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Max Haiven has shared a provocative essay on capitalism that “moves beyond the conventional framing of cheating as the exceptional malfeasance of bad economic actors, as well as beyond the claim that capitalism’s drive to profit encourages dishonesty and manipulation (thought that is indeed true). Rather, it proposes we recognize cheating at capitalism’s ideological and operational core, not its periphery.” Haiven offers three case studies, then notes that the perspective he sketches “can help us recognize some elements of the rise of reactionary, far-right, and fascistic sentiment and politics today. These in many cases revolve around a rhetoric of cheating that misrecognizes the culprits, targeting poor and precarious minorities rather than those at the commanding heights of the economy.” From the introduction…

We are, by now, so familiar with the economy being described as a game that the metaphor often passes without notice (Cudd; Mooney). Scholars from a wide diversity of disciplines and across the political spectrum have explored the importance of metaphors to the functioning of the economy, both for economists and policymakers and for more humble market actors, including consumers, workers, and small investors (McCloskey; Gramm; Young). The metaphor of the game not only affirms that capitalism is competitive and rule-bound, it also frequently implies that it is at least ideally fair. Metaphors of a ‘level playing field’, for example, were crucial to the neoliberal project that promised that trade liberalization, privatization, and deregulation would lead to a system where hard work and talent were rewarded and where innovation would thrive (Krarup). That ideology never promised equality, and indeed inequality was crucial to the driving motivations of its actors, but it did promise fairness. And yet, forty years into the neoliberal revolution and it would be hard to find anyone who believes the game is fair.

This exploratory essay presents three scenes where cheating can be seen to be at the ideological core of the free-market project. Its purpose is to contribute to the argument that cheating is not simply, as defenders of neoliberal capitalism and financialization tend to claim, the exceptional and regrettable outcome of individual amorality or regulatory failure (see Jaeggi). Nor is it simply, as many critics of the system contend, a matter of the rich and powerful breaking or bending the rules, as for example in the use of tax havens and other tax avoidance schemes, or lobbying efforts, insider trading, or the gaming of regulations to avoid the inconvenience of human or environmental responsibility (Shaxson). It also goes beyond the Marxist supposition (with which I agree) that capitalism is fundamentally built on the inherent swindle of the wage relation, where workers, deprived of the means of production, are forced to sell their labor power in return for a fraction of its actual value, the rest being pocketed by their boss and reinvested in the expansion of capitalist accumulation (Harvey). Rather, across three cases, I seek to sketch a pattern where cheating is integrated into the very ideological and operational core of capitalism.

My purpose is not to make a moral critique of free-market capitalism or a structural analysis of financial accumulation, although both might be well-served by my argument. Rather, it is to lay the groundwork for an explanation for our present-day conjunctural political salience of the cheat and cheating. Why is it that today’s far-right, fascistic, and reactionary politicians, influencers, and personalities so successfully mobilize vitriol against supposed cheaters? Donald Trump is only the most famous example in his claims that he must be given profoundly antidemocratic powers to save democracy from cheats: political miscreants alleged to have cheated him and his supporters of the 2020 elections; migrants accused of cheating the ostensibly fair border regime; racialized grifters supposedly cheating the capitalist meritocracy with their cynical claims to oppression and demands for bureaucratic remedies (preferential hiring or university admissions, etc.); and, more generally, ‘elites’ said to have cheated the hardworking and entrepreneurial (white) American everyman of his due.

The success of Trump’s antics are all the more surprising given that he is himself a convicted cheat, and proud of it (Haberman and Feuer). His policies have hamstrung or completely eliminated many government bodies tasked with controlling corporate crime and he has used Presidential fiat to pardon multiple notorious wealthy cheats (Claypool; Goldstein and Silver-Greenberg). It appears almost certain the he cynically deployed his bellicose threats of tariffs to undertake one of the world’s most staggering acts of insider trading (Faturechi, Rebala, and Roberts) and that he has developed a cryptocurrency as a means to essentially sell political influence in plain sight (Chayka).

But Trump is only the most egregious, telegenic, and bombastic of many such characters. Many similar accusations could be leveled at Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro (Nunes), South Korea’s Yoon Suk Yeol (Yang), Argentina’s Javier Milei (Callison and Gago), Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi (Stille), or India’s Narendra Modi (Auvray). All of them are illiberal democratic autocrats who have wielded accusations of widespread cheating to fuel pro-market reactionary politics, while at the same time overseeing parties or regimes that are significantly built on cheating. These and other far-right political revanchists mobilize a public rhetoric that revolves around fostering the anger of manufactured majorities against what I will call the ‘cheating other’, minorities who are rumored to be defrauding society and refusing to play by the rules. The claim is often that this cheating has either been intentionally allowed by venal political elites or permitted because of the stupidity and gullibility of liberal or left-wing policies, and that matters have become so dire and corrupt that it requires radical actions that contravene the law, human rights, and other such inconveniences.

Meanwhile, somewhat predictably, actual well-documented cheating continues in plain sight. For example, none of these regimes have done anything meaningful to reign in the use of tax havens and other forms of tax evasion whereby the wealthiest members of society essentially use legal loopholes to cheat the common purse. Indeed, many of these reactionary political actors and their supporters are named in leaked documents such as the Panama Papers or Paradise Papers (Tax Justice Network, 2024).

However, the purpose of this essay is not to point to the rank hypocrisy of these actors, which is rarely hidden and whose revelation seems to do little good. Nor is it to provide a complete account of how we came to live under what I will, elsewhere, call ‘the rule of the cheat’ (Haiven, forthcoming). Rather, it is to try and understand a tendency deep at work within financialized neoliberal capitalism, one that has helped feed the revanchist political sentiments that gave rise to the popularity of reactionary politics (Haiven).

