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.