Introduction to The Player and the Played: From Gamed Capitalism to 21st c. Fascism, by Max Haiven
This is an open access book, published September 15 2026 by MIT Press.
In an age when capitalism feels like an unwinnable game, extreme reactionary ideas and politics are on the rise. The Hunger Games, Game of Thrones, Squid Game, and much of reality TV are cultural reflections of a society of relentless, lonely competition, where each of us must become a player: a savvy risk-taker, a miniature corporation of one. But in a gamed economy we players feel played, and new forms of fascism promise harsh justice and revenge. This book theorizes the connections between the financialization of the capitalist economy, the gamification of our lives, and the rising threat of a uniquely twenty-first century form of fascistic politics.
From vicious online swarmings to the QAnon conspiracy fantasy, from the siege of the US Capitol to the abuse of “free speech,” The Player and the Played analyzes the “playgrom” as a new form of extremist violence. Max Haiven explores how “derivative fascisms” both repeat and reinvent the terrors of the past in a financialized form. How have we learned to love the cheats who have power but loathe the cheats without it? It unpacks the worldbuilding (and world-destroying) urge of Silicon Valley. And it poses the urgent question: What is the antifascist game?
Max Haiven is Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination at Lakehead University and author of many books, including most recently Palm Oil and Revenge Capitalism. He is the designer of the board game Billionaires & Guillotines. He was called “perhaps the most theoretically creative radical thinker of the moment” by the late David Graeber.
4 Jul 2026
The Plot is on Fire - a conversation with Manuela Zechner
On 27 May 2026, Max Haiven sat down with Manuela Zechner at Housman's books in London to discuss the latter's newly published book The Plot is on Fire: Care Struggles after Progress, Plantation and Patriarchy.
From the book's publicity:
As myths of progress and modernisation collapse in the relentless polycrisis of our time, how do we strengthen other plots—in community, practice and struggle? How do we come together as movements for earthcare?
This book weaves stories, proposals, and analyses around a key domain of living reproduction in crisis: agriculture. Looking at peasant, indigenous, and transecofeminist practices, it formulates another plot on how we want to sustain life collectively—beyond progress, plantation, and patriarchy.
Recovering and repurposing old and new technologies, and breaking down the division between rural and urban, the ground is made fertile for growing other futures. Alongside writers like Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler, this work of radical political theory raises critical questions about technology and storytelling, as matters of care and community.
For more information about the book, visit: https://www.plutobooks.com/product/the-plot-is-on-fire/
For more information about Common Ecologies and the Earthcare Fieldcast, visit: https://commonecologies.net/
26 Jun 2026
Decolonizing Money - Book launch Q&A w. Julio Linares
Audio of the June 13 Berlin launch of Julio Linares' book Decolonizing Money: The Promise of Abolishing the US Dollar, hosted by Miho Soong and Jabi.
The book is now out as part of the VAGABONDS series from Pluto Press.
https://www.plutobooks.com/product/decolonizing-money/
DECOLONIZING MONEY: THE PROMISE OF ABOLISHING THE US DOLLAR
By Julio Linares
To change the world, we need a money revolution. Yet the debate over money has been dominated by two perspectives: those free-market capitalists who want money to rule everything, and those who want the state to harness money’s power. Decolonizing Money presents an anarchist theory of money which sets out strategies for collective liberation beyond state and capital.
Drawing on anarchist, abolitionist and anti-colonial feminist traditions, Julio Linares makes the heretical argument for a grassroots democratic movement to abolish the imperialist US dollar as a necessary step towards the cancellation of debt and establishing a worldwide basic income. Linares shows that money, beyond a store of value and a medium of exchange, is a series of promises a society makes to itself – and he challenges us to make them otherwise.
This innovative book takes up lessons from global history and social movements in order to unleash the political imagination. It shows us how the creation, use and most importantly the destruction of money are forms of power that need to be reclaimed through direct action, as part of a radical democratic project for autonomy and self-determination.
Julio César Linares is a community organizer and economic anthropologist born in the territories known today as Guatemala. He holds an MSc from the London School of Economics where he studied and worked on projects with the late David Graeber. He serves as Public Outreach for the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN). He lives in Berlin, Germany.
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