Grease Of Empire: Palm Oil & Regimes Of Human Sacrifice / Max Haiven

Image: “The Production of Palm Oil (1844)” by Anonymous. Public domain (CC0 1.0)

Author, teacher, and editor Max Haiven joins me to discuss his book Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire, published through Pluto Books. As Silvia Federici states, this book "powerfully demonstrates how, by following the history of a key commodity, we can reconstruct the logic of imperial capitalism: its destruction of land and bodies, its drive to constantly reduce the means of our reproduction, its relentless production of oppressive regimes."

In this discussion, Haiven details the contours of such subjects as commodity fetishism and human sacrifice, as well as points to the straight line that shoots through the heinous histories of chattel slavery and Western imperialism to the formation of modern global capitalist order, by focusing on one primary and ubiquitous product we all, throughout the course of lives, have consumed countless times and in countless ways: palm oil.

BIO:

Max Haiven is a writer, teacher, and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination. He is the author of several books, including Art after Money, Money after Art (2018), Revenge Capitalism (2020), and Palm Oil (2022). Haiven is editor of VAGABONDS, a series of short, radical books from Pluto Press, and teaches at Lakehead University on Anishinaabe territories on the North Shore of Gitchigumi, though he is often found in Berlin.

Episode Notes:

Purchase a copy of Palm Oil from Bookshop.

Learn more about Max and his work.

Read his article Far from Ukraine, Putin’s War Worsens Palm Oil Crisis, published at the Boston Review.

Learn more about the VAGABONDS series, from Pluto Books.

Sounds by Midnight Sounds.