Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (Volume 4)

by Max Haiven

'Powerful' - Silvia Federici

Palm oil is a commodity like no other. Found in half of supermarket products, from food to cosmetics to plastics, it has shaped the world in which we live.

In Palm The Grease of Empire, Max Haiven tells a sweeping story that touches on everything from empire to art, from war to food, and from climate change to racial capitalism. By tracing the global history of this ubiquitous elixir we see how capitalism creates surplus people made dependent on capitalist wages but denied the opportunity to earn them - a proportion of humanity that is growing in our age of racialized and neo-colonial dispossession.

Inspired by revolutionary writers like Eduardo Galeano, Saidiya Hartman, C.L.R. James and Rebecca Solnit, this kaleidoscopic and experimental book seeks to weave a story of the past in the present and the present in the past.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Politics, Environment

160 pages, Paperback

Published April 20, 2022

About the author

Max Haiven is Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice at Lakehead University in Northwest Ontario and co-director of the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL).

Reviews

[Takin · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's less about palm oil than you'd think. I just wish it was a bit longer; there are some things in there that definitely deserved a bit more than a few paragraphs.

[Rosalie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Flew through this compact and interesting little book. The chapter on commodity fetishism (which I now understand thanks to this book) was great and so illuminating.

[Anna Purchase · Rating 5 out of 5]

i read this while trying to get a paper on palm oil over and done with while sick with pneumonia, but this was really, really interesting on many levels. will add to the list of 'if i ever become a university professor this will be an assigned reading' texts.

[Abbe George · Rating 3 out of 5]

Points off because it felt a bit too long/repetitive, but a good little academic read

[B David Chamberlain · Rating 4 out of 5]

Setting out to use the history of a little-understood commodity to track the movements and spirit of empire, colonialism, and capitalism is no easy task. The far reaching tentacles of palm oil tracked in this book are a perfect place to start exactly the kinds of conversations we are trying to engage in. As I drove a student down the highway along the Central Pacific Coast, we observed the vast palm plantations on either side of the road. When asked what palm oil is even used in, I had to admit that I wasn't totally sure. This book subsequently caught my eye.

Though the history of palm oil is not centralized in Latin America, the far-reaching themes in this book will be of interest to anyone that cares about the seemingly invisible movements behind global capital and power. A short and compelling read for pleasure or educational purposes, I highly recommend picking it up! - BDC

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haiven uses the palm oil industry and its products - from snack foods to weapons of mass destruction! - as a lens to understand global capitalism, how it intersects with white supremacy and environmental destruction, and how the liberal politics of "enlightened consumers" is utterly unprepared to deal with all this.

Thoroughly enjoyable, if occasionally horrifying, with more literary prose than most Marxist historiography. Planning to write (much) more about this soon.

[Swarm Feral · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great accompaniment to the more thorough commodity biographies. Instead of a straight forward negative hermeneutic of demystification there's a sort of exposure of how Palm Oil is everywhere and how it even lubricates our thinking. It traces the metabolic rift without calling it that showing how workers grease their machines with Palm Oil derived lubricant and then go eat Palm Oil derived food. It proposes an attunement to it could reveal the impulse towards species being without calling it that. Like Capital tracing the exploitation of capitalism yet also highlighting the potentials of this new world-wide condition we find ourselves in this book does the same with Palm Oil where cooperation displays a sort of utopian impulse in spite of its current NGO dominated state. I don't know if I really buy it fully as NGOs suck, but I do still believe in intermediate struggle and the proliferation of the ontologies of mutual aid as important to all of this while coupled with logistical thinking that really fundamentally gets in conflict with the dominant order.

Along the way it traces how the Age of Dynamite is made possible by palm oil as well and makes me wonder what contagious tools this hell world might throw at our feet if we know how to see them.

Along the way it also nicely uses the fetish concept to show how capitalism is a cosmology and also challenges the fetish as a Euro chauvinist (my words here) term. So maybe it is just doing the Jameson thing of demystification via showing how a thing works even if it is a totality and then also tracing the utopian impulses and potentials in it.

[Yong Feng · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a short volume that could be finished in a single sitting, Haiven introduces powerful ideas about how capitalism cheapens and extracts from marginalised people and nature with reference to a single commodity: palm oil. I liked how he begins with European colonisers justifying killing native people with their "uncivilised" practices of human sacrifice, and ends asking the reader if the current system of exploiting labour powered by unhealthy but cheap palm oil-based foods is not just another form of sacrifice, just more indirect and on a larger scale. I found many of the themes familiar from Patel and Moore's "A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things", but the shorter length of this book makes them more digestible for someone new to such ideas. As someone living in Southeast Asia, the centre of the palm oil industry, I would recommend it to anyone else in the region to understand the key role palm oil plays in the historical development and continued sustaining of today's capitalist world.

[RMD · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating premise and topic. Diving into the omnipresence of palm oil and its relationship to exploitative structures is very interesting and beautiful in its own way.

However, it's hard to justify why it's longer than a blog post, leaving us with no new lessons. We need to re-evaluate our relationship with capitalism, nature, racism, etc.

The text itself gets very repetitive and confuses itself, feeling at times you're on a late night drinking binge with your revolutionary academic circles.

Fun and all, but goes all around the same topics obsessing over overcomplicated terms and relationships.

Overall, good coffee table book.
... Because coffee... Well, that's another book.

[Andres Quiroz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Abrir los ojos al complejo mundo que rodea todos lo que consumimos, siempre es una experiencia desoladora. El libro se encarga de revisar a través de la producción y comercio del aceite de palma, como funciona el capitalismo.
Es interesante porque aborda conceptos como el capitalismo racial, el fetichismo de la mercancía, la ficción del homo economicus y el sacrificio humano y ambiental en el altar del mercado.
Siento eso sí que se queda corto en revisar casos más prácticos del fenómeno global, pues en algunos momentos en que se busca ejemplos específicos, resulta sumamente abstracta la argumentación sobre la lógica de este mercado.

[Brett Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book tells the story of palm oil, but in doing so provides an elegant and thought-provoking exploration of the entangled webs of global capitalism, how it lives through our bodies, and how it can be seen as a vast system of human sacrifice.

[Maia Boell 🐞 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting

[Seahorse · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit too short like others mentioned, but I loved it nonetheless. Would recommend.

[Loulou Van · Rating 3 out of 5]

edit: 3.5 ster

[KT · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent primer to the global, capitalist system through a broad, big-picture case study of palm oil