Currencies of the undercommons: Money as vengeance and some arts of resistance
Channel: ReImaginingValue ActionLab
Date: 2020-04-26

The architects and champions of racial capitalism have insisted that money is a technology of peace, a means to channel humanity's allegedly natural competitive instincts into a socially beneficial economic order without tyranny. Anyone who has felt money's lash knows better. What if, instead, we saw capitalist money as a from of systemic revenge rooted in exploitation, colonialism, extraction and oppression? This presentation shares several almost-forgotten stories of creative resistance to money's rule, and several radical "art" projects that help us see what is really at stake in money: the stolen potential of our cooperative species.  What would it mean to reclaim this potential and what (if any) role might this thing we call art play? 

This presentation is based on a chapter from Max Haiven's book Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts. https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745340562/revenge-capitalism/

It was originally recorded as the keynote for the "Economies of Dispossession" graduate conference at OCAD University in March 2020.