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# Gamed Capitalism and 21st Century Fascism
- URL: https://www.artsoftheworkingclass.org/text/gamed-capitalism-and-21st-century-fascism/
- Published: 2026-11-09T11:39:12.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-09T11:39:12.000Z
- Description: A glimpse into the book "The Player and the Played".
- Author: Max Haiven
- Tags: Commentary, Critique, #main-article

While recent award-­winning games like *Disco Elysium* and *Through the Darkest of Times* offer complex and nuanced perspectives on fascism’s root ­causes, ­there remains much work to be done, not only in creating games that contest fascism’s appeal, but in studying games for what they can teach us about antifascist political ­organizing, intellectual and artistic work, and living an antifascist life. 

Accordingly, I revisit the three-­part model of fascism, examining how manifest, latent, and micro fascisms play out in the context of play and games. I offer a comparison between three antifascist strategies: liberal antifascism, which aims to strengthen and defend demo­cratic institutions and triumph in the marketplace of ideas; socialist antifascism, which recognizes its­ enemy as emerging from liberal capitalism and seeks to ­ organize working and oppressed ­peoples to defeat both; and antiauthoritarian antifascism, which prioritizes community-­ level ­organizing and building infrastructures for antifascist life. 

As the threat of fascistic politics grows in the years to come, game-­makers and ­people who care about games ­will need to be attentive to­ these distinctions. Antifascist games should strive to confront fascist politics on the level of its ideological and institutional manifestations, on the level of its deep roots within capitalism, and on the level of everyday life, community, subjectivity, and sociality. But antifascist ­organizers, artists, and intellectuals can also learn a ­ great deal from games. If, as I argue throughout the book, twenty-­first-­century fascistic politics emerges from a form of gamed, financialized capitalism that seduces and exploits our agency, then games provide us a way of thinking about what it would mean to create movements, forms of collective study, and cultural experiences that are transformative in their playfulness. 

I am not suggesting that antifascism simply needs to be more fun, and we should be extremely skeptical of outdated and dangerous claims that fascism is a dour and mirthless phantom to be dispelled by the power of mirth. But in the strug­gles to come, the ­matter of how we create space and opportunities for playful agency is vitally impor­tant.

As David Graeber (2014b) notes, we have tended to not take play seriously as a social and ­ political category. Perhaps ­ because of the continuing influence of the Protestant work ethic (even among critics of capitalism), we are uncomfortable with play, which we often ­ mistake for a harmless indulgence. To be a serious adult (and a serious scholar) is to fundamentally distrust fun. Perhaps this is why we are so ­ eager to proj­ect playfulness exclusively onto ­ children, assuming it to flow from their presumed innocence and carefree nature. Yet, in ­doing so, we not only deny one of the most important aspects of our lives. 

We play all the time, on our phones, around­ tables, in sports, with our lovers, with our pets, with words. In confining play to childhood we contribute to what has long been one of the most ideologically disastrous ploys of the forces of reaction: to sanctify the figure of the child as the ­ bearer of all innocence and joy precisely so they can be denied to every­ one ­ else (see Edelman 2004). The overpolicing, incarceration and murder of racialized and colonized ­ children relies on the inversion of this myth: They are deemed to be insufficiently innocent or too perversely joyful, and therefore do not deserve protection (see Antwi 2024).

Such a view lends itself to the oppression of ­children and contributes to the way that infantilization becomes a template for other forms of oppression (see Rollo 2018). Further, no means are too extreme to protect the idolized figure of the from the corruption of the world, a terror projected in the past onto Jews luring ­children into dungeons to harvest their blood and ­ today onto vile teachers pushing the woke curriculum, trans ­people “grooming” youth for their sick ­pleasures, and mi­grant hordes hungry for child brides.

It is not simply that if we fail to politicize play and games, fascists ­will. It is also that if we fail to recognize the ludic impulse at work in us all, and that is awake in the world, we ­ will miss something fundamental about what makes life worth living and the strug­gle for a world worth striving for. In such a context, the widespread condescension toward play and games among critical scholars and social theorists is tragically dangerous.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d9/15/d915dd2a-765c-4262-8306-869873baa8ef/content/images/2026/11/2bQdQF.jpeg)

From the boardgame "Billionaires & Guillotines" by Max Haiven

*The Player and the Played* is ­shaped by and is, in many ways, about the American nightmare, by which I ­don’t only mean the descent into fascism ­under the second Trump administration during which this book is published. I mean something more general: the American context is profoundly consequential to the fate of the rest of the world. We may be headed for a new multipolar age, but ­ we’re a long way off yet. Still ­ today American capitalism demonstrably shapes global ­ political economy, global politics, technological development, and ­ popular culture (Maher and Aquanno 2024).

This book may indeed have relevance to places and contexts beyond the North Atlantic, but its focus ­will be essentially on the NATO countries that represented what we might have once called the West, and, in par­ticu­lar, it is engaged with Anglo-­American contexts. 

