged quarters of the global order (see Lord of the Rings: Two Towers [2002], X2: X-Men United [2003] and Transformers [2007]). In the second section, Haiven traces the intertwined political, economic and cultural forces of global support and resistance to hydroelectric mega-dams in the work of internationally acclaimed Indian novelist, essayist, and anti-dam activist, Arundhati Roy. In conclusion, Haiven addresses Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water (1999), a novel set in the shadow of a dam built illegally on Blackfoot lands in Southern Alberta. Here, the tropes of water and fluidity act as playful multivalent foils to the cultural, social, and historical blockages of ongoing colonialism. Within the breach and collapse of these exemplary dams, Haiven navigates the potential for a globalization from below."

This chapter asks us to understand finance as a cultural system. The past 40 years have seen the rise of “financialization”: the growing influence of financial speculation on the global economy, and the deep imbrications of financial “logics” into everyday life the world over. Throughout this period, finance has come both to influence culture (as a realm of shared understandings, representations and human relationships) and to be increasingly “cultural” in that it both influences and relies upon social action and meaning, shared belief and linguistic participation. In this chapter I argue that financialization is both a cause and a consequence of a broad shift away from narrative and towards metaphor. Financialization forces us to contend with a fragmentary world where narratives no longer seem to hold and where our shared understandings of social and economic processes are increasingly disjunctive and chaotic. But while finance may be is a metaphoric system, where abstractions of money and risk create a hyper-complex interwoven system of representations, it is not merely an elite hallucination of “imaginary money.” On the contrary finance expresses the phenomenal power and obscene perversion of the collective imagination under an incredibly dangerous form of global capitalism.

"With Joe Biden now established in the White House without the feared retaliation of his predecessor’s rabid and well-armed supporters, it is tempting to imagine that the age of revenge politics is at its close. But those politics remain, tethered as they are to a vengeful form of neoliberalism that Biden helped foster throughout his political career. In their now-subtler form, they threaten to germinate in the years of his administration, and bloom again afterward. A closer look at the new president’s mobilization of Seamus Heaney’s famous poem about forgiveness offers clues to the past, present, and future of revenge politics in America."

Financialization is not just an economic superstructure. It is a process that is shaping culture and our lives, from the games we play, the decisions we make and the leaders who rise to power. How can we break free and imagine a future not dictated by finance?

"It’s no secret that money rules our lives. As money currently enjoys unprecedented power over us, it also dominates art and creativity, which have become deeply integrated into capitalism.

This fact hasn’t been lost on artists, and much artwork has been produced that speaks to money’s role in society or uses currency itself as a medium.

Max Haiven is a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Art and Public Policy at New York University and he teaches at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. He is also fascinated by the relationship between art and money. Max recently launched the Art and Money project, which he discussed with Art Threat over email."

Finance Capital & the Ghosts of Empire:
Revisiting Colonial Debts, Extractive
Nostalgias, Imperial Insolvencies
April 5th & 6th, 2019

Centre for Global Political Economy & Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Sussex
In collaboration with the Reimagining Value Action Lab, Lakehead University (Canada)

Submit an abstract by February 22 or register to attend at: https://goo.gl/forms/p2UCOxzaaKHPbnHj2

How are today’s contemporary financial practices, innovations and architectures shaped by, and how have they helped to shape, colonialism, empire and the global production of race, racism and racialization?
What does attending to colonial legacies and lineages of the sphere we now call ‘finance’ contribute to critical political economic analysis?
Likewise, how can the rigorous tools of political economy reveal the nuances and patterns of empire, historically and today?
How is the world economy, past and present haunted, culturally and materially, by the trace of racialization, enslavement, indenture and odious debt?
Can postcolonial studies and the political economy of finance be drawn into a productive dialogue?
How can such a dialogue be in a productive exchange with the forms of art and activism that challenge existing power relations?
Is a ‘decolonial’ political economy of finance possible, and what would it look like?
And how can we reframe today’s political-economic and cultural challenges, from the persistence of global financial power to the revanchism of neonationlisms in light of such investigations?

Following an initial 2017 workshop exploring Colonial Debts, Extractive Nostalgias, Imperial Insolvencies (Bourne et al. 2018), this two-day event will bring together scholars, artists and activists working in fields including but not limited to anthropology, cultural studies, history, political economy, geography and sociology.

