Palm Oil

The Grease of Empire

Max Haiven

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780745345826
• eBook ISBN: 9780745345840
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Consumer Behaviour
• Index: Business

It's in our food, our cosmetics, our fuel and our bodies. Palm oil, found in half of supermarket products, has shaped our world. Max Haiven uncovers how the gears of capitalism are literally and metaphorically lubricated by this ubiquitous elixir. From its origins in West Africa to today's Southeast Asian palm oil superpowers, Haiven's sweeping, experimental narrative takes us on a global journey that includes looted treasures, the American system of mass incarceration, the history of modern art and the industrialisation of war. Beyond simply calling for more consumer boycotts, he argues for recognising in palm oil humanity's profound potential to shape our world beyond racial capitalism and neo-colonial dispossession. One part history, one part dream, one part theory, one part montage, this kaleidoscopic and urgent book asks us to recognise the past in the present and to seize the power to make a better world.

Notes

1. Jocelyn C. Zuckerman, Planet Palm: How Palm Oil Ended Up in Everything—and Endangered the World (London: Hurst, 2021).

2. Haiven, Max, Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

3. Haiven, Max, Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (London and New York: Pluto, 2020).

4. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), p. 244.

5. Jonathan E. Robins, Oil Palm: A Global History (The University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, NC, 2021), Chapter 2.

6. See Robins, Oil Palm, Chapter 2; Lynn, Martin. Commerce and economic change in West Africa: The palm oil trade in the nineteenth century (Cambridge and New York, 1997), p. 2; On the contemporary importance of dendê palm oil in Afro-Brazilian spirituality and culture, see Zuckerman, Planet Palm, pp. 56–9.

7. Zuckerman, Planet Palm, Chapter 2.

8. “Alternative Names to Palm Oil.” Orangutang Alliance, October 2021, https://orangutanalliance.org/whats-the-issue/alternative-names-for-palm-oil/.

9. Renato J. Orsato, Stewart R. Clegg, and Horacio Falcão, “The Political Ecology of Palm Oil Production,” Journal of Change Management 13, no. 4 (2013): 444–59.

10. Oliver Pye, “A Plantation Precariat: Fragmentation and Organizing Potential in the Palm Oil Global Production Network,” Development and Change 48, no. 5 (2017): 942–64.

11. See Zuckerman, Planet Palm.

12. Robins, Oil Palm, pp. 268–9.

13. Ibid., p. 283.

14. Zuckerman, Planet Palm, pp. 6–7.

15. See https://ourworldindata.org/land-use.

16. Nnoko-Mewanu, Juliana, “‘Why Our Land?’ Oil Palm Expansion in Indonesia Risks Peatlands and Livelihoods” (London, UK: Human Rights Watch, June 2021). https://hrw.org/report/2021/06/03/why-our-land/oil-palm-expansion-indonesia-risks-peatlands-and-livelihoods.

17. Robins, Oil Palm, Chapter 7.

18. Dauvergne, Peter, “The Global Politics of the Business of ‘Sustainable’ Palm Oil,” Global Environmental Politics 18, no. 2 (2018): 37.

19. See, for example, Chao, Sophie, “Can There Be Justice Here? Indigenous Perspectives from the West Papuan Oil Palm Frontier,” borderlands 20, no. 1 (2021).

20. Simryn Gill and Michael Taussig, Becoming Palm (Berlin: Sternberg, 2017).

21. See Robins, Oil Palm, pp. 288–91.

22. Pye, Oliver, “Commodifying Sustainability: Development, Nature and Politics in the Palm Oil Industry,” World Development 121 (2019): 218–28.

23. See Watts, Joseph, Oliver Sheehan, Quentin D. Atkinson, Joseph Bulbulia, and Russell D. Gray, “Ritual Human Sacrifice Promoted and Sustained the Evolution of Stratified Societies,” Nature 532, no. 7598 (2016): 228–31.

24. Bichler, Shimshon, and Jonathan Nitzan, “Capital as Power: Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism,” The Bichler and Nitzan Archives, 2010. http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/285/.

25. On the particular (violent) arrogance and solipsism of the modern capitalist cosmology relative to others, see Graeber, David and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Penguin, 2021).

26. Wynter, Sylvia, and Katherine McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?: Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations,” In Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, edited by Katherine McKittrick (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2015).

27. Paddy Docherty, Blood and Bronze: The British Empire and the Sack of Benin (Hurst: Londo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Amanda Priebe
• Whose grease
• Whose punishment
• Whose fetish
• Whose weapon
• Whose fat
• Whose surplus
• Whose sacrifice
• Whose story
• Acknowledgments
• Notes