To Be Human in this Age is to Be Frustrated – with Max Haiven

"There is something important seeing about us self in what we made out of palm oil and what has palm oil made out of us."

In this episode we talk about the palm oil industry, activism, and trauma with Max Haiven. He considers himself as a tourist in the field a history. His book palm oil was recently published. He was looking for something for his teaching of material culture at an art school that had connections to arts, history of capitalism, history of race and radicalization, colonialism, empire: Palm Oil. Several years later he wrote his book about palm oil as a commodity over the last 200 years.

Where he gets his inspiration from, if he is frustrated and what possible solutions could look like, you can hear in this episode.

Literature & Sources

Max Twitter: https://twitter.com/maxhaiven

Website Max: https://maxhaiven.com/

Beckert, Sven: Empire of Cotton. A Global History. Vintage, 2015.

Benjamin, Walter: Über den Begriff der Geschichte, Suhrkamp, 2010 (first edition 1942).

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson: Golden Gulag. Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. University of California Press, 2007.

Haiven, Max: Palm Oil. Pluto Pres, 2022.

Just Transition in the Palm Oil Industry: https://palmoillabour.network/just-transition-in-the-palm-oil-industry-a-preliminary-perspective/

Mintz, Sidney W.: Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. Penguin Books, 1986.

Robins, Jonathan E.: Oil Palm. A Global History. UNC Press, 2021.

Thornton, Cassie: The Hologram. Pluto Press, 2020.