The recognition that Empire has been consequential for the geo-political configuration of international financial markets is almost a commonplace in certain approaches to economic history (Cain & Hopkins 2016) and global political economy (Palan 2015). Likewise, scholars assembled (rightly or wrongly) under the banner of “post-colonial” approaches readily accept that finance, debt and speculation have been key aspects of the colonial and neocolonial project (Baucom 2005; Wang 2018). But invoking empire as part of capitalism’s history itself does not necessarily break free of the Eurocentric perspectives and methodologies that characterise much of political economy (Kayatekin 2009; Dale 2009). Meanwhile, much work remains to be done to fortify our growing understanding of the cultural and sociological relationships between money, risk, race and global exploitation with the tools of political economy.

This gathering responds  to recent works that have examined the role of Wall Street banks in the colonization of the Caribbean (Hudson 2017), insurance ‘innovations’ in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and settler colonialism (Rupprecht 2016; Park 2018), the persistence of imperial “technologies” of race and racialization in the contemporary debt economy (Chakravvarty and da Silva 2013; Kish and Leroy 2015; Roy 2012) and colonial conquest as a crucible for the forging of contemporary understandings of property and corporate personhood (Birla 2013; Bhandar 2016; Yates 2018).

Towards these ends, we invite abstracts for 15-minute presentation with a strong but not exclusive focus on early-career scholars, artists and activists on themes that include but are not limited to:

The ‘haunting’ of contemporary financial orders and practices by colonial legacies;
Colonial genealogies of contemporary finance and their significance;
The relationship between historical colonialism and contemporary forms of ‘data’ colonialism;
Methodological tensions or convergence between de/postcolonial studies & political economy
Intersections of gender, race/racialization, sexuality and contemporary forms of exclusion and exploitation with orders of debt, credit, extraction and neocolonialism
The vitality and challenges of activist and artistic responses to the above
Visions of the decolonization of the economy and the social relations in which it is embedded, including questions of reparations, repatriation of lands and artefacts and radical movements for collective liberation.

Please submit your abstract by February 22, 2019 at the following link: https://goo.gl/forms/p2UCOxzaaKHPbnHj2. Likewise, if you wish simply to attend but not present, please use the same form. We will strive to inform successful applicants by March 1, 2019. Limited and modest stipends are available to assist successful applicants with the costs of travel (eg. to/from London) and accommodation.

Publication opportunities will follow for participants and other interested parties.

For more information, please contact: P.Gilbert [at] sussex [dot] ac [dot] uk

Organisers:
Dr Clea Bourne (Senior Lecturer in Promotional Media, Goldsmiths, University of London)
Dr Paul Gilbert (Lecturer in International Development, University of Sussex)
Dr Max Haiven (Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice, Lakehead University)
Dr Johnna Montgomerie (Reader in International Political Economy, King’s College, London)

A wide-ranging interview with Halifax-based artist and community organizer Emily Davidson, focusing on issues including the political economy of art institutions and the creative city, intergenerational queer activism, utopian printmaking, radical nostalgia, the aesthetics of austerity and the connections between art(ists) and labour(ers).

Since the financial sector erupted in crisis and plunged the global economy into turmoil, the cultural dimensions of “financialization” are becoming clearer. This special double issue of TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies brings together a wide array of thinkers to explore the question of “The Financialized Imagination.” How are the cultures of financial accumulation produced in the secretive corridors of Wall Street and the complex fields of everyday life? How is cultural production implicated in the spread of financial ideas, metaphors, forms of measurement and tropes of subjectivity? How have debt, investments, hedged bets and securitization become discursive and material practices in a mediated landscape? How do film, print culture, art and television encode or decode financial ideas? How are literature, urban space, games and policy resonant or dissonant with global financial flows? How does financialization intersect with gender, race, class, colonialism or other forms of oppression? And how might we envision pathways out of and beyond the financialized imagination?

This issue brings together an exciting array of established and emerging scholars to help answer these questions.