Those sentiments brood within financialized subjects. Forty years into the global neoliberal revolution and its accompanying processes of financialization, we have witnessed profound pressures on the formation of subjectivities, as individuals are compelled to conform to an increasingly competitive, austere, and precarious socio-economic environment (Cooper). Yet, as many theorists have demonstrated, this is rarely encountered or interpreted as the grim imposition of market domination, but rather as a set of agentic opportunities to speculate, perform, and compete (Lazzarato; Martin; Haiven). For example, while housing precariousness has increased in many jurisdictions thanks to the financialization of urban real estate, many non-elite subjects have embraced property speculation as an opportunity to profit and improve their life chances (Stein). Likewise, although work has generally become more precarious, many subjects see increased opportunities to start their own businesses or invest in financial assets, from publicly traded shares to cryptocurrencies (Lorusso). The affordances of social media and other platform corporations offer opportunities to leverage one’s personality and talents in the name of becoming an influencer or streamer, which are among the top career aspirations for young people today (Bollmer and Guinness). While these opportunities are themselves the result of the economic forces that generally tend to increase precariousness, inequality, and the domination of society by the market, they nevertheless are experienced by many individuals as pathways to freedom. This is more than ideological false consciousness in any simplistic sense. Financialized neoliberal capitalism’s unique success has been to not merely subdue but to seduce our agency.

As Wark and Jagoda note, such conscription of agency often feels like – and is frequently expressed in terms of – a game. Even though success in capitalism is extremely rare, each of us is tasked with reimagining ourselves as a ‘player’, convincing ourselves that the game is or at least ideally should be meritocratic and fair, even if far from equal. And yet most of us will fail while we watch others, whom we imagine to be less talented or hardworking, succeed. We increasingly feel cheated. This feeling is compounded by fines, fees, and costs, including inflation. These have, ironically, increased under neoliberal financialization largely thanks to the deregulation of capital and the privatization of public services, despite claims that the system would eliminate the red tape of overprotective government bureaucracy (Cooper). It is this figure of the ‘cheated player’, the financialized subject whose sense of agency and possibility has been betrayed, that is especially susceptible to the siren song of the reactionary political commentators, influencers, and political candidates who promise to apprehend and take revenge on people and populations they depict as cheaters.

This essay takes this set of problems as a point of departure, but ultimately seeks to excavate three moments in the genealogy of contemporary financialized neoliberal capitalism where we can observe cheating being at the very center of its operations, not simply because certain cheating individuals or institutions hold pivotal roles, but because forms of activity that can very well be understood to be cheating are incorporated into the core operations of the system. Such an analysis would not only undermine neoliberal claims that capitalism fulfills the liberal dream of a society built on the Rawlsian principle of procedural justice – that is, one in which markets may generate inequality but nonetheless remain fair (see Hunt). It would also contribute to a complication of Marxist approaches which, in their zeal to understand the abstract laws of capitalist accumulation and the ways these are enabled by a legal superstructure, have tended to downplay the crucial role of cheating, fraud, and criminal activity.

In the first case, I take up the imperialist ‘great game’ on which modern capitalism was founded: the operations of imperialist states and their corporations and companies. Here, the ‘great game’ was one that promised to bring freedom, ‘fair play’, and free trade to colonized people, but in fact established a rigged game. European powers imposed punitive and exploitative trade relations on their protectorates while also insisting that they submit to their colonizers’ sanctimonious tutelage.

In the second case, I take up the paradigm of game theory, which has become a pivotal element in neoliberal financialized capitalism, both as a powerful weapon in its ideological arsenal as well as a crucial mechanism in financial decision-making, geopolitical strategy, public policy, and the development of digital technology. Within game theory’s, cheating has a specific meaning, namely defection from a previous agreement. But cheating is also anticipated and incorporated into game theory’s fundamental assumptions, whereby it is rational and expected that optimal players will almost inevitably ‘cheat’.

In the final case, I look much more broadly at what I would frame as the normalization of cheating in recent financial history, which we can trace via the work of acclaimed and highly influential financial reporter Michael Lewis, whose books have tended to focus on the rule-bending or rule-breaking mavericks whose defiance of the conventional norms (and sometimes laws) that govern finance quickly comes to be common practice and around which a new set of rules and norms quickly form.

In each of these three cases, I am not seeking to make a categorical historical argument. Rather, my effort is to paint, in broad strokes, an overarching pattern.

By way of conclusion, I take up Johann Huizinga’s distinction between the cheat and the spoilsport: the former may be unethical, but is often accepted and sometimes admired because they bend but do not break the rules, allowing the game to continue; the latter is loathsome because, in their (often justified) refusal to play a game they think is stupid, rigged, or fruitless, they call into question the wisdom, morality, or agency of their fellow players. This has significant consequences for our consideration of strategies against fascistic politics and for collective liberation…

Eminently worth reading in full: “Capitalism cheats: Three moments of normalized swindling,” from @maxhaiven.bsky.social.

* Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book 1 Chapter 8). to which he added (in Book 1, Chapter 11): “The interest of [businessmen] is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public … The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order … ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined … with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men … who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public…” As Branco Milanovic observes, the oft-called “Father of Capitalism” was no blind worshipper of the market economy.

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As we rethink the rules, we might recall that it was on this date in 2019 that Forbes annoited Kylie Jenner “the world’s youngest ever billionaire” (at age 21). A media personality and socialite, Jenner had been involved (with her sister Kendall) in the clothing company PacSun, had launched her own cosmetics line, and had, of course, featured in the reality TV show Keeping Up with the Kardashians and had “starred” in its spin-off, Life of Kylie. A year later Forbes released a statement accusing Jenner of forging tax documents so she would appear to be a billionaire.

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