Methodologically, each of this book’s following chapters ­ will take a differ­ent approach to a conjunctural analysis of the triangular relation between games, fascism, and financialization. As such, the reader might expect some concepts and approaches to be reiterated from dif­ fer­ entangles. I ­will bring to bear tools from ­political economy, critical theory, cultural studies, social psy­chol­ogy, ­political studies, sociology, ­human geography, game studies, queer theory, and race critical approaches in my efforts. Readers searching for a mechanical explanation for how ­ political economy leads to cognitive or cultural beliefs ­ will be disappointed. Like other work in the fields of cultural studies and critical theory, my effort is to rigorously understand a gestalt. It is based on the supposition that systems and structures of society and the economy shape the stories we tell, the feelings we have, the ways that we understand ourselves, and the agency we feel we possess. Equally impor­tant are the ways ­these systems and structures depend on ­ these transformations of our narratives, affects, and subjectivities. This is especially so within financialized capitalism, for reasons I ­shall elaborate. We need a subtle set of conceptual tools to parse what forms of agency, subjectivity, creativity, and ­ resistance tend to reproduce dominant systems and can lead eventually to meaningful systemic transformation. The study of games is particularly well-­suited to help us with ­these questions.

­Because of its urgency and its scope, I ­ will paint my argument in broad but hopefully not crude strokes. My key terms (gamification, financialization, and fascism) will be deployed in a multilayered way, with attention to antinomies and contradictions. Such an approach may vex readers yearning for precise and quotable definitions. To force ourselves to develop the patience, the breadth of mind, and the imagination to tolerate this kind of ambiguity is part of an antifascist proj­ect. And with all due re­spect to those who yearn for clear, almost mathematical definitions of complex social phenomena, all I can say is, play with me a ­ little and see if we ­ don’t emerge from the game better equipped to meet the dire challenges of our times. These efforts are, by their very nature, biased against fascism, for which I can make no apology. I have been an antifascist all my life, ever since my parents explained to me how Naziism had obliterated most of our ancestors. My writing is informed by a lifelong commitment to grassroots community ­ organizing, which has included ­ doing antifascist work, most notably in the context of anti-­ Indigenous racism, police vio­ lence, and settler colonialism in Canada, the country of my birth, where I am afforded the privileges of citizenship and where I benefit from being taken for a straight, white, able-­ bodied man. I am also a board game designer and teach game design to both university students and community activists. 

Though a lifelong anti-­Zionist Jew, in the course of writing this book (2023–2025), my views have taken shape during the genocidal campaign perpetuated by Israel against Gaza. The fundamental lesson I take from ­ these experiences is that fascism, to paraphrase Karl Polanyi, is a virus that can devour any society and can target almost any group of ­ people it finds ­convenient (Lim 2023). It grows out of existing systems and ideologies of power and domination and in reaction to the contradictions of capitalism. We must do the work of constantly being vigilant for the rise of fascism and build power­ful solidarity that demands a world where something like the Holocaust or what has been done to Gaza is impossible, for anyone. I work in an antifascist tradition: The fields of cultural studies and critical theory, in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada, ­ were built in response to the question of how twentieth-century fascism emerged from capitalism and how it could do so again. Foundational thinkers in or associated with that tradition worked in the shadow of a fascist threat that not only manifested in the murderous mid-­century regimes in Italy, Japan, and Germany, but that also animated the brutality of colonialism and hijacked so many tragic efforts­ toward freedom, peace, and liberation.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d9/15/d915dd2a-765c-4262-8306-869873baa8ef/content/images/2026/11/Base-Game_Player-Boards-31-07-25_Artwork-Fronts-7-rotated.jpeg)

From the boardgame "Billionaires & Guillotines" by Max Haiven

We, the inheritors of that legacy, must reflect on our failure: Fascism is once again ascendent and once again threatens to unleash terrifying violence and cruelty on the world. It must be ­ stopped.

As Bertrand Russell (1935) noted almost a ­century ago, the tenets and be­haviors of fascism are inherently contrary to the broader proj­ect of truth, accountability, reason, science, and universal humanism on which the university and academic research are founded (hence the glee with which fascists make spectacles of targeting universities for punishment and humiliation, including bad-­faith games of debate). As Jean-Paul Sartre (1948) put it, referring to the per­sis­tence of postwar fascism in France in the guise of antisemitism:

*Never believe that anti-­Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-­ Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridicu­lous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they ­ will abruptly fall ­ silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. It is not that they are afraid of being convinced. They fear only to appear ridicu­lous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side. If then, as we have been able to observe, the anti-­ Semite is impervious to reason and to experience, it is not ­ because his conviction is strong. Rather his conviction is strong because he has chosen first of all to be impervious.* (13–14)

This book is therefore not inclined toward debating fascists, but rather addressed to all of us who must be antifascists and share a vocation to make other worlds of justice, peace, diversity, and democracy pos­si­ble, probable, and real.  
  
  
//  
  
"The Player and the Played" *is published by MIT Press and is available for free download* [*here*](https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/6198/The-Player-and-the-PlayedFrom-Gamed-Capitalism-to?ref=artsoftheworkingclass.org)*.*