For more information and to order subscriptions and single issues, visit TOPIA at http://www.yorku.ca/topia.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editorial

Max Haiven and Jody Berland - The Financialized Imagination (In Memory of Stuart Hall)

Articles

1. FIELDS OF SPECULATIVE POWER

John Clarke - Imagined Economies: Austerity and the Moral Economy of ‘Fairness’

Mathias Nilges - Finance Capital and the Time of the Novel or, Money Without Narrative Qualities

Matthew Flisfeder - Debt: The Sublimated Object of Capital

Rob Aitken - Games and the Subjugated Knowledges of Finance: Art and Science in the Speculative Imaginary

2. LEVERAGED SITES

Andrew Calcutt - Fictitious Capital: London and the Financial Imagination

Cathy Greenfield and Peter Williams - From Shadowy Zone to Daily Routine: Finance Culture in Australia

Sarah Blacker - “Your DNA Doesn’t Need to be Your Destiny”: Colonialism, Public Health, and the Financialization of Medicine

Chris Arthur - Financial Literacy Education as Public Pedagogy for the Capitalist Debt Economy

3. FINANCIALIZED MEDIATIONS

Mark Hayward - Settling Accounts: On the Subject of Economic Confessions

Michelle Stewart and Jason Pine - Vocational Embodiments of the Precariat in The Girlfriend Experience and Magic Mike

Robert Hutton - The Gamification of Finance

Sarah E.K. Smith - Making Sense of the “Endless Play of Signs” in the Work of Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge

Jamie Lynn Magnusson and Elizabeth Abergel - The Art of (Bio)Surveillance: Bioart and the Financialization of Life Systems

Offerings

Michael Stein - “Do You Own an Oil Company?” A Political Consideration of the Financialized Subject

David E Maynard - Finding Financialization in Satire

Simon Orpana and Evan Mauro - First as Tragedy, Then as Ford: Performing the Biopolitical Image in the Age of Austerity, from the G20 to Toronto City Hall

Matthew Tiessen - Giving Credit Where Credit’s Due: Making Visible the Ex Nihilo Dimensions of Money’s “Agency”

Review Essays

Toni Pape - Writing Resistance: Sleeplessness, Poetry and the Right to the City under Financial Capitalism

Susan Pell - A Puzzle Constantly Changing Itself: Cultural Studies in the 21st Century

Colin J. Campbell - “Progressive” Canadian Politics and the Paroxysm of Identity

Reviews

Stephen Gray - Does He Know It’s Neoliberalism After All?

Paulina Mickiewicz - Deconstructing Disability

Trevor Holmes - Feasible Utopias, Frustrated

Matthew Ryan Smith - Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums

Sharday Mosurinjohn - Language, Politics and the Novel: Rancière’s Aesthetic History of Problem-Solving in Poetics

In this introductory editorial we set out to (1) highlight the key themes, challenges and questions that animate this Special Issue of Affinities, (2) delineate a brief genealogy of the radical imagination in theory and practice and (3) to locate the work of the contributors to this Special Issue in this genealogy.

The Nova Scotia College of Art & Design (NSCAD) is one of Canada’s oldest and most famous art colleges, and one presently under financial attack from the Provincial Government. Its main Granville Campus is located across several historic properties in Halifax’s downtown core. While these environs have long been seen as a lucrative prospect for property speculators and landlords, NSCAD’s presence here anchors a creative community in the public interest.

NSCAD’s  unique library, which houses one of Canada’s finest visual arts collections, occupies the former site of the Halifax People’s Bank, a financial institution founded in the mid-19th century to help break the monopoly of Halifax banking by notorious privateers (state-licensed pirates). The library’s unique architecture speaks to the optimism and sense of civic purpose that once animated the building’s original occupants.

In that spirit, ”A People’s Bank” is a one-night event that aims to create a zone or a commons where we can reimagine money beyond the piracy of the global economy.  The financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath of austerity has left little doubt that global capitalism is failing all but the wealthiest citizens of this world and this city. 

Money rules  our lives with greater intensity and tragedy than ever before. The average debt-to-income ratio is now over 150% and financial strain seems to be a part of all our lives.  We are increasingly being forced to borrow to pay for what ought to be public services: university students at institutions like NSCAD now graduate with debt-loads of, on average, $30,000.  Yet, as a society, we are wealthier than we have ever been.  Not surprisingly, even in these lean times, bank and corporate profits continue to climb.

A People’s Bank, then, asks us to step out of our everyday relationships to money and to question what is truly valuable.  It combines audio interviews with leading international experts on money, images of artworks created with money from around the world, and an exhibition of work by students at NSCAD who have experimented with money as a medium of artistic expression.
This event  is part of NSCAD professor Max Haiven’s ongoing ReImagining Money research project.