Max Haiven unmasks the global entanglement & human sacrifice that the palm oil industry demands

Max Haiven is a writer and teacher and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination (https://maxhaiven.com/). In this interview I talk to him about his most recent book Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire, a new entry in the Vagabond series of books that Max edits for Pluto Press (https://www.plutobooks.com/pluto-series/vagabonds/). It's a series that tries to create a venue for, as he says, writing that engages with contemporary struggles and that tries to invent new ways of offering the public radical ideas. He talks about his high tolerance for pessimism, which he realizes not everyone shares, and reflects on how that specific threshold for the negative might allow him to consider the nightmarish history of palm oil. It’s a history that is, in many ways, written in blood and fire, and one that opens up epistemic rifts. That idea of “epistemic rifts,” however, is more rooted to the moment where you, as he says, encounter an other and realize that your traditions are particular rather than universal. This is something that looking at the history of palm oil yields. And so, the history he offers is the history of something so sublimely complex that, in a sense, no imagination can quite grasp all of the entanglements the substance represents. He wants us to attempt to dwell with that immense complexity, and also the fact that it is a complex and yet not intractable problem. Ultimately his point is that there are solutions to the problem of exploitation, alienation and ecocide that the palm oil industry produces, but that those solutions have to come from the grassroots. To quote him here: the job of experts is to listen to the people who live in relation with each other and the land. To listen to these people and lend a hand if necessary. Self-determination is at the core of his argument here, but it is a self-determination that realizes the depth of entanglement; the fact that accepting local self-determination will likely drive up the price of commodities and potentially mean we have to forgo particular commodities in order to mitigate against social and environmental harm. He says it's imperative that we learn to defetishize commodities and perhaps fetishize instead the density of our entanglement. What would that mean? It might mean moving past confining logics that confuse the issue—the notion of inflation within economics, for example. He says the debate over the inflation crisis we are currently undergoing misses that the problem is, in fact, not rising prices but extreme levels of global inequality whereby certain people are deprived of the economic power and social agency to meet their own needs. Scarcity is something that we must politicize. So too is sacrifice. Who's sacrifice? This is the key question in Palm Oil. Human sacrifice, despite the undecided nature of its history, is consistently something practiced by elites for expedient reasons. What are those reasons? And why are they considered reasonable? If it is acceptable to sacrifice some for the good of the many, who gets to make that determination. And how does the logic of sacrifice get naturalized?