“Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking
living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks,” claimed Karl
Marx in Capital, his multi-volume magnum opus. Elsewhere in Capital, he wrote of “the vampire thirst for the living blood of labor” and explained that “the vampire will not lose its hold . . . so
long as there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited.”
Marx’s partner-in-crime, Friedrich Engels—equally enamored with this
hemovoric horror metaphor—referred to “the vampire property-holding
class” in his book The Condition of the Working Class in England.
With these allusions to vampire folklore already swimming through the
bloodstream of Marxist theory, it’s not difficult to imagine a reading
of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula or Tod Browning’s 1931
Universal adaptation of Stoker’s tale as a parable of the perils of
capitalism. Count Dracula’s bloodlust mirrors that of capitalism, where
eros and thanatos commingle. The vampire’s continual need for possession
and consumption resembles the ravenous thirst of capital, and the
thirst it conjures up in those under its spell. Count Dracula, like a
capitalist, grows in strength through his predation—a strength
increasing in inverse proportion to his bite-victim’s weakening.
Similarly, Marx pointed out, “the capitalist gets rich, not like the
miser, in proportion to his personal labor and restricted consumption,
but at the same rate as he squeezes out labor-power from others, and
compels the worker to renounce all the enjoyments of life.” There is
also the self-replication of capitalist consumerism, consuming consumers
who must continue the pattern of consumption, and the enslavement
through this replication, which is there in Dracula too. “We become as
him,” according to Mina Harker’s journal in the novel, “we henceforward
become foul things of the night like him—without heart or conscience,
preying on the bodies and the souls of those we love best.” For the
vampire does not merely drain his bite-victim of his or her blood, the
transaction is reciprocal—though not equivocal—with the victim receiving
the vampire’s blood in exchange. “My blood now flows through her
veins,” the Count gloats to Van Helsing. Through this exchange of blood,
the bite-victim also receives the vampire’s curse, becoming a vampire, a
bloodsucker, a consumer—Nosferatu.
While it is true that vampirism was a common metaphor for Marx when
discussing capitalism, it was not his only use of occult imagery to
describe the conditions of the worker and the problems of capital.
Writer Christopher Frayling explained, “Karl Marx enjoyed reading the
horror tales of Hoffman and Dumas père for relaxation at bedtime. When
he was seeking a compelling image to characterize the attributes of
capital . . . he chose a whole
series of fantasy images, whose unifying theme was blood.” Marx notably
utilized the imagery of anthropophagism and lycanthropy, proferring
phrases like “the cannibalism of counter-revolution” and “the werewolf’s
hunger for surplus labor.” Had he lived in a later period, it is not
difficult to imagine Marx using a different metaphor for capital that
could have superseded all three of these iconic images—a metaphor that
could incorporate the undead lifeforce-draining bloodlust of the
vampire, the ouroboric consumption of the cannibal, and the monstrously
inhuman marked nature of the werewolf—and that metaphor would be what we
now call the living dead, the walking dead, the zombie.
The zombie, as a concept, wasn’t much known outside of Haiti before
the 20th century. A colonial import, the Haitian zombie prototype, of
the dead being controlled through witchcraft as a form of slave labor,
began to infect the American imagination during the U.S. occupation of
Haiti, from 1915-1934. William Seabrook’s 1929 Haiti travelogue, The Magic Island, was the first milestone in the zombie’s inevitable permeation of American popular culture. Victor Halperin’s White Zombie,
the first known feature-length zombie film, was released in 1932, on
the heels of both Seabrook’s book and a play by Kenneth Webb produced on
Broadway earlier in the year, which had likewise been influenced by The Magic Island. White Zombie
starred Bela Lugosi as Murder Legendre, a white Haitian voodoo priest
with a corps of zombified corpses under his control. Early on in the
film, a black coachman describes the zombies he and his white passengers
have just seen: “They are not men, they are dead bodies . . . zombies, the living dead, corpses taken from their graves and made to work in the sugar mills and fields at night.” ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/the-zombies-of-karl-marx-horror-in-capitalisms-wake/
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